Watching:An X-Files episode that we taped at nearly two years ago. When I was cleaning up the video cabinet, I uncovered many tapes filled with stuff we intend to watch "some day."

Weather: Hot and humid! Typical New Jersey summer weather. I love it.

Encore No More

I wanted to turn in a set of sample pages for my latest composition job to the Press today, so the twins and I drove into Princeton after dropping Daniel off at school. While I was in town, I decided to check out Encore Books and Music since I'd heard that the store was going out of business.

Encore's existence in the Princeton area predated the arrival of Barnes & Noble and Borders. It is located in a shopping center not far from the radiologist's office where I used to go for my pregnancy ultrasounds. I would often stop there to browse for books and to sip a cup of tea in the cafe after my appointments. After Daniel was born I used to attend a monthly fiction discussion group at Encore until I had the twins. I still have a fondness for that bookstore, and I was sorry to read that it would be closing.

Everything in the store was marked down 25 percent. Some hard cover books were even more steeply discounted. Unfortunately, the shelves are already quite bare. I was hoping to find some of the Patrick O'Brien books to start my own collection (I gave my father the first ten books as a combined birthday/Christmas gift one year), but they were all gone. I did find a couple of O'Brien-related reference books, however. A Sea of Words is a lexicon of nautical terms and Harbors and High Seas is a geographical guide to the O'Brien books. Both are by Dean King. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to keep them or give them to Dad.

The children's section of the bookstore was even more picked over than the rest of the store. Most of the shelves were empty, and hundreds of puzzle pieces littered the floor. I did find a few Arthur books and the book based on the Disney animated 101 Dalmatians as well as a few other things.

Book store browsing with kids is certainly not the same restful experience as shopping alone. All during our visit, Stephen and Matthew were being their usual, active 3 1/2-year-old selves. Several times I had to peel Stephen off the empty shelves, which to him looked like fine ladders to climb. I kept envisioning one of them toppling over on him.

After I picked up the children's books I intended to buy, however, the boys begged to look at them. I wanted to browse through the fiction section one more time, so I told them to sit in the big chair together and handed them the Disney book. They sat side by side, poring over the book together.

"There's Pongo!"

"There's Cruella De Ville!"

"I don't like her, do you, Matthew?"

"No, she's bad."

Another customer, an older woman who had wandered into the fiction area, smiled at them. She turned to me and said, "They are so adorable!"

I thanked her but thought to myself: "If you'd seen them ten minutes ago, you wouldn't be saying that!"

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