Sentimental Sunday The Hero Loved Stone

The Hero had a love for anything that had to do with stones.  If we were camping he would pick up a stone as we walked along naming what kind of stone it was.  Should we be walking down a sidewalk in town, he would stop to look at a building, or a deck, or a fountain, and start discussing what kind of stone it was or about the quality of the workmanship.  We all laughed that it has stuck with us over the years and will still find ourselves thinking about a stone we see.
He loved that area of the construction trade.  Part of his job with his father's supply company was to work with the quarries and find the stones or mixture of stones for customers that had bid jobs or architects that needed specific colors, stone, or blends.

The most notable was the job of M D Anderson when they decided to build a second annex building.  The architects wanted to keep the same color as the cut marble on the first building but use a new technique that had crushed marble applied to the panels instead of cut marble slabs. The task of finding the correct blend of crushed marble fell to the Hero.  He ended up visiting 6 quarries all over the United States and mixing the different colors of marble to get the blend that matched the marble on the original building.
Later he also assisted in overseeing the seamless flooring put in the bathrooms in the new building.
It was ironic that his last hospital stay was in this annex.  The same flooring was in place, about 20+ years later.  He was loved telling the employees there the work that went into creating the beautiful building they were working in. He never lost his love for the beauty of natural stone.