Our Thanksgiving was nice, if brief; one of the things I like about heading north out of L.A. is you can actually see the stars at night. Sure, these are heavenly lights that are long gone, and we are staring into the void in the darkness, bathed in the light of stars long dead, but there’s nothing like a crisp, clear fall or winter evening looking up overhead at the stars.

On our way home, we drove through Sacramento, and as we saw the familiar tower of the Tower Theater looming over Broadway from the maelstrom that is the Sacramento freeway system (nothing compared with L.A.– people up there whine about the merging of I-80, 99, and 5, and I’ll admit getting to the 15th street exit from 80 is a pain in the ass, but that’s nothing compared with the Parking Lot, or the Wilshire/San Diego Freeway interchange. Now *that* is something to weep over…), we wondered if Tower Books would be joining Tower Records and Tower Video in its demise. On the spur of the moment, I swung across three lanes, aiming as if a homing device was planted on the front of our trusty vehicle, and exited at 15th Street.

My heart sank as I saw not only the dying Tower Records store, but right behind it, large “Going Out of Business” banners draped across the storefront of Tower Books. The whole empire was falling, and we decided we’d stop briefly to pay tribute at a former haunt of mine.

We quickly found a parking spot and sauntered into the bookstore. Inside, half the store was already empty, and its voluminous magazine section was a shadow of its former self. I missed Tower when I lived in D.C., and found that they had an outlet on the Rockville Pike, which I visited from time to time, but it was nothing compared with the Tower Books on Broadway, or even the Watt Avenue branch (Tower Books in L.A. was practically non-existent, and in any event, the outstanding Book Soup is just down the street from Tower Video, and across from the landmark Tower Records, which actor Alec Baldwin laments in this blog entry at Huffington Post. I recently paid homage to Tower Video on Sunset with a friend earlier this month, and left with a bit of personal history under my arm. I probably won’t go back, although when I visited, the store was still well-stocked, compared with other Towers I’ve been in since). I’ve spent countless hours poring over the history section, the art books, the coffee table books at Tower after the workday, or on my way home from a social outing. Tower Records, obviously, held no attraction for me, but I did check next door at Tower Video from time to time– they had a very wide selection of films for rent, although the prices for the tapes (and later DVDs) they had on sale weren’t competitive with other stores (which is probably one of the key reasons this business failed).

While Tower is admittedly a chain, it was always to my mind a smaller, more friendly chain than some of the behemoths out there, and in any event, Tower started in Sacramento, which is close to where I grew up– as a child of the Sacramento Valley, Sacramento was the largest town around, even though The City always beckoned. Berkeley had Cody’s (another recent victim); Sacramento had Tower.

We wandered the remaining aisles, browsing through what was left. We left Tower for the final time, though not without some new memories: a couple of books to add to our library and its overflowing bookshelves.

Sacramento and its environs haven’t been home for quite some time, but visiting Tower when I was in town was not just an attempt at nostalgia, but a way to stoke my intellectual fires, even if just briefly. Now there’s one less reason to hang out in Tomatoville. Adieu, Tower. You shall be missed.

[Update on Christmastime: I don’t know whether to be chagrined or amused that our very first Christmas card was waiting in our mailbox when we got back from our calorie-busting repast. It was a lovely, pre-printed message from our loving insurance company, which no doubt wanted to get a head start on reminding us our premium is due soon. Ah, the joy and cheer of bills… Hopefully we’ll find far more personal and heartwarming messages in our mail in the weeks to come.]