My mind keeps tumbling back, bringing tears to my eyes, to his eyes, laughing like happy babies, every time he opened the Styrofoam cooler box Captain Antonis would send from Poros. One time it’d be packed with black sea bream, the next with plump red porgies and other times with blue-spotted and white bream. From the young amberjacks and silversides to the groupers and poor cod, his eyes would light up with the same anticipation. Dad loved fish.

You should have seen how his entire body would practically glow when he told me how to cook parrotfish. We rub them, uncleaned, with plenty of salt and, once they’ve been cooked in the oven or over a grill, you remove the fish from their scales, which are tough and fused together like armor. The sweet, whitish flesh inside retains all its juices, gently steamed inside the shell of its scales. He told how in Kalymnos, or somewhere else, perhaps, they’d use the fish’s innards, after removing the bitter gallbladder, and whip them up in a sauce with olive oil and vinegar. And how, over there in Kalymnos, on the very edge of the country, they’d weave the octopuses they caught into tight balls and dry them that way, removing as many tentacles as they needed when they needed them. After they were rehydrated in water and plumped up, they’d be cooked with rice or pasta or stewed with onions and tomato.

He’d tell me about other travels too – the captain’s life is an ocean of journeys. From one end of the Earth to the other, from Magellan to Osaka and from Panama to Lagos, wherever his ship dropped anchor, he would haggle with the local fishermen to secure fresh catch for himself and his crew. He’d pack the fish in containers with seawater and keep them in the ship’s massive deep-freezers.

In Piraeus, too, I remember a tireless old Pitsos fridge we kept as a backup on the rooftop terrace and a freezer that was added later for the same job, being packed with white plastic food containers filled with picarel and seawater. He always kept his own stock of picarel, but also got presents of the stuff. Each batch seemed ready to jump right into the pan as soon as it was unfrozen.

Friends and relatives would bring him fish as a thank-you for some kindness he had done for them, helping retired sailors or deckhands who didn’t know their letters well tackle Greek bureaucracy. Fish was the only thing he’d accept in exchange.

My mind creaks under the weight of so many memories: A small blue plastic bag filled with scorpion fish as sweet as honey when cooked in parchment; two congers mom cooked up with onions and potatoes, rewarding us for all the pesky bones with a thick sauce – perfect for dunking chunks of bread into; mom cleaning what seemed like tons of fish all the time and pulling the skin of eels with a pair of pliers after hanging them off the lemon tree in our backyard in Hydra.

The son of a poor fisherman from Hydra, Dad was the youngest of five. His dad took him along on his boat, raising him on the sea, which defined the dimensions of his life. He went to sea himself at a young age and traveled the world as a licensed captain. He lived this vast, fragmented life, scattered across the oceans of the world, modestly.

My mind skitters across insignificant scenes: His fingers exploring every last nook and cranny of a striped red mullet to coax out every last bit of flesh, especially around the head; his mouth sucking the bones with almost religious reverence of every trace of flavor. A holy communion with the sea.

I remember another scene locked in my mind with similar greed by my childish eyes: I must have been four or five, tops, and we were standing at the stern of a massive freighter docking at a Mediterranean port. The ship’s cook had whipped up a batch of fried red mullet and passed them around to the crew for a bite to eat. I can still see the red-tinted oil on the white galley plate, and taste the unbelievable sweetness of the fish as they broke it off and fed it to me by hand; it’s a flavor that is indelible in my memory. And then there was Dad, making the rest of the fish vanish, like a stray cat.

Did I call these scenes insignificant? They are anything but. This habit of sucking every last morsel off the bone is a bubble carrying an old way of life, expanding quietly in concentric circles through time. This is what life was like for the working class back in those days. It was a frugal life, filled with great hardship and immense respect for the environment, for food and for humanity. We tend to forget that we are their heirs to a great culinary philosophy based on the wise, rational management of our resources. We forget that what we call sustainability used to be a way of life; it was the marrow of human activity. Sustainability meant survival, and every act of waste was an act of hostility.

That savoring, that hunger and passion, that tug at the sleeve … Where is he now to see what a cat I have also turned into?

This story first appeared in Kathimerini’s food supplement, Gastronomos.