My father collected reels of TV commercials. The basement of the house in Old Holly was full of these reels, carefully filed and cross-indexed as to length, type of product, audience recall, product identification and a number of other categories. The index cards filled two file cabinets and the reels themselves stood upright in hundreds of numbered slots in a series of floor-to-ceiling filmshelves which he had designed and built himself. The wine cellar, my mother used to call it. He had a screen and projector and he spent several nights a week viewing the commercials and making notes. He had been doing this for many years. He considered it part of his job. His purpose, he told the family, was to find the common threads and nuances of those commercials which had achieved high test ratings; to learn the relationship between certain kinds of commercials and their impact in the marketplace, as he called it. We spent many of our adolescent nights, Mary and Jane and I, sitting in that dark basement watching television commercials. We looked forward to seeing every new reel he brought home. While my mother wandered through the large old house, the rest of us slouched in the flickering basement and argued about which new commercial was best. My father used to arbitrate our bitter disputes. It doesn’t matter how funny or pretty a commercial is, he used to say; if it doesn’t move the merchandise off the shelves, it’s not doing the job; it has to move the merch. And now, as the waiter put our plates before us, I thought of him standing by the projector as the first new reel of the evening thrust its image through the dust-drizzling church-light toward the screen, an alphabet boy eating freckled soup perhaps, a man carving his Thanksgiving teeth, the tongues of seven naked housewives lapping at a bowl of dog food. I wished he were dead. It was the first honest thought which had entered my mind all day. My freedom depended on his death.