The hand-written text on each photograph reads:

Image Number 1 (The House I Once Called Home, A Photographic Memoir With Verse): Sonny returns to the house of ghosts, where he was born seventy years ago. This abandoned wooden box is the cabinet where my family's curiosities are stored. I now reopen all its shuttered windows and unlock all its boarded doors.

Image Number 2: As a child, I did not understand that I was a prince, and that my father was the king. Although we did not live in a castle and my father worked in the mill, I began to realize that in the realm of my dreams, I was the dauphin. Through my bedroom window, I could see a spectacle of turrets and minarets float above the soiled city below like an iridescent mist. My imagination would be both my wand and scepter. And there would be no boundaries to my domain.

Image Number 3: My heart remains a recluse in this dead house. Steeped in the reverie of what it used to be, I keep my vigil for another day, before I too fade away. This house is built of wood cut from my family tree. It was deprived of most amenities, and until I had grown beyond a boy, this poverty did not embarrass me. How strange that I should recall this faded strain after all these years. These rooms were our little theater's mise-en-scene, where we performed our daily dramas sans-proscenium. I have returned to fulfill my deal like Faust, and the shades of this dead house. I who have been most blest, now with this incantation put this place to rest.

Image Number 5: The spirits of my saint and sinner kin, spin around me like dervish dancers in a circle, happy at the sight of me again, and that I had not forgotten them.

Image Number 6: I believe we leave echoes of ourselves behind. In those rooms where our lives were first defined. Sometimes there is a moment redux, when the flux of time becomes transparent. It is a reverberation of recall. A subtle sense of recognition, within a shrouded familiarity. Suddenly the clarity of second sight, Mother says my name, "Duane, Duane." "Daddy's home. It's time for to eat." I seat myself at the table. The soup is ladled. I know it once again, like a bite of madeleine.

Image Number 7: This photograph is a fossil, a fleeting moment preserved as a specimen of time on film, the way ancient insects are preserved in amber. Time is a string that threads together each indivisible instant like pearls of an infinite seamless necklace. Eternity is the absence of time. By a serendipitous intersection of time and place, the threads of my families' lines were woven together into the fabric of this shared moment in Andy's photographic tableaux of our clan in the garden long ago.

Image Number 8: In this very room, on a February afternoon, when Margaret was twenty and Jack was twenty three, I became to be. Here stood the bed, where I first cried and mother bled. And above the bed a cross hung on the wall, the day the midwife came to call. Over there, a chair, near where the vanity used to be, its mirrors now scattered everywhere, like shards of forgotten memories. My yesterdays are this debris, and I alas am seventy.

Image Number 10: Grandmother's garden has become a feral forest, wild and grand, worthy of Miss Havisham. Nature has forgiven us our trespasses and reclaimed its natural domain. Twigs have grown to trees. Dense ivy undergrowth chokes the path with thickets. Ancient roses cloak the fence, and Anna's spruce has grown up to the roof. The weeping willow of my youth has fallen without a sound. Squatter racoons in the house peek from the dining room at squirrels playing hide and seek. The woods have won. The shy house sees no summer sun. Soon there will be no trace that someone lived in this place.

Image Number 11: How strange to see mother and Sonny in nineteen thirty three. She clung to him more than he clung to her. Margaret and Jack were without hope, when they eloped to Greensburg, where he kept his word. They pretended to be a family like actors pantomining two different plays on one stage at the same time.

Image Number 12: The kitchen pulsed with the heartbeat of the house. It was the epicenter of life where strife sometimes occurred, and happiness could be heard. Here my family flocked to nest. Mother baked to celebrate, (In the history of cakes, her's were the best.) and father groused when slightly soused. It's where we Merry Christmased and Happy Birthdayed, and my parents played their games, at the same kitchen table where we cried the night Anka died. What a primal pleasantry, stirring tea by the fire and listening to the kettle's murmur, free from the freezing winter's BRRR. It was the place where I embraced all goodbye, when I first roamed a homesick seventeen.

Image Number 14: Grandfather seemed to be like Lear. He reigned his court with love and fear. To pass his tests, his sons paid his gambling debts. He let they pay without regrets. But it was Eleanor he loved the best. Between dreams and death, he waited for her homecoming. After she arrived to say Goodbye, he died.

