Monkey and I took a field trip today to see an old friend in her last days.
This friend had been a weekly part of my life for the past nine years, since I moved back home to Chicago from the cornfields of Urbana-Champaign.
Each week, upon walking through the doors, the smell of new books and fresh coffee greeted me.
Borders was more than a bookstore to me, but a place I could escape from the trials of teaching and motherhood to write, think, drink coffee, and read.
I will even miss the grizzly employee who would yell at me for sitting on the floor in the aisles, muttering something about a fire hazard.
Just as there are food deserts in the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, I now live in a bookstore desert, the closets ones being in the suburbs a good fifteen minutes away. Or the used ones down in Wicker Park with their snobby hipster employees.
It saddens me that my sons will no longer have a bookstore in our neighborhood, only libraries with cranky old workers shushing them.
That the tidal wave of Kindles and Nooks and e-books are slowly killing paperbacks and hardcovers. A bookstore is more to me than a place that sells books. It’s a free university, with everything perfectly crisp and categorized. It was my perfect escape.
The death of Borders Books is a knife in the heart of every community.
I own over 5,000 books. Hidden in many of those are old love notes and photographs and notes written in the margins by a younger version of me. You can’t dog-ear a Kindle, can you? You can’t hide a dollar bill in one. You can’t write reread the notes you wrote in the margins of The Bell Jar or Infinite Jest from when you were twenty years old.
The one e-book I recently purchased left me feeling like I cheated on my first love.
Books are more than words. They represent a time, a place in our lives. A bedtime story. A cookbook with sauce splattered on the pages.
In a digital overloaded world, I refuse to buy an e-reader. {I ordered my lone e-book through my iphone}. I blog for hours each day. I watch Elmo. I’m on my iphone constantly.
The last thing I want to do right before bed is stare at a screen.
Color me crazy, but snuggling up with my children to read off a screen doesn’t have the same romance of dog-eared board books with peanut butter smudges and teethmarks.
Books are a way to unplug. I hope you will join me in decreasing your screen time, and supporting paper books.
Now, off to turn on my reading lamp and curl up with a David Sedaris book. I need a good laugh after attending my best friend’s funeral today.
Say it ain’t so, Borders Books.
This is a beautiful tribute to books. I, too, cry when I see a bookstore going out of business because it is like losing a good friend.
And thank you for admitting how many books you own. Very few people have a library like mine and it’s always nice to meet another bibliophile.
I don’t think I’ve ever left a comment, but must say I wholeheartedly agree with you about books versus e-books. Our Borders is staying open, thank God…I have a gift card I must spend!!!