I’ve been thinking of someone I never met ever since August or so when we started the remodeling project.
I’d give a lot to know something about the person who installed the tile hearth in our house in 1911 or 1912. (We can’t seem to nail an exact date for the house, but it wasn’t in city records in 1910, and it was in 1912.) I like to think he had an eye for beauty and loved clinking the tiles into their symmetrical formation and cementing them fast, hoping they would be enjoyed for years to come. Maybe it’s better I don’t know anything about him, since my imagination is probably better than reality. But I like to think he appreciated the beauty and precision of color and shine, or he wouldn’t have had that job.
If he was very young in 1911, he might possibly have lived to the 1980s when our neighborhood and house began to deteriorate. I’m assuming that’s the time frame when someone brushed vomit colored brown paint over everything, including the iridescent tile. I know paint can offset breakage and decay, but to paint the glorious blues and golds and maroons of the old hearth is just a little much. All that to say, in theory, the man who spent time carefully placing the tiles in 1911 could have lived to see them disappear behind the paint in 1980.
But he couldn’t have lived, not even in theory, to see them restored in 2025 at that bottom of our new historic bookcase. He didn’t live to see James, a first rate remodeler with 50 years of experience, laughing at me when I said maybe we should try to restore the crumbling old hearth. He didn’t live to see Matthias, James’s son and my second cousin, helping me get a picture of their imprint in the old cement so I could recreate the pattern. He didn’t see me ignorantly dabbing paint stripper onto them and getting it all over the boards on the porch. And he didn’t live to see the colors blaze back to their former iridescent glory when I rubbed on the tiles with an old toothbrush.
Even James was impressed, I think.
I picked out as many unbroken tiles as I could find and arranged them roughly in the formation they had once been laid in, to the best of my ability. Later, flooring man #2 put them back on the new floor Matthias laid.
Let’s say the original tile man saw the destruction of the gorgeous hearth–and the neighborhood, for that matter–and despaired that his years of work had been in vain. Why spend the effort, only to have things ruined and wasted and disrespected by people who don’t get it? Because I’ll admit I feel that way about broken things sometimes. What’s the point of trying?
But if, in theory, he went to the grave a cynic because of the ruined hearth on Brady Street, then he became a cynic too soon. He would never live to see the recovery of the hearth. But it was recovered all the same, and means so much more because of the silent decades under the oppressive brown. I appreciate his effort today, and so will our guests, even though he is long gone.
He couldn’t see the whole picture, because he was limited as a human, bound by time. And that’s why I’ve been thinking of him. Because there’s no way for any of us, who happen to still be alive, to see the whole picture either.
Ultimately, I think whatever work is done to the glory of God does matter, whether or not it disappears for decades.
Historic shelf and hearth almost done – needing a little trim yet