Serendipity Silver Spring Style

Just back from a late afternoon walk up Georgia Avenue. Georgia Avenue is one of DC and suburban Maryland's main arteries. While out of towners may know Massachusetts Avenue ("Embassy Row") or Connecticut or Wisconsin Avenues (which run down to the fashionable enclaves in Northwest DC and Georgetown), Georgia Avenue is for the locals. The stretch where it crosses the DC line into Silver Spring, Maryland is a rich mix of old and new: bodegas, lunch-counters, and carry-outs; ethnic restaurants (Tex-Mex, Salvadoran, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Ehtiopian); pawn shops; a corsette store (really); the new location for Pyramid Atlantic; an armed forces recruiting center; laundromats and seamstresses. All of this flows north to where Georgia Avenue interstects with US Route 29, and the triangle thus formed is the epicenter of Silver Spring's revitalization, capped off by the AFI and the new headquarters building for the Discovery Channel.

I'm endlessly fascinated by this neighborhood, and seem to discover new things on every walk. There is, for example, the "Mayor's Promenade," a brick arcade dedicated to the memory of Norman Lane, the homeless unofficial "mayor" of Silver Spring--his bronze bust sits on a pedastal at the head of the alleyway. Also tucked away on a sidestreet is Silver Spring Books (used books, that is).

Today some instinct took hold of me and sent me there the moment I set foot on the Avenue, and sure enough, just inside the door, I caught sight of Right as Rain and Hell to Pay, the first two books from local writer George Pelecanos's most recent trilogy. Pelecanos, who is a University of Maryland graduate, writes hard-boiled prose about DC and its environs, books set in those proverbial (but real) places the tourists never see. The books' pages are peppered with real street names, real businesses, all sorts of local references. Just across Georgia Avenue is the Korean lunch counter mentioned on the first page of his first book, A Firing Offense. I've been steadily consuming Pelecanos since moving here two years ago, and so I immediately snatched up these two volumes from the latest trilolgy to kickstart my summer reading. Pelecanos doesn't sit on the shelves for long around here, so I felt pretty fortunate in my find.

But wait. It gets better. The woman who rang me up at the register took a look at what I had in hand and said, "Do you know that we're in there?" What do you mean, I asked. "This store. Silver Spring Books. One of the characters in the trilogy works here."

So how's that for serendipity? We chatted for a few more minutes; she told me that when she went to a signing she recognized Pelecanos from his own visits to the store. This isn't the kind of place that gives out cute customized bookmarks, so I left with a plain Silver Spring Books business card stuck in the pages as a souvenir. Well.