Image Number 15: When I was fifteen, I first discovered desire in my favorite Sunday funnies. It was in a paper owned by Hearst, that Prince Valiant freed Aleta from a curse. But everything went wrong. He was captured as she escaped. And his captors stripped him into a kind of thong. This nudity was new to me. Suddenly a strange awareness. Some buried yearning stirred. What was this curiosity that urged me to touch? I did not understand that this novelty was desire for a man. I hid the comics in a drawer, so I could peek at his physique encore. Desire has whispered in my mind thoughts I never heard before. Now as I decline, in the ripening of time, I've forgotten what these thoughts once were.

Image Number 16: My brother Timothy and I were born nine years and nine days apart. Mother liked to play games with names. Tim was to have been Anthony. Wisely she had a change of heart. It was too much a clue to what I cannot share with you. I should have been Stefan or Valentine. Instead, I was dubbed Duane, after Mr. Shaw's suicidal son. He was my doppelgänger, one the patrician, the other plebian. The two Duanes passed each other on Cornell street two weeks before the deed was done. Our eyes recognized each other, but we did not say "Hello" or "Goodbye."

Image Number 17: Annabelle, Cyril, and Steve, lost in the labyrinths of their minds, linger in a kind of limbo, where we cannot go. These exiled sonambulists wait by the river Styx. We also wait and grieve.

Image Number 18: I'll tell you what I know. Father lived incognito in his own house. He was a stranger to his spouse. Jack worked three shifts in Mr. Carnegie's mill for little pay, and smoked three packs of Camel's everyday. Cigarettes were his best friends, until they betrayed him in the end. Mother said he was a good man and a good provider. Between mother and me, he was always an outsider. When he was told that he had been cuckolded, father went from an amateur drinked to a professional. Mother took to her confessional. Once I saw him cry. I never thought to ask him why. He was already a ghost when he expired. It pains me to write this. He was not missed.

Image Number 20: Although my aunts and uncles seemed to do just as they pleased, they never ran away from home, and were tethered by their telephones to grandmother, their éminence grise.

Image Number 21: Cyril's young bride died too soon. Something black grew within her womb. He never saw his Eurydice again. Cyril became a ruin, until Annabelle made him well.

Image Number 23: Mother did not love my father. She loved another. Margaret lived a secret melancholy. The life she chose to live was her great folly. For you see mother believed she had sinned. And of course, Catholics don't divorce.

Image Number 24 (Petunia): Grandmother and Eleanor were pussy cat queens. Eleanor's best friend was Billy, a tom too nosey. Grandmother named all her kittys the same, Petunia, after her favorite posey. On orange steel mill summer nights with Vulcan bangings fraught with fright, enchanted by fireflies' lights, Petunia would prance like Puck beneath a weeping willow bough and meow as she leaped high to catch fallen twinkles from the sky, then leaped again and pirouette against the moon in silhouette. All flailing paws without applause, she danced ever higher near the stars. Then with one grand breathless bound, Petunia flew out of sight above the ground. No one that night saw her descent, and I alone know where she went.

Image Number 25: When I Was A Boy, Everyone Called Me Sonny Something in finished. The shadows of these empty rooms have bequeathed me the reality of death. This legacy has left me diminished and bereft, in a way I can't express. Although Sonny has gone with all the rest, he still lives with every breath I breathe.

Image Number 26: I hold plaster dust from the house in my hand. This powdery debris, like ashes in an urn, is the end of our history. It seem a peculiar irony, that most of us must cease to be, to know the real of our reality.

Image Number 27: Look, there in the moonlight, two vagabond seeds have blown thru the broken window, and rooted in the rubble of the room, where I used to dream. Life has awakened and disturbed the solitude of this tomb. Everywhere the universe is a womb, with glowing galaxies like flares of light, creating life in deep darkness.

Image Number 28: When I indulge the whims of Nostalgia, and daydream bittersweet scenarios of what might have been. These foolish phantoms of regret vanish in the clear light of reality, and everything is as it should be. Our little lives are thus-perfect in their pain and happiness.

Image Number 29: I threw a penny into the Youghiogheny and made a wish, that I might float with it, down the Monogahela to the Allegheny. Then further still below to Ohio, until I reached the Mississippi and the sea. There the tides would carry me away, to where I cannot say, someplace fair and new. And I would do the things I had never done before. And my penny wish came true.