Open House???

It is an Open House...I am down in the basement with a rather attentive couple. They are asking this and they are asking that and I am smelling "Offer to Purchase". They head out the basement door to talk things over and I head back upstairs to attend to the footfalls of other prospective buyers. I hazard not more than a small glance at the old woman sitting serenly at the kitchen table. I do notice, however, that she has a bemused calm about her, as though the years between the gentile time of her day and the harsh electronic nonsense of today have filled her not with a sense of doom, but of blissful longing for a simpler time.

Great, I say to myself. Perchance she will have a good word with one of the other prospects -- the one with whom she came. She'll say something about how the house glistens with the charm of another time and she would happily bequest a chunk of her estate to the purchase of this property.

I spend a few minutes in this agent reverie, and even pass her again. I proffer her a smile and a "How you do?"

"Oh, fine," she says, "A cup of tea would be nice about now."

I smile and joke, "I'll see what I can do, but right now I MUST excuse myself to attend business."

"You're excused," she says.

A few moments pass, and, inexplicably, my Open House is empty. I catch my breath to prepare for another wave -- the final 15 minutes. I sigh and think about how hard we sales folk do work -- sometimes. I begin to expend air into another sigh, when that mournful moan is cut short by one from another set of vocal chords...coming from the KITCHEN.

It is the serene old lady. Sitting there, calm as ever.

"Is there something I can do for you?" I ask her.

"That cup of tea you mentioned would be nice."

"Are you with someone."

"Heaven's no. I walked here all alone. When will Ida be coming home?"

At this I quake, for there is no Ida in this house, and I duly report this to her.

"Oh!", she exclaims, "I must have walked into the wrong house!" and she gets up to head to the door rattling off a litany of apologies the length of which you would expect to hear from a "Perp" who just got nailed stealing the Police Commissioner's car.

I tell her it is all right. I close up the house. I offer her a ride. She accepts. My reveries of a fat commission check are put on hold, and as I drive her down the road, she breaks me from my dismal state when she asks, "Tell me young man, that Green place that is in the center of town, that Starbucks,...do you think they might have a cup of tea in there for me?...And you?