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.