Farewell, Borders – lights out

When our local Borders opened in a cookie-cutter mall it was so mega-sized I was breathless upon entering. Like something out of an Isaac Asimov sci-fi story, I had the odd sensation I was entering a human brain. I was awed by the human knowledge these books represented. From my perch on the escalator that carried me from first floor to second, I looked over what appeared to be a football field of books. Over the years I created my own virtual office on a lopsided coffee table. My two sons squealed with delight – I groaned with exhaustion – at midnight release parties for the latest J.K. Rawlings' book, which went on interminably year after year.

After 9/11 there were book discussions to discuss Islam. When my sons befriended a boy so poor he had no kitchen table in his home, the three bonded over Borders' weekly chess matches. After a long day we'd indulge in audiophile heaven – clamping on headsets spread throughout the CD department and sampling everything from Rachmaninoff to Indian Bollywood scores. We'd laugh ourselves red in the face reading Dave Barry out loud. High school news got shared over a coffee. In one of Borders' many remarkable Special Events, I met Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Of course she was selling her memoir.

I vowed not to return to Borders in its closing days. Why visit a corpse? Certainly there would be vulture-like discount-hunters picking over a cadaver like the undertakers in Dickens' story plowing through Scrooge's pockets. But eventually I did return. I found there a crowd of worshipful readers sampling and collecting books as if they were artifacts of a vanishing age. My husband morbidly snapped iPhone photos of the space where football fields of books had once spread. I did not know he then forwarded them to our sons.

The next day I received a text message. It read: "So many happy coffees after busy school days." It came from my son. What was he writing about? "Please translate," I responded. "I am sad Borders is closing," my son texted back.

I emailed the pictures to friends. "A sad sight, very sad indeed," wrote one Japanese friend. We had become lifelong friends over tea at Borders. "All our sunny memories at Borders," replied a teacher. "Your smile was assuring in the emptiness of the space." A professor not prone to emotionalism wrote, "I was sad as well." He added warily, "A nation that does not read can never really grow."

For all its pitfalls, Borders allowed us to grow.

Journalist Priscilla Hart lives – and reads – in Annapolis, Md.

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