
Here’s a quick little watercolor portrait I did of my old lizard when she was young. She kept very few pictures of herself because she always said that my grandmother was beautiful but she was not. Today I showed her her old picture and the watercolor I did. She wasn’t sure who she was looking at. I asked: “Was she pretty.?” “In her head,” she replied.
Then I showed her more pictures on my phone. At some point she even held the phone and remarked on how hard and heavy it was. She liked most pictures but not all, and understood the subject matter of most of them pretty well. She prefers the ones of flowers or flower paintings and the ones of me dressed up for events. She laughs at pictures of dogs. She really marveled over a picture of Nancy. “Oh, my,” she said. “Is she really a dog?”