The House That Tim Built

Today I want to tell you a story about a house.

One day when I was a child visiting San Antonio, I wandered on past the Alamo and walked about an hour on East Houston Street until I came across a very large construction site. I don’t know what possessed me into walking that far, but I did it, hot sun and all.

Now, on this construction site was a very tall and dorky looking construction worker with a name-tag that read “Timothy T. Duncan”. He saw me shyly clinging to a barbed wire fence on the edge of the construction zone, watching the cranes as young boys do.

“Hi, my name is Tim,” he said.

“Hello,” I said.

There was a silence that followed, one that should have been awkward but wasn’t. I learned then that Tim wasn’t like other grown-ups. You didn’t have to fill silences by saying what school you went to or how old you were or what you wanted to do when you grew up. Tim stared with that same blank-ish stare that I got in trouble for a lot. Grown-ups think this stare is a sign of not paying attention, but children know is a sign of paying very deep attention to something everybody else cannot see.

“Do you like superheroes?” he asked, breaking the silence. I told him I did and he took off his boot and showed me his tattoo of The Punisher.

I gawked a little. “Cooool,” I said, my interest piqued. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m building a house,” he said.

I looked at the dust and scattered materials that lay on the site. Messier than my room, I thought, as I listened to the drone of drills and equipment. “It doesn’t look like a house,” I said, unsure.

“It will,” Tim said. “Also, you should stand outside the fence. Not wearing a hard-hat in a construction zone is a leading cause of construction related accidents.”

I stepped outside the fence and watched them work for a while. It wasn’t just Tim who worked here. There was another tall man named David and a man named Sean and a man named Bruce and a whole bunch of other people. Their manager was a mean old white-haired man named Gregg who liked to yell a lot. He even yelled at David and Tim. I tried to ask him why he spelled his name with two G’s at the end, but he just glared at me and refused to answer any of my questions.

“Tim,” I said. “Why do you spend so much time on the boring stuff on the ground? Why can’t you get to the fun stuff like windows and roofs and bedrooms with TV’s in them?”

“Every house needs a good solid foundation,” he said, unconcerned.

So they worked hard on the foundation, Tim hardest of all. They hammered and drilled, dug and poured concrete. Eventually, the Texas sun morphed into a streaky red as the evening time came. The workers had stopped for the day, but Tim kept working, unaware of the hour.

“Tim, you’re never going to finish this house,” said one of the workers.

“It’s too difficult,” said David.

“It’s too tricky,” said Gregg.

“Let’s do it,” said Tim, hammering away.

And as the dust cleared the next morning, Tim stayed true to his word: A house had popped up on East Houston Street. Just a one story house, with no frills, but the citizens of San Antonio loved it. They would pass by it sometimes at the end of long days and grin despite their problems. The advertisements for it may have been silly and it may not have been on HGTV as much as the other, more flashy, houses — but it was a sincere house, and the people of San Antonio liked sincere things.

I did too. I watched the house with delight, pointing out its wonders to passerby.

“This is Tim’s house,” I would say. “Tim is 7 feet tall and he built this house and it’s the best house in the world!”

My mother eventually found me and took me home, but I returned to the house four years later, still a child but now a child who thought he was an adult.

A lot of the workers had left since my first visit, but some were still there. David sauntered up to me, wiping the sweat of his brow. “This is my last day,” he said.

“That’s sad,” I said. “I’ve never had a last day before. I had a first day in preschool, and a first day in kindergarten, and a first day in first grade…all my days have been first days.”

David laughed, a deep throaty laugh that betrayed his good nature. “You should talk to Tony and Manu over there,” he said. “They’re having their first day too.”

In fact, Tony and Manu were walking over to us, chatting spiritedly in accented English.

“We were just talking about your last day,” said Manu to David. “We want to finish one more floor of the house, you know, as a going away present. But Tony here thinks — ”

“It’s too difficult,” finished Tony.

“Too tricky,” nodded Manu.

“Let’s do it,” said David.

So I watched as Tim, spurred by David’s unrelenting encouragement, built a new floor of the house. It was then that I began to think of Tim as a superhero. Most superheroes went from mild-mannered people to loud warriors, but Tim was a unique breed: a mild-mannered warrior.

He laughed when I told him this.

“A mild-mannered superhero,” he said. “That would really be something. I’ll include that in my email list of suggestions to Marvel’s Director of Creative Content, right after my pitch for a Spiderman-Deadpool team-up.”

