Columnist insists through humor and ‘real life,’ that ‘Everything Is Going to Be OK’

Georgia Garvey’s husband, Tim, wrapped his hands in a double layer of plastic bags and trudged back outside to properly dispose of the dead squirrel found floating in the kiddie pool in the back yard of their Wilmette home before the couple’s two young boys discovered it.

Sometimes a woman must draw a line.

“For in our home, there is nothing a woman cannot do if she chooses, but there are several things that she chooses not to do, and one of them is touching the waterlogged corpses of tree mammals,” Garvey wrote in her Pioneer Press column of June 14, 2021.

“Sometimes You Need a Dead Squirrel Disposal Service, And That’s OK” is among Garvey’s favorite columns in a collection of about 80 bound in her first book, “Everything Is Going to Be OK (Until It’s Not),” Creators Publishing.

The Book Stall, 811 Elm St., Winnetka, will host “An Evening with Georgia Garvey” starting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18. She’ll discuss and sign her book of essays, written over the past several years, and since October 2021 distributed by Creators Syndicate to publications nationwide.

Attendance is free with registration through thebookstall.com.

Approached last year by the publisher to consider a compilation of her work, “I said, ‘Of course,’” Garvey said.

A wise move, and a fun read, Garvey tackles such freewheeling topics as parrots that speak only in Portuguese curse words, her heritage as a first-generation Greek immigrant, and the age at which a woman is past her prime, per former CNN personality Don Lemon.

Born in Philadelphia, while still months old, Garvey moved with her parents to Greece because her father, George, came from Oktania, near the country’s eastern coast. Well-traveled early in life due to her father’s work as an off-shore oil rig electrician, she lived in North Carolina and Georgia, with many trips back to Greece before settling in Chicago.

As well as an electrician, George Evdoxiadis also was a restaurateur, “because every Greek person in the United States is contractually obligated to open a restaurant,” Georgia said, jokingly.

“I try to be a source of positivity as much as I can, and I try to be funny when I can, and when I can’t be funny I try to be honest about real life,” Garvey said.

Garvey worked as a copy editor, reporter and manager for the Daily Herald before moving to the Chicago Tribune. She eventually became editor in chief of Pioneer Press and the Lake County News-Sun before leaving in 2021 when she emphasized writing her columns, as well as her other full-time jobs as mother and wife.

Some of the columns contained in “Everything Is Going to Be OK (Until It’s Not)” were written while Garvey was with the Chicago Tribune Media Group, but most were under Creators Syndicate.

She had written occasional columns dating back to her days as a student at Columbia College Chicago’s “Chronicle,” but when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and the freelance columnists whose work she edited had to be put on pause, Garvey returned to the craft in what she called a fairly seamless transition.

“I thought, we have to have a columnist, and I started writing one,” she said.

“It was interesting and a good way for me to work through my experience as the parent of young kids during the pandemic,” she said. “There were so many strange and hard-to-process things happening at the time. The column gave me a way to process those things.”

Among them were the death of her beloved grandmother, Katerina, whom Garvey visited in Greece before she passed.

It was an experience Garvey turned into an April 2020 column, “Why are we in quarantine? We’re saving the lives of people we will never meet” — a parable for observing COVID-19 precautions at a time when they were under heated debate.

It’s perhaps her favorite column in the book compilation.

“I remember that day in Oktonia, when I saw my grandmother alive for the last time, and I know the value of the sacrifice we’re making,” Garvey wrote for the Pioneer Press.

“After all, we might never do anything more beautiful, more selfless or more meaningful in our entire lives.”