“DC Reentry”

The Accidental Realtor by Victoria Hall

My life’s trajectory has always taken me to places I never planned to go or go back to. Born without a “decade at a glance” planner when people would ask “what are your plans?” I would often respond with an old Elenore Roosevelt quote; “The past is history, the future a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.”

And so, like Forest Gump played by iconic actor, Tom Hanks in the 1995 film, I have often found myself at the epicenter of some wildly historic and unpresented events however, only tangentially involved and effected. And often thought that I had no idea what I was doing in this particular city, at this particular time. Or why the universe had brought me to this moment. This was how it was and had always been from my hometown of Baltimore (1960s) to Atlanta (1990s) and now in the new millennium in Washington, DC.

My friends in Atlanta, Georgia where I had spent the past fifteen years said, I had always talked about moving back to Washington, DC. Now, I had never actually lived within the District of Columbia city limits however, I had completed a master’s degree in education and behavioral sciences from George Washington University and in fact accumulated nine credits toward my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology when I decided to abruptly end that academic chapter of my life.

The phone call I made to the head of that department was met with disappointment and dismay, when I announced from Pompano Beach, Florida – where I was vacationing – that I was in fact going to extend that vacation and take the next semester off.

Now mind you GWU was paying for my degree and had given me a monthly stipend along with a teaching assistantship, but at age 28 I had gone through a divorce from my first husband and been told by my friends that I would never make any money in academics.

His words today still weigh heavy on my psyche, “You will never return.” Well, he was right. I also had been surrounded by a family that was rife with mental illness and decided that I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my life trying to help a lot of mentally ill people get better. And that I lacked the cognitive dissonance that would separate my world and mental health from theirs.

And so it was on that fateful day in September of 2001, as I sat in my DC real estate licensing class, held at The Fannie Mae Foundation on Wisconsin Avenue in north west DC, when someone other than our instructor entered the room and announced, ““The Twin Towers in New York have been hit by two planes, and there is rumor that DC is also a target, please pack up your belongings and leave the building and go home to your loved ones immediately, it appears the United States is under attack.”

The problem was, well there were many, first I had just moved back to DC and had along the way forgotten to have children and or remarry again so I didn’t have any “loved ones” to go home to. So, I packed up my belongings as instructed and left the building.

Outside the high blue sky and bright sunlight belied the ominous announcement. Traffic moved slowly and in only one direction and that was north as people exited the city. Everyone walking on the sidewalk paraded and shuffled along like zombies, in a silent, steady pace and I thought, “Where do you go when the world is ending?”

I walked to my SUV, numb as a call came thru breaking, what I now believe was my shocked reaction to it all, “Where are you? Come be with us, you shouldn’t be alone.” Again, another thought came and that was, “I’ve been alone my entire life, why should now be any different?”

But I had been given the gift of many extraordinary friends. These two, Jonathan and Catherine lived down in an apartment on Dupont Circle, a mile from Cleveland Park in Northwest DC, where I was living, and so I replied, “Yes, thank you for thinking about me, I will come.”

So first, I drove one neighborhood over toward my apartment building at the Kennedy Warren on Connecticut Avenue, as I passed by the small outdoor shopping center, I pulled over and parked in front of the grocery store and went in. I walked through the isles with the silent customers, all of us seeming in the same frame of mind of abject shock as I bought bread, cheese, and canned tomato soup thinking, “A grilled cheese sandwich would be good comfort food right now.”

As I parked and walked into the building the doorman stood out front as usual, the front desk person greeted me as if nothing abnormal was going on. It was all so surreal. As I entered my apartment I immediately put down my groceries and turned on the television. As I unpacked my bags, I listened and watched as the news repeatedly played the attacks on the Twin Towers with flashings of warnings and then suddenly the announcement that the Pentagon had also been hit.

I sat down on my sofa and did what anyone would do when their city was under attack, and the world as I knew it was coming to an end, I fell fast asleep. Waking up an hour later my phone buzzing with alarms from my friends, “Where are you, we’ve been so worried about you!” I told them what happened. “I’m on my way down now.” The rest of the day and evening 3 remains a blur but was one spent with dear friends, which if the world as we knew was in fact ending, is where I wanted to be.

I was able to receive an email from another couple, my married friends, Randy, and Laura in New York. We had all met in Atlanta a few years before and I had introduced them. They had taken a loft apartment overlooking the Hudson the year before when I decided to move back to DC and take an apartment at the Kennedy Warren.

