For Thanksgiving that year, my mother and my wife and I checked him out of the nursing home and brought him homewith a wheelchair in my Volvo station wagon. He hadn't been in the house since he'd last been living there, ten months car earlier. If my mother had been hoping for a gratifying show ofpleasure from him, she was disappointed; by then, a change ofvenue no more impressed my father than it does a one-year-old. We sat by the fireplace and, out of unthinking, wretched habit, took pictures of a man who, if he knew nothing else, seemed full of unhappy knowledge of how dismal a subject for photographs he was. The images are awful to me now: my