Until I was born my father, against all odds, was a respected photojournalist. He freelanced all over the world, often with my mom along (who now had to be cajoled into leaving her screen porch), exploring Antwerp, Nairobi, Delhi and Saigon. Over the years, he had gifted each of us with a few discreetly-framed copies of the photos he made for Life magazine and the holy grail, National Geographic. One of mine, of a little Afghan boy laughing in a field of opium poppies, had won my dad an international award. But when he became a family man, my mother let it be known that it was time to stay put. He got a position working for the state, then privately. Later, together, they opened Demetriou’s Papierie. My father still took photographs, of course: Photos of us growing up and the ones he took of us with our own children were far beyond anything we could have commissioned.

He also gave each of us daughters copies of two photos he had not taken himself, but which he prized. They represented the two sides of his life—the Greek side, the arrivers, and the American side, the strivers.

The first pictured my father’s parents on their wedding day, walking home from church through the narrow streets of Nafplio, outside Athens. Papu wears a dark blue suit; Yaya, a white dress embroidered in red and gold with a thick white veil that falls from a golden band. Not long after that day, my grandparents and their brothers and sisters all came to the United States. Friends of theirs lived in Milwaukee, and there was a strong Orthodox presence there. My father grew up in Arcadia, Wisconsin, a suburb, but his father and uncles worked in a run-down rim town near the Milwaukee airport where Greeks ran all the restaurants, even the food trucks, and where Papu and his brothers built the best hotel. When my dad moved to Madison to study photography at the state university instead of working his way through all the stations of the cross at Cosimo’s Restaurant, Papu probably expected him to fail. But Dad did just the opposite, in part because he grew up well-connected, although he would not ever have said that.

That was what the other picture was about. Taken many years after the first one, it symbolized my family’s American side.

In the gauzy bokeh foreground, my mother and Wisconsin’s former first lady, Alma Romero Hodge, are tossing handfuls of petals into the air at a victory celebration for Malachy Hodge, a two-term governor and my father’s closest friend since high school. But the focus isn’t on the jubilant adults. Instead, it’s on me and the Hodges’ eldest daughter, Alice, called Alzy, peeking out from under a long table. Aged about five, both Alzy and I were guarding the laps of our white dresses which we had filled with dozens of small wrapped chocolate bars.