MORE TILES
Hung returned Tuesday to tile most of the kitchen. I say most because the pattern is more complex. The grout lines have to match those in the sunroom, and given the shape of the kitchen there are far more cuts to make. He’ll finish the tile today but will he have time to grout?

One more story about Hung. Diane warned me that I might appear to be beating that dead horse, but so be it.

Last Christmas Susan gave me a remote starter for my truck. I used it all winter, not just to warm my truck, but to show off and to startle those who beat me to the front seat. I use it somewhat less in the hot weather, but not much less. I’d probably trade-in my truck given the abysmal gas mileage, but I can’t, because of my treasured remote starter.

For some reason, Hung has been almost obsessed with my truck. He bought a Toyota, new, in 1999, a year before the crew cab concept with front facing rear seats was introduced and his regrets are obvious. Everyday we talk about my seats, how the truck looks more like an SUV, the width, the length, the tread on the tires, whatever comes to his fertile mind.

As we were standing in the kitchen and probably after one more question about my Nissan, I said to Hung, “I can start my truck from here.” I thought this would impress him more than the rear seats.

He said, “I can too.”

Certain he has misunderstood me, I said, “No, you can’t. See, if I had my keys I could press two buttons and my truck would start.”

“Mi kal, I can do that.”

This was after our Baptist conversation and you would have thought I’d learned my lesson. Yes, you would have thought.

“Hung, this is not like a car alarm, this is a REMOTE STARTER.” I raised my voice so he could better understand me.

After that conversation, he never missed an opportunity to start his truck from afar. Call it dueling remote starters.

BMW
The consensus seems to be that the cause of an overheating BMW is due to a blown head gasket, retarded ignition timing, or a faulty cooling system ( possibly a knackered radiator-UK site).
Travis & Matthew::
Found this site: One hundred and one tech tips for the 2002.
The opening paragraph
begins: “Anyone who has owned a 2002 for more than a few weeks has been introduced to the car’s inscrutable nature.”
12. A 320i radiator is as good or better than the 2002 part it is lighter, and
the whole conversion costs $50.00 less than the 2002 radiator alone.
13. If your 2002 runs hot, and the radiator is more than 2 years old, replace it.
But there is so much more:
6. Too tight belts destroy water pumps; tighten only enough to run the alternator.
23. BMW O.E. exhaust systems are the longest lasting and most quiet you will find.
32. Tailpipe smoke on deceleration usually means valve seal problems.
34. Drain your speedometer cable; it collects water.
37. 2002s run fine on unleaded fuel.
50. There is a lot of room for stereo gear under the back seat.
55. Remove bumpers and clean behind them annually.
83. Black spark plug wire can replace discolored chrome windowtrim.
98. Not driving a 2002 is the worst thing you can do to it.

TUESDAY

Old steps gone, new mahagony and primed pine ones in place.
Bill, as usual, doing most of the clean-up.

Railing, a bit of trim and then we’re off to Lexington…I mean, Newton.

Click for full screen version
Dan’s outdoor wireless office. The nearby waiting room

BMW UPDATE

This is the last week of auto mechanics class and on Friday we have to drive the car back home. Without an inspection sticker. Dan and I believe creative story telling will suffice if we’re stopped, Diane claims she’ll take Matt to the Vineyard as planned, whether I’m in jail or not.

This week Matt will change the tie rods, having already worked on the distributor, ignition wires, alternator, coil, and battery leads. Surprisingly too, it passed both Matt’s compression and oil pressure tests and that leaves only the clutch to repair. I wrote to David Stochl seeking his advice about whether we could do that work ourselves. His diplomatic reply:

“The clutch is a tough question. It involves taking the driveshaft out, the transmission out, and then the clutch pressure plate and disc off the flywheel. The flywheel also should be taken out and resurfaced, as it most likely will have heat cracks. If you don’t resurface the flywheel, it may chatter. Not good.

That is a lot of work for anyone with little experience. The job isn’t impossible, but just little stuff like making sure the clutch is aligned with an alignment tool (need to buy or rent one), and then actually lifting the transmission into place is a pain in the back.

