The Portrait
Pepper Scott
Have you ever had your portrait done?
I mean really sat for one. Not a quick snapshot with a phone or one of those school pictures where the photographer tells everyone to tilt their chin just a little. An actual portrait. The kind where an artist studies your face as if they're about to capture your very soul.
Well...
I have.
Now, Terry would probably object if I called himself an artist. He would have laughed and reminded me that he wasn't exactly hanging masterpieces in museums. But he was a creator. A musician. A builder. A man who spent years building recording studios for other musicians, shaping places where music could come alive. His hands knew their way around guitars, tools, wires, and wood.
As MS slowly changed his world, those same hands stopped cooperating.
First came the numb fingertips. Then buttons became impossible. Fine movements slipped away a little at a time. He accepted those losses with a grace that still amazes me, although I knew they disappointed him. You simply learned not to measure Terry by what he could no longer do. There was still far too much Terry left.
One day he looked at me with that familiar sparkle that usually meant I was about to become the unsuspecting target of one of his jokes.
"You want your portrait done?" he asked.
I blinked.
"My what?"
"Your portrait."
No one had ever asked me that before, so I was curious. Suspicious, yes. But curious.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll do your portrait."
Well... okay.
I tried to imagine what people actually did while sitting for portraits. Fold your hands? Look thoughtful? Stare off into the distance as if contemplating the meaning of life?
So I sat.
We talked about this and that while he worked. I never paid much attention to what he was doing. I was too busy enjoying the conversation, and honestly, I figured whatever he was sketching couldn't possibly be serious.
Nearly an hour later he announced, "Okay. It's finished. Want to see it?"
He handed me a little frame. He had even signed it, bottom corner, like a man closing a deal.
I looked down.
And absolutely lost it.
There I was.
A stick figure with hair standing straight up in every direction like it had touched a live wire, two dot eyes, a mouth that could have meant anything, and an arm reaching out toward nothing in particular. I looked like I had been electrocuted mid greeting.
I laughed so hard I could barely breathe.
He was offended for exactly four seconds. "I am insulted," he said, chin up, doing his very best wounded artist. But his mouth was already twitching, and then his composure went the way of most things does around me, which is to say it collapsed completely, and we were both laughing until neither of us could talk.
That little drawing still makes me laugh today. Not despite what his hands could no longer do, but almost because of it. He took what was left to him, a pen and an hour and a captive audience, and made something that outlasted the joke it started as.
It stays where I can see it. Wild haired, dot eyed, utterly ridiculous.
Best portrait anyone has ever done of me.
