A Barnes and Noble Cause

I never had the privilege of growing up surrounded by extended family, an expansive group of family friends, or even neighbors with whom I spent countless hours biking around town with. It was always just me, my sister, and my parents. 

And so, I grew up with the weirdest traditions known to mankind. It was an event every year to speed off to Walmart and purchase new planners and binders for the upcoming school year. We never had gravy on Thanksgiving Day, but we watched Confessions of a Shopaholic on DVR while eating hasbrown sandwiches in our pajamas until we could recite the entire screenplay from memory. In the week between Christmas and New Year's each year, my sister and I race to finish all seven Harry Potter novels, a competition we began to assuage the guilt we felt for making our mother buy three boxed sets of the same series. 

And perhaps most importantly -- we had our Barnes and Noble Days. Every snow day, end of a marking period day off, spring break, midwinter break, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and everything in between, my mother would take a day off work and take my sister and I to Barnes and Noble's, where we'd spend the next several hours reading on the floor next to the bookshelves. For lunch, we'd rush to finish our broccoli cheddar soups (with a French baguette) from Panera, then rush back to read for the rest of the day. As the store was closing, we got brownies from Starbucks and bought whichever book we were in the middle of reading. I honestly don't even think I liked reading. I just wanted to be part of the fun so badly, I conditioned myself to sit there and read.

All this to say, Barnes and Noble closes down on February 14th, 2023 -- so much for it being a day of love. When I found this out, I filled my basket to the brim with books I always thought I would have forever to read, but now only have two weeks. I texted a friend and we desperately thought about starting a GoFundMe to save them (as though Barnes and Noble is some small, local business we need to worry about "saving", and not a large, franchised chain). I went back two days later, bought more books, found the dumb paper tree in the Kids' Section I used to lean against, and wondered how many books I'd have to buy to save this location, only to realize that some things are out of our control. 

Aforementioned dumb paper trees

Time, for example. Global pandemics, as I learned two years ago. What other people do, which I learned a few weeks ago. And apparently, your childhood bookstore closing, too. It's not only the loss of a tradition I was hoping to carry onwards with my kids, but also a reminder that nothing lasts. In twenty years when there's another building in this one's place, nobody will remember that it was once a bookstore that a little girl loved. Maybe that little girl herself would have forgotten, too. My mother put it best (as she usually does) -- "I don't have memories of us in Bali or Switzerland, but I certainly have vivid images of my two daughters refusing to talk to each other but reading the same book. But such is capitalism: things die."

Yeah. And I think a part of myself died with it, too. 

But, as my friends were quick to remind me, literally nobody cares about this but me. So, here's to the end of an era. Go buy yourself some books while they're 40% off.