From Screen Saver (A Book I Wrote Back Aways):
The house that I had built in Jefferson City was actually closer to Ashland.
All of the activity related to the real estate sales community of Jefferson City had almost immediately taken on the characteristics of a minor, and mercifully brief, soap opera.
I had gotten the inevitable referral from someone to employ another someone to help me in my search.
I had worked with that someone and had been taken to see a large number of places that weren’t really what I was looking for but which I was assured by that agent who was helping me were the best and only choices I had from which to make my choice.
Having just left the job of being a sales school instructor for IBM, I could recognize a forced alternative when offered.
I had been in the process of trying to get that agent to admit that there were probably other options when I received a phone call from another agent who said something about hearing that I was new in town and that I was probably getting the real estate equivalent of the bums rush, and that she, as an agent with no axes to grind would show me everything in town that sounded like what I wanted and could afford.
On the evening of the second day of looking at properties with the second agent I was back in my room at the Holiday Inn and was just unbuttoning my shirt in preparation for a change from business attire to civilian attire when the phone rang.
“Noel, this is Agent One” a stern-timbred female voice announced.
I had visions of being back in grade school and having just been caught in some nefarious act by an outraged nun.
“Just what do you think you are doing?” she continued in the same tone of voice.
“I thought I was unbuttoning my shirt” I responded.
Ignoring my amazing cleverness she launched into a description of my various acts of real estate infidelity and told me that “we just don’t do things like that in Jefferson City”.
“I hadn’t been made aware that we were betrothed” I said. “And I didn’t call agent two; she called me. If your self-perceived right of exclusivity has been violated by anyone, it has been violated by a member of your own sorority.”
At that point she hung up on me.
Which was good; I didn’t want to see her again anyway.
What was bad was that I didn’t want to see agent two again either, and I had the suspicion that the small town real estate grapevine would have cast me into the outer darkness by the following dawn.
And the Holiday Inn had been beginning to lose the luster that it had seemed to have had in my first few days there.
One can live in a round building without going insane for only limited numbers of days, I was discovering.
I had heard at the office from someone that there was a really nice lake just north of town where people were known to buy or build houses.
I had put that thought aside initially in spite of the fact that Mysti and I had enjoyed immensely living on Lake Oswego in Portland.
I couldn’t
imagine a lake in the mid west, other than perhaps, Lake of the Ozarks, being worth the trouble of considering as a place of residence.
But since what I had seen as being on offer in town hadn’t been anything that I had wanted and since I had probably alienated myself from the tightly knit Jefferson City real estate CABAL I had begun to give the idea serious consideration.
It turned out that there was an agent there who lived on the lake.
I called her and made an appointment.
The lake, I learned had been built by one of the other residents and a couple of his relatives, and when the water behind the earthen dam had filled brimful up to its prior to filling inexactly understood shoreline, the lake had been quite a bit bigger than had been planned.
So, being the new owner of some very attractive lakefront real estate – the lake had filled a small valley that was bordered on all sides by hillsides covered with hardwood timber and mid-western cedars, and as such was a beautiful place – that other resident and lake builder – his name was Ken – had become a builder-developer of lakefront property.
He had, by the time that I had been introduced to him built several houses where he had lived himself until someone had come along who had wanted to buy them.
At the point agent three had introduced me to him, Ken was trying to sell the house that he was living in which was either house three or house four for him.
Agent three showed me that house.
I met Ken.
I liked a lot of the characteristics of the house, but I really didn’t like the location.
Of all the houses on the lake it was the farthest away from the shore – it was behind the dam – and was more like a house in a field than a house on a beautiful lake.
“No problem” said Ken.
“How so?” said I.
“I’ve got a lot for sale over yonder” said Ken gesturing in the general direction of a stand of hardwoods across the lake from the dam.
That was in late April and the weather had been sunny and beautiful for days, so within the hour, I was – in full business suited and wing tipped battle attire – walking the property line of an absolutely beautiful ten-acre piece of Missouri hardwood forest that was fronted by 550 feet of lakeshore.
Within days Ken and I had agreed on a set of plans for the house and within the week I had gotten a construction loan and had become the owner of a house under construction on Lake Champetra.
Since I wasn’t going to be able to move in until somewhere toward year’s end, I rented a two-bedroom apartment on Southwest Boulevard in Jefferson City.
The apartment quickly developed its personality: there was the young woman who lived in the apartment above me who woke me every few weeks with the vigorous creaking of her bed springs; there were my various slalom water skis leaned up against the boxes of unpacked stuff that I had had delivered to the apartment for no apparent reason; there was a Mode O’ Day store over the hill below me that specialized – if one were to draw conclusions from its window displays – in women’s underwear starting at size fifty.
