I hate walking into the Barnes & Noble at The Shoppes in downtown Chino Hills. Every time, a salesperson unenthusiastically asks me if I’ve heard about the Nook, the chain’s flagship e-reader. Yes I have, thank you. But if I wanted one, I wouldn’t be at a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble has a near-monopoly on that sort of thing. Less than a year ago, we lost the neighborhood Borders. It was closed down, its stock liquidated, and its memories–well, my memories–boxed and boarded up. I know, I know. I should be lamenting the closing of a used bookstore–or shopping at one. That’s much cooler.

But I can’t help it. When I was a kid, Borders was the only place that felt like a haven for anyone with offbeat interests. It’s where I learned to shoot a free throw correctly (from The Art of Shooting Baskets by Ted St. Martin), to pick mutual funds (from How to Buy Stocks by Louis Engel), and to write a sentence correctly (from The Elements of Style by Strunk & White). I’d often walk through the aisles at random, grabbing copies of anything that looked interesting, and lumbering back to one of the tables with, say, The Good Heart by the Dalai Lama and Ultimate Spider-Man #103.

Some of my most enjoyable moments there involved picking up one book, seeing another book referenced in its pages, then looking for that second book, and then looking for yet another book referenced in that one, and so on: the physical reenactment of getting lost in Wikipedia. You just can’t do that with books online, and you certainly can’t do it at mom-and-pop shops with limited inventories.

Borders was also where I officially became an adult (at least according to teenage ritual). On my eighteenth birthday, after buying my first lottery ticket and pack of cigarettes, I stalked the magazine racks for what seemed like forever, waiting for an opening. Finally, when I thought no one was looking, I grabbed a copy of Playboy and tucked it underneath a New Yorker and Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

When I made it to the cashier, I smoothly spread my spoils onto the surface between us, as one would when dressing a coffee table.

“Eighteenth birthday, huh?” she asked, with a knowing smile.

“What? How can you tell?”

“Your hands are shaking pretty hard.”

I quietly paid up and power walked out of the store–embarrassed, but a man. Right?

Most teenagers spend their Friday nights at a stadium or an impromptu house party, but I’d begin my weekends by looking for a new book, sometimes ignoring texts from friends asking to go out. Who needs school spirit, social status, or community when you could be flipping through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time while drinking a hot chocolate? Yeah, my girlfriends were thrilled with that, too.

It’s hard walking past that abandoned store, now a mere shell, because so much of who I am was made within those walls. I literally grew up among those bookshelves. I know that Amazon is the real killer here, but I can’t help resenting Barnes & Noble for its survival–however short that survival might be.

So the next time I walk past the salesperson at Barnes & Noble, ready to do the customary song-and-dance, I might just be up-front and say, “No, thanks. No Nook for me. I’m a Borders man–a man whose tastes were shaped by its layout and that adjoined Seattle’s Best Coffee. That’s something your fancy e-reader and Starbucks can never replace.”

And then I’ll grudgingly put in an order for a Hot Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Jay de la Torre is from Chino Hills, California.

*Photo courtesy of J Zachary.