"Twenty-five or so years ago, one day after school I went to visit my dad at his office. We didn't have a computer at home at the time so whenever I was around his, I would beg him to let me use it to play with MS Paint. I was probably around 7 or 8, and my go-to artwork was a portrait of my him made with the spray tool - perfect to recreate his short, spiky hair and stubble -"
"and I'd make his head ridiculously big and tease him about it. He still has one of these masterpiece in his desktop wallpapers rotation, I'm pretty sure. I couldn't draw much else with the mouse, nothing more complicated than a lopsided house and a tree, so I would ask him, knowing full well he wasn't the artist in the family, to draw something for me; that day I asked for a dog."
At seven or eight, the narrator visited their father's office and used his computer to play with MS Paint. The narrator favored spray-tool portraits of their father, exaggerating features for fun, and a portrait remains among the father's desktop wallpapers. Limited by the mouse, the narrator asked the father to draw a dog; the father's attempt produced a misshapen, pig-dog hybrid that provoked prolonged shared laughter. The oddly ugly dog image persisted in memory, becoming a small, enduring symbol of playful bonding, imperfect creativity, and the warmth of familial moments during childhood computer explorations.
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