My advice would be to get some estimates for a clutch job, then decide whether you really want to dive into that job, ot just pay to have someone do it with a warranty. Sometimes with stuff like Transmissions, it is nice to have a warranty to take it back if it acts up.

Case in point: I was selling my 1964 Ranchero this year. The 4 speed transmission lost third gear, and I had two more transmissions in my garage. Supposedly one had been rebuilt, so I was told. I spent a day pulling out the old one, putting the new one in, making all the adjustments for the shifter, then crawling out from under the car to take it for a drive. It growled in first gear, slipped out of second when I decelerated, then could not get it into third gear. The moral of this story was that I pulled the transmission out after replacing the shifter twice (thinking it was a shifter problem), took it down to a friend’s transmission shop, and $580 in cash later, had a rebuilt unit to put in. It worked like a charm. As much as I hated to spend the money, it was done in a few days and was done correctly.”

As much as I hate to spend the money and as much as I’ll miss seeing that transmission sitting on Matt’s chest, we’ve decided to take it to our local mechanic. After the clutch is repaired, Matt and I will start the body work, and begin investigating ways to add head rests and some kind of after market shoulder belts.

ENDINGS

Thursday is Diane’s last day at Emerson. Monday, August 25th, she’ll again be making that familiar drive to Mclean Hospital.

REWINDING

These images should have accompanied Rewind. They present the scope of Adam’s dilemma, to begin again, or not. Click here for more photos.

The old floor… .

I stopped at Home Depot to buy thinset and when I arrived at 8:15, Adam and Hung were already discussing Adam’s complex, precisely random, tile pattern. I walked over to where they were standing, ready to join the conversation, when a mosquito landed on my arm. I swatted it, then glanced at Hung, worried that I might have offended the Buddhist in him.

The tiles, in my opinion, are gorgeous. No mamby pamby tiles these, even Hung commented on the thickness, and when you walk into the room there is no doubt what is underfoot. The colors will tweak each eye differently but I see muted pastels of a desert sunset and texture that of the forest floor.

Okay, what it is, the desert, the woods or an addition in Sudbury? You be the judge, photos are below.

However, the design, Adam’s inspired creation with an assist from his computer, requires that a tile be placed then that corresponding tile be crossed off the paper layout pattern. Without using the drawing as a checklist, the intentionally random pattern swallows one whole. I’ve seen Hung fly through simple jobs, laying square tiles like a card dealer in Atlantic City, but this pattern required him to be fully engaged.

Three times, he asked me for advice when the paper pattern could not be repeated on the floor. I was useless. To give advice I had to look at the printed paper, locate the tile space in question then transfer that image to the floor. I couldn’t do it; I kept getting lost. I need square tiles lined up like soldiers in dress whites in predictable formations. Toss in an accent tile or two and I’m good to go.

We spent more than an hour dividing the room with blue chalk lines, and laying out trial runs to be sure the finished floor would resemble Adam’s creation. Confident Hung understood his design, Adam left for work, late, and I moved to the den to tackle the water damaged bay window. Hung had laid maybe ten tiles when he walked into the den.
“Michael (he pronounces my name My Kal, the same emphasis on both syllables), how much did I say this job?”
I expected this conversation. Weeks ago, when he came to look at the empty room, I showed him Adam’s design, but that paper was a flimsy substitute for tiles in hand. I turned away and laughed. Fortunately he knows this is a commiserating laugh because he then said, “When I was here before I didn’t see the tile.”He calls it tie, for both singular and plural. I know all too well how hairy estimating can be and it doesn’t bother me to know that others have the same problem.

My sister-in-law, Susan, has her own horror story, perhaps my favorite in part because: A. It was happening to her, not me, and B. She somehow maintained a sense of humor. A budget-busting publishing project that seemed to have no end – she couldn’t submit a half finished book-dwarfed my own personal nightmares. When I asked Susan if I could use her story in my story, she wrote back : Where you say, ‘she had horribly underestimated,’ you may be underestimating. I think that at about half way through that project, I was making 11¢ an hour; by the end, it was costing me to finish the damn thing. My point here is that you may want to make stronger ‘horribly underestimated.’ ”
But my intention is not to describe the project at length but to recount her most memorable retort. When her husband asked how she could have screwed-up so badly, She replied, “I carefully estimated the project, then I bid half.” I wondered if that was what Hung was thinking.

