Reporting just about any story has a way of filling me up in a very satisfying way. I start off like a sponge—more or less dry—then I begin soaking up material, more alive in a sense. Mind you, I don't think of myself as terribly empty or unimaginative when I'm alone and left to my own devices. But still, I love filling up with new lives and stories. I find myself engaged with multiple new characters, sometimes briefly joining their world, understanding their concerns, absorbing their points of view, even gossiping with them about people or things I never knew anything about before. I take in a fresh landscape and stories that simply didn't exist for me before working on the article. Oddly enough, that always seems to take me by surprise.

This story was unusual. I began my reporting before the terrorist attacks on September 11, when much of Tysons Corner's pulse was at the cutting edge of the economy. But that economy has since been affected not just by the general economic downturn but also by that terrible day, and some important things have changed.
This is still a prosperous community, and one that—for a variety of reasons—is withstanding much of the economic malaise that has afflicted the rest of the country in the past year or so. When I went there the first time, people had an exuberant, sky's-the-limit- optimism. They were wallowing in material excess and, perhaps, some excess of self-esteem. By the time I went back, the mood was not exactly down, but it was definitely more sober. It's less than pleasant to see people who have been jarred and disoriented.

I was supposed to talk to the manager of James, the très upscale men's store, but he was clearly quite involved with helping a couple and their son. It looked like serious business so, naturally, I offered to come back in a couple of hours. When I returned, I was astonished to find that he was still busy with the same family. So I gave up on collaring him for any meaningful interview that day.
The following day I learned that he had stayed with this little family for some hours, even after I left the second time. It turned out that they spent $25,000 in the store in the course of one afternoon. Being a starving writer, I was pretty bowled over by that figure. $25,000! Sure sounded like a good commission to me. And indeed the manager told me that $25,000 was about the most anybody paid these days in a single trip to his store. But he told me that last year he'd had more than one sale of up to $100,000. Single customer, single visit.