It was the Christmas of the iTunes gift card. It became a joke, almost, as card after card was showered on my kids like confetti.

What I wouldn’t have done, when I was their age, with such riches to spend on music.

Then it struck me: What I would have done is something very different from what they would do.

I would have gone to something called a record store, which is relegated in their minds somewhere between the teletype machine and the rotary phone.

Yet for our generation it was so much more than a retail outlet; it was an integral part of our culture. It was the place where you could browse the stacks for hours, scrutinizing the liner notes and cover art like an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.

When Gem City Records closes its doors Feb. 24, music fans will have to travel to Cincinnati for a comparable record store. It’s a funny reversal from the days when our friend Don McClanahan — who has been debating music with my husband Jim since junior high school — would drive up to Gem City Records for the albums he couldn’t find in Cincinnati. “For old fogies like us it’s a shame to see an institution like Gem City Records go out of business, but I’m not broken-hearted,” Don said. “It’s really no different than all the other changes that we’ve seen over the years. There’s not much of a market for buggy whips, and how often do you actually write a letter and send it through the post office?”

Well, he has a point. Yet the closing of Gem City makes me wonder how I would feel if the Kindle or the newly-unveiled iPad brought about the death of the bookstore. What if I could no longer roam the bookstore in search of something that caught my eye? (We still have excellent used record stores such as Second Time Around on Brown Street, but you can’t count on finding all the new releases.)

Jim reminisced, “I liked the music playing in the background as I browsed the record store. Sometimes I’d talk to another record shopper and they would recommend an artist I’d heard of but hadn’t checked out yet. I enjoyed the feeling of being lost in all the music. Time would pass without my noticing. I would plan and prioritize which records to get, in which order, which ones to put on my birthday list.”

Store manager Dale Walton, 54, came to work at Gem City in 1985, four years after it was founded in 1981. He’s not sure what he’ll do next. “If I could get the funds together, I’d love to start another store. A town this size deserves to have a record store. Not everybody has iPods.”

Ian Bonnett, who has clerked at the store for five years, is also bummed, and not just for the loss of his job. He has been coming here with his father, Kevin, since he was a tyke. “This was my Cheers, the place everybody knows my name.”

Loyal customer Melvin Pullen agrees. “This place is going to be missed,” said the 36-year-old Dayton man. “This is my first stop for imported records and hard-to-find records. It’s just a good home-feeling store.” More than that, he said, his conversations with the staff has expanded his musical horizons: “I don’t have the tunnel vision I used to have when I was only into hip-hop. They’ve gotten me seriously into jazz and opened me up to all the musical possibilities.”

Is music less of a communal experience than it used to be? My husband tends to think so. “I liked going to a friend’s house to compare record collections,” Jim recalled. “I’d pull out an LP to hear it for the first time, with my friend looking for my reaction to it. It was fun to go to a party and discuss passionately which record they should play next and why it was so good or why some other artist was not so great.”

But his buddy Don observed, “Music lovers are just finding a new way to share their love of music with each other through a different media. I like going online and finding out about new music, or visiting the Web site of a band I enjoy and downloading a song they put online that you can’t get anywhere else. Jim and I still talk about music online, on the phone and in person. So it’s still a community, just different.”

He’s right again, but I still mourn the passing of the Last Record Store — a place where the touch and the look of the records, the smell of the vinyl, and most of all the ongoing conversation — is as much a part of the experience as the music itself.