Ode to my Favorite Bookstore
When Borders was going out of business, I bought a lot of books. There was a Borders a few doors down from my work at the time. I’d wander the store at least once a week when I found out that I wouldn’t be able to anymore soon. Borders was a huge part of my childhood. My heart hurt when I knew I’d have to say goodbye.
My family loved books. I think I did too when I was little, even though I wasn’t always a big reader. We were at Borders all the time because my mom was always getting another couple books for school. And every year for our birthdays, my dad would take my sister and I there to pick out our birthday books. We could spent $2 for every year we were old.
My sister would fill her arms with books and bring her stack to one of the chairs. Then she’d need at least an hour to meticulously choose her birthday books, narrowing her pile a little at a time. For several years I would ask if I could use the money on CDs, and the answer was always no. That didn’t matter though, I would always find enough books I wanted to read.
When we made our selections, we’d bring them to my dad. He would always go a little over his birthday budgets for us if we were distraught about choosing. And my mom might add one of our books to her pile. She almost always needed to for my sister. What I remember most clearly though is that we would always go as a family.
After I moved away from home for college, I could still go to Borders. I couldn’t go to our family Borders, but I could go to a Borders. I’d browse the aisles whenever I was homesick for my family. I would move through the bookshelves, feeling their bindings with my fingers as I went. I would almost always leave with at least one book.
My 19th birthday was the first time I remember it not being family trip. My sister wasn’t there when I was picking out my $38 of birthday books. It was the first time she wasn’t in another aisle, carefully choosing her $42 of books. She would never be there with us again. It was the year everything changed. And my dad never got the chance to buy her birthday books again.
For a while after that, it was hard to go to Borders. It hurt too much to walk up and down the aisles. But after some time, I found comfort there again. I could go to Borders and feel a concrete connection to my childhood; a connection to a world with my big sister still in it. After a few minutes in a Borders, I would feel close to my sister among all the printed pages. So I would go there, whenever I needed that feeling.
When Borders announced that they were going out of business, neither my parents or I were ready for it. We’d talk about it often when I called them. I remember them wandering the aisles as much as they could too before we all had to say goodbye. And every time I went, I bought a few books. Especially when they were 50% off, then 60%.
On my final trip, the books I bought that day were 90% off. There weren’t many left on the shelves, but I bought anything that sounded remotely interesting to me. I wanted to support Borders until the very end, to say thank you for being there for my family for all the years. In those last few months, I think I brought enough books home to open my own library.
They were all books I thought I might want to read one day, and most of them were. It was only a handful of books that went to donation still unopened when I finally decided to empty a few bookshelves. After moving a couple times in a couple years, I realized I didn’t want to keep carrying around books I didn’t plan on reading again, or ever. The extra heavy boxes felt like a metaphor for something, and it felt like time to let go.
These days I only keep books I plan on reading. Books to read for the first time or again one day. If a book isn’t genuinely on my reading list I find it a new home, usually in a little library in the city. My bookshelf is much smaller these days, filled only with books I know I’ll read soon.
On my bookshelf, there are still a handful of books left to read from all those trips to Borders. They still have their Borders receipts tucked in their pages and their barcodes still on their backs. I don’t know what it’s going to feel like to peel that last sticker when I finish the last book bought at Borders. But I know it will happen one day soon.
Maybe it will feel like saying goodbye to Borders all over again. But maybe it will just be one of those moments you anticipate for a long time that ends up feeling like nothing at all.