With about three quarters of the floor finished and Hung readying to leave I asked him why he hadn’t brought his son.
He said, “He has something at church.”
I thought to myself, church? That is a mighty western sounding word. “Church, what kind of church?” I quickly scanned my meager knowledge base and came up with Catholic, as in French influenced. The French bombed the Vietnamese before we did and I thought they might have left a little something extra.

“Baptist,” he replied
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was back in Adam’s random floor pattern trying to find the next tile. I looked hard at that Asian face, “What do you mean, Baptist.”
“Baptist,” he replied like it was I who was the idiot.
“Baptist, like Baptist? With God, and the baby Jesus?” I could only think of Southern Baptists, the kind we all ran from in southern Indiana.

“Yes, but Vietnamese. Vietnamese Alliance, Baptist.”

He explained that his wife’s grandfather was converted by an American missionary and that he too was a Baptist. I had to find my missing Buddhist but not until I asked about his great grandfather did I get to a maybe. Sounding just a bit defensive to my probing of his family tree, he added, “You have to have religion to keep people from doing bad things.”
Off the deep end with no rope to pull me back, I fired back, “No you don’t. Your boys aren’t good because they are afraid of going to hell, they are good because of you.”

I don’t get in anyone’s face about their religion and I don’t know what I was doing in Hung’s. My version of Hung combined with my personal guilt about the war was colliding with the real Hung and I could hear popping noises where there should have only been thoughts.

Explaining the pattern


End of Friday -Click for larger image

Plans, but not the full view.

After the pounding din, the silence was riveting. Hung had just walked in and was standing in the kitchen, his face bearing an expression frozen between the hopeless smile one might give an implacable predator, and utter shock teetering on anger. Michael and I were on our knees in the sunroom, more than halfway through tearing up the tile floor he had laid the day before. It had taken the two of us the better part of an hour that morning to wrap our minds around what we had begun to do — Hung had just walked in. And it was his work.

The day before, as intimated by the intro to Eagle Lake below, Hung had arrived to put the second — arguably the first — major finish material into our addition, applying our subtle but zooty Italian tile to the slab he’d laid just two days before, in a complicated randomized pattern dreamed up by yours truly. Michael and I spent over an hour with him strategizing and doing initial layout, and then with a half dozen tiles in place, Hung’s momentum building, I finally went off to work, excited by what I’d find when I returned that night.

Midday, Tricia called me at work to diminish my expectations. “You know, it won’t be exactly straight. The pattern is very complicated, and he’s a little off. The middle won’t be exactly in the middle. Just so you know.” Implication being, there’s no going back, but it’s barely noticeable, except to the adaptationally-challenged, such as myself. But I talked her through the intent, explained where certain compromises were expected, and she became convinced it was alright after all, just a matter of perspective. Nevertheless, after a late night lighting mockup, I came home somewhat tense.

The tile looked great. I could begin to see how the room would be when it was finished. Yes, the center tile looked maybe a half an inch off center. More of a problem was a slight hook at the end of the middle row, but taking up and adjusting a few tiles would fix that. I went to bed content.

When I awoke, I had work to do in the addition to make ready for another thing Hung would do. But as I set about it, something about the floor was bugging me, and I stopped, stood back for a better view. It couldn’t be, but that “hook” from the night before now seemed like the whole row, indeed, the whole floor, was on a slant. But surely that was optical illusion — out came the tape measure. And 5 minutes later, I was in the dark pit of despair, my dream and vision in ruins about me, barely the strength of limb or will to dial Michael’s number. “It’s crooked. The pattern’s perfect, but the whole floor’s rotated relative to the walls — it’s off by well over an inch across the 12 feet, and in both axes. I wanna die.”

Okay, melodramatic, but I’d schemed and sweated the tiniest of details for almost three months, and now, the first unfudgeable thing — arguably the grandest and most noticeable treatment — had failed the simple tests of centered, and parallel to the walls. After some half-hearted fact-finding, Mike said, “I’ll be right over.” On a day he had other plans, and for a task second only perhaps to coming over to shoot a friend’s mortally wounded dog.

