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“Now that,” she says, “is writing.”

Which means I can breathe again. And then as I peek around the corner I see the handsomest man in poetry, Robert Pinsky, striding into the bookstore just in time.

CLOSING TIME

“YOU MUST ALWAYS KNOW WHEN TO PULL OUT,” SAYS THE merchant Nazruddin in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, one of the many excellent novels about running a store. “A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty.” Shopkeepers make good narrators because they’re passive and steady, and they tend to want relatively small things, while the world keeps taking more from them than it gives back. Plus, in the end something awful always happens to them, whether it’s the anarchic revolution that sweeps away the postcolonial African nation that Naipaul’s shopkeeper has patiently worked to build up, or the equally pointless churn-and-burn of New York commerce that ruins Morris Bober, the Jewish shopkeeper hero of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

How do you know when to get out? For Bober, one of the signals he hears but is too stubborn to act upon is the arrival of energetic and ruthless competitors. (Malamud’s parents were in fact Brooklyn deli owners, part of the last generation of Jewish immigrants to ply the trade.) “The chain store kills the small man,” he remarks abstractly. The world changes on him, and he does nothing to protect himself. Like a lot of shopkeepers, he lives in Plato’s cave, a hermetically sealed world where the only evidence of a reality outside are the shadows dancing on a cold wall. “Everything will be fine as long as I manage my affairs in here,” he thinks, while outside, beyond his awareness, things change and contingencies grow, nowhere as fast as they do in New York.

Brooklyn is changing. Just down the street from where I had my Sesame Street epiphany a few years ago, developers from Cleveland have signed an agreement with the government to build one of the largest properties to come to New York in a generation. Skyscrapers, a hotel, a sports stadium and, amid it all, many different “cultural spaces”—this new development, called Atlantic Yards, is going to be so big that its impact will be felt for miles in every direction. Traffic will have to be rerouted, buildings demolished, their tenants relocated. Purely in terms of size and ambition, it seems like the antithesis of the people’s borough. It seems more like … Manhattan.

Maybe, though, Atlantic Yards will turn out to be a good thing for us, by raising the value of our lease. Maybe it will provide the sort of foot traffic, tourism and round-the-clock sales that shopkeepers dream about. Maybe we’ll get that Manhattan-style store we once thought of going for after all. But we won’t have to wait the five or six years that the construction will likely take to find out, for even closer than where Atlantic Yards will be, the landscape is already erupting in a most un-Brooklyn way, sprouting sunlight-hogging apartment complexes with cubicle-sized dwellings wrapped in unfriendly mirrored glass.

You have to try not to be sentimental about it. It makes as little sense to argue against progress and change when it comes to cities as it does with literary magazines. And so one day in 2004, when I open the newspaper and read that a Manhattan real estate developer has bought a parking lot a block away from us and plans to build two hundred apartments and twenty-seven single-family homes there in the coming year, I look on the bright side.

“Think of all the potential customers!,” I exclaim to Gab. “When it’s finished, we’ll be their closest convenience store.”

Gab takes the newspaper from me and reads to the part where I left off. Then she says, “But did you see this?” Right after the part about the two hundred apartments it says that the developer intends to line the block with retail space, “perhaps including a supermarket.”

We look at each and wait for the