When I started high school, I wanted to go to college and major in art history, and imagined that one day I would become a Monet scholar. I forced my dad to buy me the book Linnea in Monet’s Garden. I would go to the Art Institute of Chicago and gaze at Monet’s haystack paintings until well past the time people would start saying, “Geez, how many paintings of hay can a guy do?” I had Monet calendars, journals, postcards, and a huge framed print (which still hangs on my bedroom wall). Even though I realized that there would probably never be a huge job market for art history majors, I always stayed interested in the subject, and wrote a final paper for an art history class on a painting Monet had done before he became MONET.

That class invoked a new love for Pop Art in me, and Roy Lichtenstein surpassed Monet as my favorite painter, I would still love to go to Giverny and see Monet’s garden and his little Japanese bridge and visit all the places Linnea visited.