One often hears, especially at this time of year, about “comfort foods,” those substances consumed not necessarily for the nutrition they provide but for the associations they raise. Hot chocolate and toast on a snowy day reminds me of my senior year in high school, Constant Comment tea takes me to senior year in college, and Campbell’s tomato soup with Premium saltines and Velveeta cheese on Sunbeam bread grilled in a cast iron skillet puts me at the gray and yellow Formica and chrome table in the kitchen on Fifth Street any Friday between 1954 and 1961.

There are, I think, as well, “comfort places,” places we go to not only to conduct the business for which they exist, but to trigger some of the associations our memories hold because of them.

One such place for me is the News Center West, a newsstand and greeting card shop in an old strip mall not far from the house my parents moved us to in 1963. I went there today for some of the research supplies I need for my Katherine Project.

News Center West has been in the same place in the West Shore Plaza since before I started going there. The Plaza itself remains mostly unchanged from those days, even though it has undergone some cosmetic remodeling. The huge space at one end that was Bowman’s department store has been divided into five different outlets, and the supermarket that anchored the other end has changed names, but the Plaza remains one of the last open strip malls in the area -- no food court, no bench-ringed fountain, no “heart smart” indoor walking course.

And News Center West, too, looks and smells and sounds the way it did. As you enter, you see magazines and newspapers on the right and greeting cards on the left. In the middle are racks of paperback books arranged according to publisher (so you have to know if you’re looking for something put out by Bantam or Signet, not Dostoyevsky or Stephen King) and school supplies. The gift area -- candles and candle rings and bags of potpourri -- shares the back wall with numismatic and philatelic supplies.

I’ve shopped there for nearly forty years. I bought school supplies through my first two years of college there, and in December of 1966 I used the last dollar I had before Christmas to buy the Signet paperback edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed ($.95 plus 5% tax) because a young man I wished to impress said it was the greatest book ever written.* Before the advent of Encore Books and amazon.com, it was the outlet I used to order the books I wanted for “keepers” instead of library borrowings.

In those days, when I approached a research project, I did it the way Sr. Margaret Loretta taught me in ninth grade. I wrote bibliographic material (author, title, publisher, date) on 3x5 cards and notes on 4x6s. I continued to teach that method to two generations of high school students. But in my own work I cut corners. My most recent graduate courses required brief, self-contained papers with no more than three sources, and I did most of the research with highlighted photocopies  and little tape flags stuck like feathers in my books. 

Now I approach the most extensive research project of my life, in which I will seek to recreate, with historical faithfulness, the furniture, costume, foods, medical wisdom, and folkways of people who lived 150 years ago. I’ll need to know something of their language, their history, how they celebrated their weddings and what they paid for a coffin. I’ll be using sources that do not circulate and which a researcher is forbidden to splay on a Xerox machine and rake with a light.

At the same time, I’m shepherding Lynn through her first big research project -- 25 pages about genetics and careers therein. Her instructor preaches the wisdom of alphabetized file cards, and I need to be a good example.

These days there are the warehouse office supply stores where you can buy index cards in a range of colors in packs of 1000. There is probably also computer software that replicates the way we assembled note cards and bibliographies. But today I went to News Center West and bought a pack of 50 3x5 cards and 200 4x6s, and a little metal box for each. It made me feel young again, and studious, and serious about my project.

And on the way out I bought a Sky Bar, four connected pockets of chocolate filled, left to right, with fudge, vanilla cream, peanut butter, and caramel -- a confection popular in the 1950s but hard to find these days. It’s a comfort food from a comfort place to help me start my next big adventure.

* (This young man is immortalized in "Concrete Poetry.")