It took us awhile to come to grips. We measured and rationalized, pondered keeping it, visions of jack-hammering up shattered tiles, and confrontations with Hung keeping us from declaring the right thing to do. But then Mike tentatively put the claw of a hammer under a tile, and miracle — it lifted, intact. The way was clear. We began the grim but oddly invigorating task of reversal, the first step to setting things to right. Brutal, ugly work, but way easier than it should have been (though that in and of itself was some cause for concern, later dispelled). And then Hung walked in.

He never said a word about it all day. After I explained the problem, pointed out the benchmarks, theorized about where “we” might have gone wrong, all with a conciliatory smile on my face, he just went out to the garage, got his demo tool and squatted down to erase his previous day. Occasionally he’d stop and glance about in perfect poker face, only by unattributable inference in any shock or disbelief. I finally went to work, leaving Mike to labor on with Hung in the silence only by definition punctuated by the percussive cacophony of demolition, the human aspect impenetrable and cloying.

There was much intimate and revealing conversation that day, I’m told. Mike learned much about Hung’s early life and flight from Viet Nam 20 years ago with his fledgling family. But the subject of the task at hand was tabu and impregnable. We may never know why, where this all sits in Hung’s psyche. And I care.

It is perhaps undemonstrable by any means that could be called scientific that one’s spirit, persona and attitude imbues the works of one’s hands with an energy sensible even to those who do not believe in “energy”. Great care and optimism, pride and comradeship had swelled the karma of this space, and while I am without shame or doubt heavily invested in the details and attached to my physical vision, so too am I committed to the experience of everyone working here being informed and uplifted by that which all others have brought to this work. I had my own darkness to wrestle with, but Hung’s own weighs on me.

I can’t reach into his darkness, if even there is any of that of which I worry. I can only hold out light. When I got home that evening after the demo was done, I worked into the wee hours laying out guidelines, drawing maps, writing instructions (just a few, really). And I went to work without staying to coach Hung, trying to simply create trust. When he arrived, Tricia said to him, “I’m glad you’re back.” He might, after all, have decided, enough’s enough. But I think that touched him, and he threw himself into it, and it’s beautiful. I hope he comes to understand my need to rewind, even, perhaps to share it, if only post facto. But when I took the picture below yesterday evening before beginning the new layout, it came out looking not so much like the wreck it felt like at the time, but rather like the fresh possibility it in fact was, both in our say-so and in actuality.

Implements of destruction, some new, at rest, a day’s work undone.

Adam and I have been writing about past camping trips that we will add to the mainecourse.com site. As soon as the image map on the places.html page is updated, this one,which I recently finished, will be linked.
Tomorrow I’ll post photos from the part of the job Susan might be most interested in, the laying of the tiles.

