My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the dog's tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening. After a few hours of this, I said, "Jesus Grandpa, I get it, he's a dog," not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.