My Friday nights are not exactly the stuff of legend. I usually go to my mother’s house, have dinner with her and my brother, use their washer and drier, then go over to the local Shop Rite for my weekly groceries. Then I bring the food and the laundry home, and if I’m lucky I’ll get another two hours of reading or web surfing until I zonk out. It’s not exactly way up there on the excitement scale.

Last night I decided to change the ritual just a bit by going to the Borders bookstore in Willowbrook. I wanted to pick up a magazine that relates to one of my pedestrian interests, i.e. railroad operations and history. I had read on a hobby site that the latest edition had an article about Paterson, NJ, which is near my home turf. Trains Magazine can be hard to find in most magazine stores, but Borders has a big magazine section and usually stocks it. That’s what I like about Borders – it’s big, and so it has a lot of different books and mags and music covering a wide array of different subjects.

I have a lot of different interests myself, ranging from the sublime (philosophy) to the quotidian (collecting statehood quarters). My mix of enthusiasms is certainly eclectic; it includes theology, monastic spirituality, stamp collecting, hard rock music, vegetarianism, computers and programming, national politics, photography, indoor plants, essential oils, modern physics, the Roman Empire, urban American culture, social justice, the space program, Myers Briggs, economics, jet fighter planes, impressionism, bird watching, microbrewed beer, etc. It’s hard to find someone else with a range of interests even vaguely close to my own. Most people can relate to regarding perhaps two or three of my interests at most. And most small bookstores have materials that cover about the same. Even the local Barnes and Noble stores started to bore me.

But Borders is different. It has books that relate to almost all of my interests; and more than that, it has worthwhile books. It has the deeper books, the academic and specialty books, not just the coffeetable pieces and best sellers (and all those $2 bargain books that you’d need a lobotomy to actually find interesting and credible). Borders is the kind of place I could go into and wander around for an hour or two and feel comfortable. They don’t go quite as far with the comfort angle as some of the B&N;’s; you don’t have lounge chairs and couches mixed in amidst the book stacks, inviting you to sit and browse (a nice touch, admittedly). But there’s still something about the “twisty” layout of the place that makes it closer to home. I.e., the book shelves aren’t laid out in long rows of geometric order; instead there are “coves” where a general type of book can be found, e.g. computers, history, cooking, home decor, religion, etc. Unless I’m a hurry, I hit quite a few different coves on each visit. (And yes, they keep a pretty good train book selection.)

Or at least they did. After dinner I drove up to Willowbrook and found my way across a harshly-lit parking lot on a cold winters night, expecting the usual civilized atmosphere to embrace me as I walked into Borders. But I soon knew that something was wrong. The bookshelves were in disarray, the magazine racks were empty, and there were these xeroxed pages posted everywhere. And thus the bad news – store closing, 40% off everything. I wandered around a bit, and thought about perhaps taking advantage of the discount. But I didn’t have the heart. One of the few stores that I can actually spend quality time in was in its violet hour. Arg.

What happened? Well, on the way home, it stuck me. Despite my affection for it, I was guilty of putting Borders out of business. I’ve been using the Internet to hunt for bargains on the books that I want to read. I haven’t spent much time strolling the “coves” open to unexpected, interesting “finds”. I never did patronize the Borders coffee bar (although I had intended to do so someday). I didn’t drop by for the special events and entertainment nights. And I guess that too many other people followed my example. So I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised. This isn’t a rage against the evils of capitalism. It’s just a lament for a nice capitalist idea that I was freeloading on, until the financial chickens finally came home to roost.

The rest of the evening was also disorienting. I went to a different Shop Rite on the way back from Willowbrook, as my usual supermarket would require a back-track. And that also threw me off balance, as I had trouble finding the stuff on my grocery list. Of course you’d expect that problem in a supermarket you’ve never been to. But I used to patronize this Shop Rite quite regularly, until they upgraded the one where I now go (which is closer to my house). Since then, they rearranged the parking lot and the store interior (somewhat). Once again, I was getting that ‘you can’t go home again’ feeling; my vague recall of the place only made things worse.

My last stop before home was the local Barnes and Noble, which didn’t usually carry the magazine (or the atmosphere) that I was looking for; well surprise, surprise, they actually did have the mag. So I was finally on the scoreboard; I did finally manage to get the article about the Paterson yards in the old days. But when I got home and skimmed thru it, the ‘home no more’ feeling came right back. The article actually focused more on recent times at the place in question, and the author himself lamented how much the place had changed and how inhospitable it had become since he was a kid. And the rest of the magazine just reminded me once more why I lost interest in modern railroading; it just wasn’t as funky and friendly and informal as it was about 40 or 50 years ago. It was now just a standardized machine protected by barbed wire and post-9/11 security.

Oh well. I’m looking forward to getting back to the Bloomfield Shop Rite next week, and seeing some familiar faces stocking the produce bins and manning the cash registers! Perhaps I’ve now become a supermarket hobbyist . . . yes it is kind of interesting how some stores put the shelled walnuts in the produce section, while others place them in the baking supplies isle, and a few stores do both!