Even mean old-man Gregg (who insisted I call him Mr. Popovich) couldn’t help but crack a smile. Tim’s energy was infectious — it swirled around the site, giving spirit to Tony and Manu and even David, who found energy even on his last legs.

In the years after David left, Tony and Manu kept working with Tim, building the house all the way up to four glorious stories. They grew up alongside me— weathering change and disappointment, molded into better people by the steadfast anchor that was Tim Duncan.

There is a temptation now, as I tell this story in past-tense, to pretend that things were rosy all the time, that their triumphs were uninterrupted by pain. But this is not the truth.

The top of the building crashed down frequently, making the workers rebuild the new floors from scratch. Tim’s knees buckled under the stress of hard labor, and soon he began to move with one foot almost permanently planted to the floor. I hardly noticed, of course. It was always just same old Tim. The same old foundation. That was the subtle miracle of those waning days of my childhood: Tim’s most recent work may have come crashing down, but the house — the house still stood. An immovable rock on the scorching San Antonio streets.

It had been a long time since that second visit when I came to San Antonio once again. 6 years had gone by, taking my childhood with it. I don’t know why I came back after that long barren gap, right before I was to head off to college. There had been no news of a fifth floor. Progress had been slow, and there were rumors of Tim being on his last legs. Perhaps I went because I wanted a formal goodbye, a clean break from the past — a way to affirm that I had, indeed, grown up.

That process — growing up — had been very disappointing. I found out that instead of learning to drive and seeing R-rated movies, it mostly meant coming to terms with the limits of childhood wonder:

No, you cannot be a astronaut when you grow up.

Perhaps The Tigger Movie is not the masterpiece you thought it was when you were 5?

So, I drove back to San Antonio, ready to share my newfound grown-up wisdom. There were more people on the site than ever before, people from all over the world who had come to work with Tim Duncan, who had won himself quite a reputation in construction circles for being a pleasant colleague. There was an Australian named Patty and a Brazilian named Tiago and a Frenchman named Boris, who looked quite out of place wearing a pressed suit and chewing on a croissant. Tony and Manu were still there of course, chatting with a new guy named Danny.

And then there was Kawhi. Of all the people I’d seen work with Tim over the years, Kawhi reminded me the most of him — quiet but brilliant.

But even amidst all these bright new faces, I had come to deliver a somber message to Tim, and deliver it I did.

“Tim,” I said, not sure how to break it to him. “You’re house just isn’t worth trying to improve anymore. Maybe you should start thinking about…moving on,” I said gently.

Mr. Popovich heard me and nodded silently for a while, staring at the blueprint for the new floor. “Too difficult,” he said, finally.

“Too tricky,” said Boris, walking up to us with a Beignet and glass of Pinot Noir in his hands.

“Let’s do it,” said Tim, unwavering.

So all the workers, spurred by Tim’s stubborn conviction, started ramping up their work on the fifth floor.

They built through the day and through the night, humble, steadfast. Tim could not build like he did in his youth. A lesser observer might have even thought that they could’ve have built without him — but I knew the truth. The progress on that fifth story could not have been made without Tim Duncan’s subtle sacrifices, the invaluable arms around his co-workers, the calmly focused attitude that he brought with him everyday. It seemed like my childhood had been brought back.

So, with a reinvigorated a sense of belief, I watched with breath drawn as Tim put finishing touches on that fifth floor. It was then that it all went wrong—in the moment right before elation, when I was at my most vulnerable.

Tim Duncan took a good long fall, and the almost complete fifth floor, due to some technical reason I still cannot comprehend, had completely fallen to pieces.

“Sun stroke,” they muttered in the background. “Too much heat.”

The words all came in a blur: splintered, nonsensical, terrifying. All I could comprehend was the tantalizing closeness of Tim’s triumph. I felt hyper-aware of many things: The thin red line between success and defeat, the cold hard fact that even the best of us sometimes do not cross it.

And in that horrible, no-good, awful moment, I asked myself: Why do we stake our emotions on things external to us? In other words, why do we pour our souls into that which cannot possibly improve the material conditions of our daily lives? Or to put it in simplest form: Why does this hurt so much?

I was not qualified then to answer that question, and I am not qualified to answer it now. But if I had to venture a guess, then I would say that it is because some part of us unavoidably latches itself onto the possibility of impossibility. Some part of us wants to see our restraints stretched, forgotten about, even dismantled. Some part of us — perhaps the child in us — believes without reason and with fervor in the sublime.

