My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

He had worked at the Corwin foundry from 1962 until it closed in 1998, and the lunchbox on my lawn was the one he had carried there for thirty-six years, which is why it was dented down one side and why the paint was gone.

He had emphysema and congestive heart failure and had been told, that spring, that he was somewhere in his last year. He had no children. His wife had died in 2009.

He had not been able to get down his own front steps without help since the previous January.

So he sat in a chair in his second-floor front room, with an old camera on a tripod and a long lens he'd bought at an estate sale in the nineties, and he photographed Bellamy Row.

Not people's windows. Not anybody's back yard. The street. The sidewalk. The bus stop on the corner. The mail truck. The Petrosyans' dog. Four hundred rolls' worth of an ordinary street over two years, because he could not walk out into it.