Today, I went into Border's. If you've been living under a rock or are somehow blind to the signs in 490-point font plastered all over the building, it's closing. The entire chain of Borders is going out of business, bankrupt and foreclosed. Borders was once a giant; much like in You've Got Mail, Borders was the Fox Books that stomped all over mom-and-pop bookstores like the Shop Around the Corner. They were once palaces of books, music, and movies, massive stores chocked full of everything ever printed, recorded, and filmed. Bookstores were one of those things everyone thought was recession-proof: even if we didn't have two dimes to rub together, we'd still read, right? Wrong. Borders took a big gamble when they didn't immediately jump on the eReader bandwagon. They were the very last bookstore to cling onto selling CDs when digital downloads are at an all-time high. When the unemployment line was wrapped around the block, Borders seemingly snubbed their nose at this; continuing to sell books at full price. Glossy hardcover tomes sat unsold on the once-proud shelves of Borders as Amazon sold the Kindle for $114 and Barnes and Noble wisely downsized the number of stores they had. And now, finally, the drain has been pulled. Borders has had the final nail slammed into their coffin, just another casualty of the ruthless economic downward spiral our country has been plunged into.
It's part of a bigger picture. Borders going out of business isn't just a byproduct of a bad economy. I've felt the effects of that; losing my job at the restaurant hit a little too close to home for me. I know nothing is a constant today; nothing can truly be counted on as a surefire business opportunity. Stores and restaurants are closing left and right, and occupations that everyone always thought were recession-proof are becoming spare, and everyone's always afraid and nervous that they're going to be next; that they're going to lost their job, or their house, or that gas will shoot up again and they'll be forced to choose between driving and paying bills. It's so odd to be experiencing this. As a child of the nineties, I grew up in a time of relative economic prosperity. No one worried about high gas prices or losing their homes. If you turned on the news, you didn't hear words like "recession" and "unemployment" and "foreclosure". It was just a very different time.
I wonder if this is just all part of growing up? Do places that you couldn't imagine living without go out of business? Do some storefronts become other things? As I was driving down 135 this evening, I tried to think about what used to be what. Acapulco Joe's (now out of business) was Piper's. Walton Dentistry was a clock repair shop. Luca Pizza di Roma was Boston Market. AutoZone was Blockbuster and many things didn't even exist, like all the apartment complexes, the Starbucks, Panda Express, Menards, Home Depot, and Chik-fil-a. It's like whiting out things on a piece of paper and writing in other things, then forgetting what you whited out in the first place. It's hard to imagine the landscape without things like Meijer, but there was once a time when it wasn't there. Will I just grow used to Border's not being there? It seems so hard to imagine.
I wanted to go to Border's because I wanted to go there one last time. But before I even walked in the door, I regretted it. I saw a few people carrying out a bookshelf and loading it into a minivan. It wasn't bad enough that the store was closing, that they had to rip the very foundations of the building up? I opened the door and instinctively looked to the right, where they always had bargain books and other books of interest. During Christmas, they always had trees there. Now, there were badly Xeroxed fliers advertising things for sale like the cash registers and even the damned boiler. It was like all pretense had been abandoned and no one cared anymore. I was surprised that there weren't fliers in the bathroom advertising that the toilets were for sale as well.
I walked around the store, taking it all in. Gone were the racks and racks of magazines, the coffee shop had been dismantled, and the entire contents of the store were clustered in a few shelves in the center of the store. I walked over to where the kids section used to be, and all that was left of it was the outer spaced patterned carpet. There was a ring of dust around the border of the carpet where they had removed the three wide, flat steps that kids could sit on. I just stopped dead in my tracks. It was an empty, blank space. Although it was brightly lit, it was very dim to me. I can't even describe what I was feeling right then. I had so many happy, shining memories of that place, and seeing it like that broke my heart. That's not how I wanted to remember it: broken down and useless, bits of it being carted off like items at a gypsy fair.
I can remember being so happy there, feeling so safe and tucked away from the world, curled up with a book on those steps. The thing I associate most with Borders is Harry Potter. Harry Potter's world was my world, I was safe there. Harry was a friend when I often felt like I had none. If Harry was my friend, then Borders was the playground where we played together. It was like waking up and finding out that playground had been demolished.
I supposed it's all relative. It's all about growing up. When you're young, you can't wait to grow up. But as you get older, you realize those were the best times of your life. This happens to everyone I suppose, but no one tells you just how hard growing up is. No one tells you how sad it is.
I know it seems silly to be sad about a bookstore, but I guess I never thought that such a huge part of my childhood would be gone. But I won't remember Borders that way. In my mind, it's always going to be a bright, happy place full of books and music; a place that made me exceptionally happy for a large chunk of my life. Yes, it's gone the way of floppy discs, videocassettes, and Paramount's affiliation with Kings Island, but all of those things, they still exist in my memories. And that is one thing that a floundering economy and burgeoning adulthood can never take away.
They can place all of the nails in the coffin of my childhood that they want, but I know I'll always be a kid at heart. A kid curled up with a book at Borders, at that. :)
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