That morning Randy was working at his office in the financial district. Laura stood in a towel as she had just showered and as she looked out their floor to ceiling windows and saw the smoke billowing from the World Trade Towers. “Oh my God, what is happening!?” she wrote in an email, the only way we able to message each other. Unable to receive or make cell phone calls, that day I emailed her back. “I love you both and pray that Randy is okay.”

A few hours later another message came through, “Randy is home, we are both safe and okay, and love you very much.” The timing of both attacks was so bizarre as we had all chosen to leave Atlanta at the same time. Me renting out my loft at the Hastings Seed Factory down from CNN Center that I’d only lived in for six months deciding it was too loud, too factory-like and therefore too depressing and uninhabitable.

And Randy and Laura had rented out their antebellum house in downtown Decatur, Georgia fulfilling her long held wish to live in New York City for a few years. Now here we all were living in two of the three cities that had been attacked on “9-11”. The rest as they say is history.

PART 2

My exciting reentry back into DC didn’t end with the mere attack on 9/11. Oh no. As I was wrapping my final real estate licensing classes a year later in 2002 at an outdoor shopping center classroom, the news of the day was that now a man in a white van had shot and killed a woman in a parking lot of one of these same shopping malls. As if this wasn’t terrifying enough he had then gone “postal” and had been sited at several other parking lots in Northern Virginia, shooting people at random.

Both incidents had me questioning God and the Universe about why I had moved back to an area of the world that had seemingly lost its mind. How unintentionally and without a big plan I had moved to the part of the country that was under attack by other countries and its very own individual citizens.

It took a few months for them to apprehend the insane man who became known as “The White Van Murderer” but to this day when I see a white windowless van, I pause.

A few months later after completing and passing my real estate licensing classes in the Fall of 2002, all the while thinking I will continue to do some communications and contract work, that had been my sole source of income for my first two years back to DC, for a man named Steve Smith and his company Creative Options, the “Tech-Wreck” happens or the collapse of the tech giants stock market! Suddenly and without warning, I am left with no contracts, no work and so had to resort to real estate as my main sustenance and source of income.

I’d interview with the son of the owner of the largest real estate company in the five- state area of DC, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania and hang my first license at his Long and Foster, Old Town Alexandria, VA office. It reminded me of the neighborhood of the house I had rented on Federal Hill in Baltimore, the year before and I thought I will sell my Loft in Atlanta and buy a condo, in this very Dickensian place on the water.

And so, I would consequentially be forced to leave my formerly lucrative communications consulting jobs and ostensibly transform myself as I had a few times prior, from teacher, feature writer, fundraiser-publicist and most recently, communications and marketing consultant now, I would morph into a licensed realtor.

After shopping the Old Town Alexandria, Virginia market for my own home and trying to help clients sell and buy real estate there for a year I realized that living in North West DC at the Kennedy Warren and working out of a Virginia office which was not working. I had been told that most real estate agents’ sphere of influence was within a five-mile radius of their homes, and I was working at an office 10 miles away.

So, I decided to get my DC real estate license in addition to my VA license and affiliate with an office in the heart of another historic area on the Potomac, Georgetown where John and Jackie Kennedy bought their first DC home at 3307 N. ST. NW and lived from 1957-1961. The office was just a few miles from my apartment at the Kennedy Warren, so within a good marketing radius of my residence.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my entire reentry back to DC was steeped in a rich broth of history. After moving into the Kennedy Warren, I learned that it was one of the “Ten Best Addresses” in DC. And its nickname was the KW or “kept woman”. Rumor had it that several senators and congressmen kept apartments for their, at the time, “secretaries”. Not the 5 least notable of which was Lyndon B. Johnson. There was also a ballroom downstairs where many inaugural balls had been held, including former president Bill Clinton.

It is said that it takes three events to jettison you into your next realm of existence. My trinity of DC events took place my first two years back and were explosively marked in 2001 with “9-11”, then the beginning of the longest war in history in 2002 and the consequential “Tech-Wreck”.

But I was not only a survivor of a very severe and traumatic childhood, and therefore like the metal “Milwaukee back brace” I was sentenced to wear for Scoliosis from ages 13 to 16, or my curvature of the spine, I had in essence been born and equipped with a mental and emotional suit of armor.

That armor had served me well as I was and had gone from survivor to thriver. I had often thought that this combined with my good Irish-Italian ancestry had also added to my strength and made me even stronger. “From the hottest of fires comes the most finely tempered steal,” was often my battle cry.

And as Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going!” So, as I entered the doors of my new posh Georgetown real estate office for the first time and was greeted by the cheerful, bright, broad smiled receptionist, I thought my feet were clearly and firmly planted and in the door of my new life in our Nation’s Capital and I was home again.