LIZ TRESTON

Liz Treston is one of the coolest women I know. She is a speech pathologist by training, but wears many hats. Funny and very smart, people want her to run things. Like TRAID, a company which provides Technology Related Assistance to People with Disabilities. She said she'd run the program for a year. That was ten years ago.

She also gets into the schools to build awareness for disabilities. She'd just been there the day before I was to paint her, with Nello her canine companion. She recounted her day to me and it was entertaining.

Fourth Grade:

"Can I have a volunteer" and before anyone consents she's volunteered the squirmiest kid whose been paying the least attention. He is stunned to find himself before his classmates with a pencil in his hand, which Liz has supplied him. "OK. How'd you get there?"

"Uhhh."

"Was it a disease or from birth or an accident? What?" The rest of the class is getting into it.

"An accident!" they offer. So now they're learning that there are lots of ways to wind up in a wheelchair.

"Great." She knocks the pencil out of the kids hand. "Now pick it up." He gets up.

"Uh uh uh. You can't walk."

"Oh I forgot."

"So how are you going to get it?"

A blank.

"The DOG, the DOG!" the other kids are yelling.

And so Nello quietly gets up retrieves the pencil hands it to the kid and returns. Pretty cool. And the kids are totally intrigued. And often recognize Liz around town and far from being shy about a person in a wheelchair, run up and say hi.

Liz, herself, dove into a swimming pool at nineteen and was paralyzed from the neck down. Not a dumb shallow end thing. She was an excellent competitive swimmer and diver. It was one of those pools, long since outlawed, where the grade from the deep end to the shallow end is so sharp that it's like a wall. One that she slammed in to and started her second life as she calls it. Her second birthday. She is 25.