October, 1995

La Casa De Fiesta is an unlikely name for a topless bar, especially one in Millinocket Maine, the heart of the used- to-be-thriving paper mill industry. Sure, there are foreign born loggers, but mostly French Canadians who drive down from the north. Mark Queijo and I, coming up from the south, had been on the road for five hours when we drove by the bar, looked at each other, smiled, turned around and pulled into the adjacent parking lot. We’d left Acton early, stopped at the Littleton Sub Shop for a late on-the-fly lunch and were now only an hour and a half from where we intended to spend the night – Chamberlain Lake. We were also alone. Dan and Adam with known work obligations, and later, unexpected car repairs, wouldn’t meet us until the afternoon of the following day. If we stopped for a beer or two we had nothing to lose but sleep.
We have a camping routine that is, by now, as predictable as the changing color of Red Maples in the fall. We know what our preparation entails -important gear left home; we know what the drive will be like – long; the first night’s sleep in a motel – fast; the subsequent breakfast-huge; the lake water temperature – testicle retracting; we can even predict squabbles that might surface. That would explain my reaction to walking into a room full of naked women when moments before I was scanning the skies for the Northern Lights. Dissociative. It was fun, it was memorable, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, especially the "Preferred" dance I arranged for Mark while he was in the bathroom, but I was happy to get back on the road, to search for our campsite in a birch meadow near the water.
We left the bar at 10:30 and arrived at Chamberlain before midnight. How convenient, I thought, I’ll get a good night’s sleep. But that was before Has to Have a Water View, met Can’t Turn Back. The logging road follows the lake north but other than at the ranger station, it’s a comfortable few hundred yards away. To get to the water, where I wanted to pitch our tent, we had to find an access road, a path, two ruts, matted weeds, anything that resembled a trail meandering in the direction of the water. Under the stars it was no moon dark and hard to find those trails, in the woods and on one of those trails, it was the color of lamp black.
The first path we chose began in a silvery green field of knee high grass. It curved down into the woods, but bit by bit the trail got narrower and narrower as encroaching branches of nearby trees closed around us – much like a Chinese finger trap. It was painful listening to the fingernail-on-chalkboard sound as the new Jeep’s black finish fought its way through those branches. It wasn’t my car, but I cringed as Mark continued to drive until the road died. We got out and with flashlights in hand, continued our water search. We climbed over fallen trees, plowed through brush, and stumbled on rocks before I suggested giving up. "We can’t turn back now, the water must be right over that hill," Mark offered. I laughed, "And then what, walk back for our gear and then all the way back to the water that we don’t yet know exists?" Retreat we did, but I was happy knowing that Mark wasn’t going to give up until tab A had been inserted into slot B. He had demonstrated that his need to move forward was greater than his love for his Jeep’s flawless finish.
I would like to say that the next trail we drove down took us right to a campsite on the water. But I can’t . I’d like to say the one after that one, or the one after that or the trail we took that ended next to a newly built cabin deep in the woods. The cabin that looked at that moment like it might have been owned by someone from Texas with a chain saw and meat hooks. I wish I could say, can’t-turn-back and has-to-have-a-water view conceded and slept there, but I can’t. We really are too much alike because we didn’t stop out search until the sun threatened to help us look, until we were too tired to continue and we had come to our last dead end – a muddy, rutted area next to a narrow stream. We climbed out of the Jeep, scouted for a flat place to pitch our tent, failed to find one, set up anyway, and climbed in just as it began to rain. We had found our water alright. It was falling on our tent, it was babbling from the brook and it was oozing up from the ground around us.
The next morning, nowhere near enough hours after we had fallen asleep, we got up, stuffed our wet tent into its sack, and headed back to the lake where we thought we’d meet Dan and Adam. It was still raining when we drove into the parking area at the south end of Chamberlain, and that’s why we ended up cooking breakfast on gathered wet wood, a few feet from a battered gray camper. This, after asking the park ranger proudly standing in front of three sheds full of seasoned wood, if he might spare a log or two. He said no.
While Mark cooked over easy’s in a small frying pan coated with rain and butter, I pulled out the year’s brain storm. A gold filter cone with which to make our coffee. Damn thing worked at home, sort-of, where time was not critical, but for whatever reason, old sediment clogging the holes or coffee ground too fine, water poured in hot would drip out like that nasty motel faucet you can’t quite turn off. Five minutes later, one cup full of coffee – anything but hot. Mark provided the morning’s entertainment when he insisted on cooking bacon, to accompany the runny eggs. It was fun to watch him dodge exploding grease as rain drops danced on his bacon fat.
Don’t mistake the self-pitying tone of this story; we were not miserable, and god knows, we never whine, in fact we were having a good time. Mark’s previous camiping experience had been a Battan-like march and paddle through the Boundary Waters in Minnesota with enough gear to squash a Russian weight lifter and for me, well, I had been to Maine before.


Adam Kibbe and Mark Queijo

Sounds Like

I’ve known Hung for sixteen of the twenty years he’s been in the US. He has four children, lives in Dorchester and owns three houses. He works hard now, but worked much harder when he lived in Vietnam or as he calls it, “My country.”

For twelve of those years I called him “Hung.” I didn’t say Hung, like hung by the neck. I tried to imitate his Vietnamese so I’d add my own musical lilt. And I’d do my best to leave off most of the “H’ as he does. I’d exhale forcefully, hit a high register and sound like, I guess, a donkey getting goosed.

