Art depreciation

   When you're lying permanently on your back in a nursing home and looking up and across the room to a dark print of Washington Crossing the Delaware that you laminated decades before, and you say to the old woman who is perched beside you and listening perhaps too intently, "That corner is a mess. We'd better not get into that corner," does it help that nobody knows what you think?
   It's not as though they ever did know, right?
   "It's a big country," she adds. "We can't kill them all."

   Oh God, what does she mean?
   "Hmm," I say, stiff upper lip, squinting with what I hope is conspiratorial charm. "Does that painting look like a lobster to you?"
   She shifts her head in a way that suggests she's a little startled. Has a new thought materialized?
   "Now that you mention it," she says, "it sure does."

   So sorry, Emanuel Gottleib Whoever you were, the child-of-immigrants schoolteacher Julia Frances Lynch Hammesfahr Loyall no longer sees your tribute to the Father of Our Nation as very useful or even comprehensible. She sees a lobster, and mess.
   "We won't go in that corner," she says.