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!”