I was never comfortable with my pronunciation, but it was the best I could do and then one day, I heard Hung tell someone on the phone his name was Hong. But not Hong as in Hong Kong. When he hung up, I said, “I’ve been calling you Hung all these years, why didn’t you tell me your name was Hong.” Again, I’d go easy on the ‘H’ and kind of bark it out.

I have no doubt if I was as close to the pronunciation of Hong as Joan is to John. And whatever it was I was saying before I switched to Hong, it was probably equally butchered. That’s why it didn’t surprise me when he said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Today, Hung and his son laid the Sand Mix, which is a mixture of concrete sand and Portland Cement, as substrate for the tile. Wednesday is an important day for the Kibbes because that will signify a huge step in the completion of the job – laying of the tile. But it’s an important day for me too, because I’m going to introduce Hung to multi-lingual Adam who will then help me with the proper pronunciation.

Doing the Deal

Hung exemplifies my utter confusion around money. This is the conversation we have at the end of every job and remember, this has been going on for years.

“How much do I owe you?”
“What do you think?”
“I think whatever you think.”
“You tell me how much.”
“I can’t tell you how much, it’s what the job is worth, Hung.”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”

Now I’m squirming and turning red, “Just tell me how much
I owe you”

This will continue until l’ve exhausted him, and he’ll finally say,
“How about six hundred?”

I’ll think to myself, that’s about half of what the job is worth; I’ve got to pay him more than that, “How about seven hundred?”
The deal closes when Hung replies, “How about six fifty?”

Diane reminds me that when I was asking him to price the Kibbe job, that I kept saying, “It’s not for me, charge what the job is worth.” He’s been tiling for twenty years and he knew the square footage of the job – small by his standards – yet he had to call me back with a price. When he did, it was about half of the so-called competing estimate.

Harder Work

Hung brought help, his twenty year old son. I shook his hand and noted that he looked like Matt after we ask him to take out the trash. Clearly, he did not want to be working with his father.

“We’re in the same boat.” Hung said to me. This after we commiserated about how our children get driven everywhere and how they would rather not work. For Matthew, that is work at home because he has had two jobs since he was fourteen and has missed maybe one day.

“When I was five or six I had to bicycle eight kilometers to school.”
I thought, here is the Vietnamese variation of walking six miles in the snow, but I can relate because I walked to school.

Then he said, “When I was fifteen to about twenty, I drove a tractor.”
I offered, that I too worked hard as a teenager. I thought to myself, Hung and I have a lot in common.

Then he said, “Many people in my country can’t go to school because they have little to eat. Each day they have to find their own food. Before school I would dive into the river and catch fish to eat. He held his fingers close together to show me how small the fish were.

I thought to myself, maybe different boats.

Mud job in progress.
Click for Larger Image

“You’re driving like an idiot.”

Dad’s spontaneous, oh so helpful outburst as Matthew slows at a corner to keep the Mazda on four wheels, but treats the stop sign like it’s a green flag at the Indianapolis 500. I had already kept my mouth shut when he stopped on the crosswalk at the first traffic light, when he nearly “got air” over the railroad tracks and when he flew into the video store’s empty parking lot. But the stop sign pushed me over the edge.

We were on our way to Dan’s birthday party and Matt had again asked if he could drive. He always asks, we always say, yes. But after my gentle admonition I thought, always has been less than a week. Sure he drove for two years in our yard, racing from one end and burying the nose of the car in the bushes at the other end, but that is all of a hundred feet. No lights, no other cars.

Diane summed it up after we got home. She said, “What if we had an incompetent child we were teaching to drive? We barely tell him anything and he’s driving.” And that’s what I had to remind myself, that he doesn’t whiz through stop signs or stop on cross walks because he has suddenly became a seasoned Massachusetts driver. He’s a kid learning to drive.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you Matt.” Thinking to myself, how does an idiot drive, anyway?

As I was sitting at my computer thinking about our highway drive home and how accomplished a driver he already is, I saw Matt walking across the front lawn with his friend Joe.

