SERENDIPITY - EVERYONE READS NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - BUT NOT LIKE THIS

Keep reading - this is really a real estate story, as well as another of my serendipities, one of two involving the National Geographic Magazine.

Remembering a lifetime of National Geographic Magazines with my brother yesterday, I remembered a couple of serendipities that involved this magazine. (I also remember the summer when mother kept me out of trouble by encouraging Pat Cooper and me to index a huge stash of them in our garage in Nacogdoches.)

Peter and Nancy were newly-weds and the budget was tiny. The house could be tiny too, provided it was close to town. They both wanted to be able to walk to restaurants and to be in a place their friends could find easily.

Her job was a fascinating one to me. I had shelves of National Geographics going back many years and had always thought that working for National Geographic would be about the most exciting job in the world. Her job was helping to edit National Geographic books for children.

The house was almost in the shadow of an apartment building two doors away. It was a cute little bungalow with a wide front porch and charm. Not much space, but lots of charm. Also charming was the fact that the owners had great taste in books - several that Nancy had actually worked on. We wondered about the children – the house was not really big enough for a young family.

We talked about the pros and cons, as I always do. It was tiny. But they were only two for now. It needed work. But they loved to work together. It was affordable. They could walk to everything. I pointed out that a house that close to downtown might someday be next door to a parking lot; it might even be the site of a parking lot. One never knows. “Someday you might bring your grandchildren to Silver Spring to look up the old homestead and have to say, ‘When we lived here, there was another house next door, not that parking lot.” True, they admitted; but they were optimists. “Someday we might show our children a big new building and say, “Our little house used to be right there - we were happy there, then we sold it for a good price so they could build that building.”

Whatever might happen in the future, for the next few years, they’d be at the edge of the commercial area - all I could do was to give them as much information as possible. They wanted the house.

Everything went very smoothly. On settlement day, we went to the attorney’s office. In the waiting room, she saw a familiar face. “What are you doing here!” The books she had been so pleased to see were in that house because it belonged to the boss who worked on them with her.

The extra glass doorknobs from my house happened to match theirs, so our housewarming gift was old door hardware.

The other National Geographic serendipity is from 1994, involving an explorer who was on the first American team to get to the top of Mt Everest.