so he opened the album with hands that seemed a thousand miles away from him , at the end of long plastic arms , and he looked at the faces and places in george 's album , the aunts , the uncles , the babies , the houses , the old fords and studebakers , the telephone lines , the mailboxes , the picket fences , the wheelruts with muddy water in them , the ferris wheel at the esty county fair , the standpipe , the ruins of the kitchener ironworks - his fingers flipped faster and faster and suddenly the pages were blank .