While reading a book of poems by Lucille Clifton, I notice that the bookmark I’m using, water-warped with small tears along the edges, is from Borders.com. I search my memory for the last time I was in a Borders store. I try to remember its physical location – strip mall across the street from the real mall. I look it up on Google Maps. It’s either a Layne Bryant now or a flooring company or an ALDI, or maybe it was where the Guitar Center is, and I’d have sworn there was an office store nearby. Aside from the Target, and maybe the Guitar Center (if it wasn’t a Borders), none of the original stores remain. I worked in that shopping center – just out of college, sporting goods store, early morning stock crew and then part-time in the cash office when I got a full time job as an editorial assistant. The sporting goods store is now a Burlington Coat Store and, of course was very briefly a Spirit Halloween or whatever they’re called. The Goodwill next door was a toy store where I’d buy birthday and Christmas gifts for my daughter and my nieces and nephews before I got lazy and started giving everyone gift cards. And maybe in that same shopping center was a steakhouse where, for a brief spell of a half year, maybe more, my wife went for dinner seemingly once every weekend. That was before we realized we could cook steaks almost just as good and for a lot cheaper, but I always got the ribs or the ribs and chicken combo and the bread was good too.
This was all a long time ago – somewhere between fifteen and thirty years. The book, however, is new, and was not purchased fifteen or thirty years ago. I bought a few weeks ago from the bookshop on Polk where I stopped before visiting a street fair and listening to bluegrass music. And now I remember that they gave me a sticker when I bought the book – a sticker with a cartoon of the fog over the bridge. A sticker that I had planned on putting on my water bottle. They gave it to me because I wished them a happy independent bookstore day – it was independent bookstore day. And remembering the sticker, I go thumbing through the book and looking through stacks of papers on desks and tables, some of which I check twice, but don’t find it, and assume the sticker fell out of my pocket that day, or maybe I gave it to my friend who met me at the street fair which ended with a Mardi Gras style march led by a small brass band.
And that’s about all I have to say about that.