Tim Duncan was the perfect man to project that belief onto, both in failure and success: a fighter to the end, a very tall representative for those who felt very small.

And true to to his fighting nature, Tim got up after his sunstroke, and limped over to where Mr. Popovich stood. Mr. Popovich looked at him, and dusted him off. There was a gleam in both of their eyes as they looked at each other. They stood up straighter. It almost looked as they were communicating, but no words came out of their wryly set mouths. Suddenly, mean old man Gregg didn’t seem so mean anymore.

He left the site as darkness came, with 4 short words to Tim:

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When tomorrow came, I half-expected Tim not to show up, but show up he did. Then — miraculously considering the events of the past day — Tim and his team got to work.

Only, this work was not normal, everyday work you could witness on any old construction site. In all my years observing construction work, I have never seen such a team effort. The word “team”, I think, sells it short. It wasn’t a bunch of individuals working together as it was a human body, different parts being extensions of the same spirit: Kawhi the hands, Tony the legs, Tim the ever-beating heart.

And as the day wore on, they completed, with fluidity and ease, the fifth floor of the house.

It had been 15 years since the first floor of the house was built, and I had a recurring thought:

“This is Tim’s house. Tim is 7 feet tall and he built this house and it’s the best house in the world!”

Tim celebrated a little after that beautiful moment, admiring his handiwork. Then, he went back to work, just like normal.

After a long while, he spoke again:

“I think I’ll call it a day,” he said, looking away from his house for the first time and up at the windswept stars.

Everyone gaped at him. The day had always been coming, but now that it had finally come, the air had become quite heavy.

“No, Tim! You can’t leave! Another year, c’mon!”

The words came out of my mouth reflexively, desperately.

Tim looked at me. “Why? I am well past the statistical peak age of the average construction worker. Working further would only further impair my ability to perform, and worse, increase my chances of harming my co-workers aggregate performance. Here, take a look at these graphs; It’s all very well explained.”

I don’t know what it was about that moment, perhaps the accumulation of so much change — going to college, Tim leaving, my childhood finally slipping away for good— but suddenly I felt very small again.

“Because I’m worried! I’m worried that this is it — I’m worried that all the other new houses will be bigger and shinier than ever and everyone will forget us and what you did! I’m worried that this will all fall down and not matter! Please don’t leave Mr. Duncan…Please stay…”

My voice trailed off as tears started to flow down my face. I turned away, embarrassed.

Tim Duncan stared at me, stared up at the house, and stared at me again. He looked stoic as usual but freer now — unburdened, with the air of an old wizard.

“But you won’t forget, will you?” he said.

“I could never forget,” I said, grinning through my tears. And it was true — the memories swirled around me permanently, memories of building and rebuilding, success and heartbreak melding into one long nostalgic ache that I never want to let go of and never will.

I looked around at the site. So much had changed since I first stumbled upon it as a child. Then, there was a pile of dust, but now there was a real structure here, something that was easy to take for granted but a real miracle when you thought about it, the way a bunch of loose materials come together to create something so sturdy and livable.

Even with all the change, there was a constant spirit to this place that Tim created. Lots of people said the spirit was based on succeeding so much, but I never believed them. Even at his lowest point, when he fell into the abyss from that roof and “success” was the furthest thing from his mind, it was still there: A humble resilience that emanated from his heart and soul.

Somehow, Tim Duncan transcended the number of floors on his house. He was something else — a quiet but constant, noble sense of effort — that kept things humming.

“Do you know why the house didn’t fall down completely that day?” he asked. “The day I fell? The analysts were all puzzled, you know. They all thought whatever it was that went wrong should have brought the whole place down. Not just the fifth floor.”

I knew the answer, but I nodded no anyway, just to hear him say it. “Why, Tim? Why didn’t the house fall down?”

“It’s like I told you on the first day we met. It’s because we have a good solid foundation.”

And with that he wandered off into the sunset, humming a tune as he went.

Tim’s house is still there, even now. If you happen to pass by it, and get real curious, you can ask “Who built this house?” to the internet or the television or some unknowing friend. They will give you all sorts of different wrong answers on who built that nice-looking house on East Houston Street. They will give you names of companies like AT&T and Lake Flato Architects and Hunt Construction Group.

But if you ask around in San Antonio or you ask me, we will all tell you the real truth:

That is the house that Tim Duncan built. And it has a damn good foundation.