Relational fire: the elders are still among us

“You gotta let the house breathe,” he told me. I thought he was talking about tile. He wasn’t. Let me establish context:

Douglas is in his 70’s, and he’s been teaching me masonry and tile these past few years. He’s got 50+ years experience under his belt, and he’s a master at the soft art of unlocking the full creative potential of human capital.

When we first met he took me to lunch and he said:

“Kent, long after you and I, and the GC and the architect have packed up and left, there’s going to be a homeowner that will sit in this shower and look at our work, and how that person perceives its quality will testify as to the pride we took in our work without them ever knowing our names.”

What he said gave me chills.

Then he did this:

The guy WORKS. He’s in his 70’s, but he’s on his knees, he’s up and he’s down, and he’s using a soft voice to share his tricks for coaxing imperfect tiles into quality presentation, and just when he’s captured my attention, (through pure demonstrative merit), he did this:

“Kent. What do you think? Is this good enough?

I don’t know, man: I’m flying by the seat of my pants over here trying to keep up with you.

He handed me a tile, and looked me in the eye. He said:

“Ok mister tile guy. What does this work say about you?”

Me being me: I went hard on the issue of precision, leveraging prior experience with inlaid wood, and it turns out it’s not functional to be that precise, for a variety of reasons, which Douglas elaborated upon.

The master tile guy said:

“Kent we got a saying in the tile business; when in doubt, use grout.”

And with a laugh he pivoted to share a few examples of why factoring for some margins allows a skilled tile person to fine tune as they go.

As he says:

“Kent, the house has gotta breathe - it breathes in in the winter and it breathes out in the summer, and you gotta make room for it to breathe or it will crack, and some are gonna break.”

And for a couple of years I thought he was just talking about tile and masonry, until he revealed his true self, and I came to realize that he might be an actual angel here on earth.

His manner and affect reminds me a lot of my maternal grandfather Henry (pictured), who embraced an authentic interest in people till his final day.

Doug treats people with respect, and because he’s such a hard worker, his example inspires me to close the gap, stepping into each lesson while retaining my dignity for having spent so many hours in a state of abject humility, because dang it: Douglas really knows how to do tile, indeed his work was once featured on the cover of Architectural Digest.

Something I learned in the military: you can shout at a person, and that trick works precisely once and never again, because by humiliating a person you’ve lost their respect.

Douglas speaks with the even tone of a guy with a ton of confidence, and he WORKS, good god he wore me down, just through his own example.

He said:

“Kent to this day I don’t know the difference between a verb and a noun and I don’t honestly care because as a tile guy I’m working with math that’s older than this universe and that’s good enough for me.”

I frequently say that I miss the sounds of my grandparents’ voices, but if you listen: you’ll still hear echoes of those same voices, and we don’t need most people to make a difference, do we?

Deployed skillfully, those echos tend to reverberate.

My grandpa Henry quit school during the Great Depression, and moved out of his folks home as a young teen to work in the forests, fighting fires and logging, riding the rails with hobos and tramps to bring money back to his many younger brothers and sisters.

Sometimes that money didn’t make it home safely, and freshly beaten and robbed: my grandpa would head back into the forests to try again.

He was a young teen.

But Henry was a big kid, and by the time World War II started he’d earned some strong shoulders. He lied about his age, the army accepted him, and he carried a BAR through North Africa and into Europe, making a mockery of Nazis and other fascists with that great big rifle.

My grandparents generation is mostly gone, but there’s some decent boomers when you know where to look, and I’m honored to know more than a few of them; although my grandma Ruth would say “prosperity ruins a people,” some of them have held true to the old ways, but for the most part that generation just can’t hold a candle to my grandparents’ generation.

It’s common to talk smack about the younger folks, but if you know where to look, you’ll find the warmth of that same old-timey steel.

And we don’t need most people to make a big difference. That’s the good news.

I tell Doug I think he might be the closest thing I’ve come to meeting an actual angel on earth, and he waves my words away and laughs.

Outwardly he’s “Douglas from south Florida” with the large Ford truck and the salt life stickers, and then one time we paid a visit to a recently widowed mutual friend and she greeted us in her underpants, and was a hot mess.

Which is understandable: her husband just died.

She said “I’m so sorry” and with the softest voice he said “

aw it’s ok darnlin, I ain’t never lost a husband, and can’t imagine what you’re going through. Why I’ll tell you, when I found the body of my only son with the top of his head blown clean off, I didn’t know what I was going to do, either.”

And then he told the story of how he and his son’s friends and the Texas rangers found his only son’s remains in the Sam Houston forest, backed up against a tree with his handgun in his lap, and how the rangers said “we found him!“ from just ahead.

And for a moment Doug thought his boy was going to be alright.

He’d raised his son by himself, so he could almost see and feel his son in his arms, but they rounded the bend and saw what was left of his boy, and his friends were shook. It was the first time any of them had seen a body, and they looked to Doug for guidance.

Doug said: “so I looked at those boys and I put my arms around them and I smiled and I said boys it’s going to be alright, just you watch,” and then he set the tone for the whole scene, even the Texas Rangers were shook, and he provided comfort for them because he said he could tell that:

“the lot of them needed a daddy more than my son needed me to be mourning him right then.”

I actually retreated from the room where the story was being told.

I stood in the old tile bathroom because the candor was too much. His words were too much, and I just couldn’t, so I listened to him tell that story as it echoed in that old cinder block house, and it left me shook.

Consoling the mourning widow, he continued:

“...and for a hundred and eighty eight full moons I sit out there with my boy and we share some words, some tears, and a lot of laughter”

And brothers and sisters that story just hollowed me out, and yet it was exactly what that widow needed to hear, but she’d known Douglas for years and had never heard that story. Not even once. He delivered that story at the precise time, and not a moment earlier.

Then he came into the bathroom with his shorts and that goofy salt life shirt and those dorky south Florida glasses and he was like “what’s up, tony hawk? you want to do some work today or what?” and then it was just Doug: the guy in his 70’s who teaches me masonry and tile.

I’ve seen him pull that trick a few times, transforming the grief of his lived existence into a gift that elevates the well being of others, and then he erases himself, and he is back to being: Doug.

There’s beauty in the common people, they do magical things that aren’t commonly noticed, and other people can’t see it.

Douglas handed me a torch, but he wouldn’t describe it that way. He’d say he showed me how to lay tile, how to let a house breathe, and how to ask what the work says about a person doing it long after that person’s gone.

That’s the thing about torches, they’re not diminished by being passed from one pair of hands to the other. It’s like I used to tell my sons Ezra and Isaac: when you add more wood to a campfire, it makes more fire, provided you let the fire breathe.

And my sons Ezra and Isaac inherited one of their own from an entirely different village.

Communal hearth: how Isaac earned the name “Eisenhower”

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Aug 16

My two adult sons live in Portland. I wanted them to come to Central Texas with me, because I believe there’s greater opportunity here than in the Pacific Northwest, but they chose to stay put. I don’t fault them for that.