My in-laws tried to quietly expel my dad from my wedding because he’s a garbage collector. They said it was for “appearances.” I was shaking with anger when my dad calmly asked for the microphone… and the room never recovered from what he said. My name’s Anna, and the man who raised me works for the city.
My dad, Joe, has worked as a garbage collector for as long as I can remember. Sanitation department. Garbage collection.
Whatever you want to call it — he’s been doing it since I was a toddler. My mom died when I was three years old. Cancer.
Fast and cruel. One day she was there; the next she was in the hospital, and then she was gone. No warning.
No time to prepare. After that, it was just my dad and me in a small two-bedroom apartment on the south side of town. The kind of place where the radiator clanked in winter and the windows stuck in summer.
But the rent was stable, and we made it work. We didn’t have much, but we always had enough. The heat stayed on.
The lights worked. There was always food; sometimes just pasta and butter, sometimes scrambled eggs for dinner. But there was always something.
My dad left for work at 4:30 every morning. I’d hear the door close softly, feel the apartment shift as he tried not to wake me. By the time I got up for school, he’d already been working for hours.
He came home smelling of metal, exhaust, sweat, and something I couldn’t name but always recognized. His hands were calloused. His back hurt most nights.
Some evenings he barely spoke because exhaustion had drained every extra word out of him. But he never missed a parent-teacher conference. Never forgot my birthday.
Never once made me feel like I was too much or too hard or not worth it. When I was little, I thought every dad did that. Later, I realized how rare it was.
He never apologized for his job. Never acted ashamed. When people asked what he did, he’d say it plainly: “I work for the city.
Sanitation.”
“It’s honest work,” he’d add. “And it keeps the city running.”
Then I met Ethan during my second year of residency. He was visiting a friend at the hospital where I worked, and we ended up in the same elevator.
He smiled. I smiled back. We started talking, and somehow we didn’t stop.
He was steady in a way I wasn’t used to. He was calm and attentive. The kind of person who listened when you spoke and actually remembered what you said.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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