The Bookstore

They opened a Barnes & Noble in Santa Fe this summer. When was the last time a real store opened? Our outlet mall is a ghost town, the main mall has a post office, theater, and ropes course but few stores. 

The story of retail for 20 years has been one major store closure after another. 

The new store is a mile from my house. I can easily walk to it if I take the back way and cross the arroyo on the footbridge.

It opened in the old Bed Bath & Beyond store -- that was the more common fate of retail: a store going under last year. But it was replaced with a brand spanking new bookstore.

It's the same as the Barnes & Noble stores I remember, although this one has a huge children's section that is more toys than books. Which is happily welcome as I shop for my grandkids.

Twenty seven years ago I was in a Barnes & Noble store in Connecticut, but I wasn't shopping for children's toys or books. I was on a date. 

Jim and I met there for coffee on our first date. It was awkward, of course. We were middle aged, in our 40s, both bewildered to be nervously sipping Starbucks coffee across from each other after long marriages had ended in widowhood for both of us. But there we were. 

Me asking him if he smoked (he was quitting, which he actually did eleven years later).

Him asking me who those ladies were behind me tittering a bit and stealing looks at us. 

They were people who knew me -- we were in the Barnes & Noble in my town and I was "known" somewhat, since I was the youngish woman whose husband had died leaving me with two young teenage boys. I was someone people talked of, or commiserated about, or feared because no one wants the fate that had befallen my family.

We left after half a cup of coffee and went next door to a bar for a glass of wine (the date was actually going well.) No one knew either of us there. 

We both remember the tab -- the wine cost $6.95 a glass (in 1997), which stunned Jim. He had never paid that much for a full bottle. He visibly blanched. But he paid without hesitation and that's when I knew he was into this date. He wanted to impress.

And he did.

Now, when I walk into a brand new Barnes & Noble in a place thousands of miles and a quarter century from that first date to buy books for my grandkids, I smile. Full circle.