“I got to drive on Route 2. “ he told Joe. I could almost hear the buttons pop.

My marriage is a cooperative blend of individual talents. Or survival instincts. I cut the grass; Diane makes sure Matt does his homework. I clean the basement; Diane pays the bills. Once a month or so, I wash Dianeís car, every night she makes dinner. I sleep late, Diane executes every last detail of all our trips, whether itís to France, Gilsum NH, or to that town on the Ohio River in southern Indiana.

Every January, early, Diane will ask me to call Brian and tell him to get ready for our trip to Evansville. His response is always the same. ìSteak, medium rare, potatoes with butter and gravy, iced tea, no vegetable, no dessert.î That is what I hear because whatever his response is, however it is framed, it always sounds like a death row prisoner requesting his last meal.

Brian hates to leave his space, but does so once a year with us, this pilgrimage to visit our parents and Mattís grandparents. Matthew, Diane and I love it, probably in that order, but Brian has a most comfortable home, not to be duplicated in a far off land. However, once he agrees to go, all he has to do is stand still and wait for the Tsunami named Diane to carry him away. The naked truth is, Matt and I, clinging to our backpacks and surfboards, do the same.

When the time comes, Diane announces the time has come. She searches the net for the cheapest fares, scrambles to book the best rates at the Marriott, arranges for the rental car and continually updates Brian to ensure that heís standing at his front door when we arrive en route to Logan. Which he always is, carrying not much more than a toothbrush. Diane claims that is when she hears his first sigh.

And, according to Diane, the sighs continue on the plane but reach a crescendo in the rental car returning to the Marriot from our first dinner on Bellemeade Ave. They donít stop until the sun rises on our first morningís breakfast at Dennyís. I donít notice the sighs, but I do see the transformation. Brian, apparently, with the last of his resistance ground to fine dust, inverts the pestle, taps out what remains with his forefinger and comes alive. He starts chatting with the waitress, customers next to us, bellhops, shop owners, labyrinth guides, convicted felons, whomever, and he doesnít stop until we drop him off on Mt Auburn St. five days later.

I, however, the guy Brian nicknamed Gabby Hayes, become morose and uncommunicative. Itís as if Brian has left his coffin and Iíve climbed in. I spend most of the visit walking in his shadow wondering who the hell this guy is, who so closely resembles, well, me.

Itís not unlike what happens in a marriage. Or so my rationale goes. Diane does the laundry; I donít have to. She worries, freeing me to make caustic comments about her neuroses. Peter hasnít been part of these family visits in many years but when he is, I have the best time, because he acts out all of my inner impulses. He reacts to my fatherís irritability, I see the stillness of a protected mountain lake. He responds to my motherís woo woo side, I see Mike Dukakis with a sense of humor. I lie back and enjoy.
The gallery contains fifty-four images taken by both Brian and me. I considered posting only my pictures but found most of my really good photos came from Brianís camera. Except for the ones that Matthew took.

The Ohio River

Note the post time, Susan.

For the plumb and level police, this one was not, like the previous photograph, taken with a fisheye lens. However, it is a composite, poorly done, but illustrative of something. To get an full view of the sunroom, I would need to stand in the hallway, but that would involve knocking out a kitchen wall.
The best part of this job, any job, is having others do the work. Monday, Hung turns the floor into concrete. That reminds me, eighteen bags of sand mix will be delivered tomorrow. Are you home in the morning, Adam?

Peter and Patti complained about images over-running my text, therefore, I resized all the photos on this page. It is a browser, resolution, monitor size issue; I hope this helps. If you click on the links under Recent Entries, that problem disappears entirely and you’ll also see comments listed in order.
Mark Queijo and others want more history of the BMW and I’m hoping a Ruthenburg will send me a paragraph or two that I can include in my short (upcoming) synopsis.

Brian posted on his site, this stunning image of the recent Van Gogh Moon and I had to reproduce it here. To me, it demonstrates his technical skill (as a younger brother it pains me to say that), the limits (as in upper) of the Nikon 5700 and the gift of a mostly clear sky.
I added this unsubscribe link.

Click to Enlarge

I don’t know about the hug, but here’s the cake.

And they ate it.