Monahon, like his parents before him, has spent a good part of his life correcting people. That’s Monahawn! Hon, hawn, horn! Like a tuba my father would say. Monatuba? The odd ending probably came out of Ellis Island. I can hear the Immigration officer telling my grandfather, "Boston? They don’t want you up there, Here, I’ll give Monahan a snooty twist . . ." Four generations later, our second son arrived in Ireland to be told, "Sure, and you don’t know how to spell your own name!"

I’ve led three lives: aimless, work happy, paradisiacal. Ended aimlessness at 25 by marrying a girl with only two things going for her: beauty and brains.

Walter Dorwin Teague, my first boss, helped me support a wife & three sons by starting me at $110/week. Rohm & Haas was a bit more generous upping me to $134 for a couple of years, At around 36 I was earning as much money as my 17-year-old grand daughter. My salary then equaled her current scholarship at the College of the Atlantic.

Milan, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Munich, London, Oxford, Aspen, Seattle, Tokyo, Kyoto are some of the cities where we worked in the service of commercial art. Early on I was taken off the drawing board and transferred to corporate management because I knew how to spell, It was a great career, I delegated management duties and designed corporate exhibits, wrote corporate publications and retired at fifty-five to the side of a mountain and even more fun.

Founded Lively Artists here in Maine where we built our solar home of our own design – ‘our’ meaning my life turner-arounder and me. I sold some abstracts as a Lively Artist in the land of pines and lobsters. Published the ‘zine’ Lively Press for ten years - sort of resembled the New Yorker of the 1930's. Published a short PC How-to, McGufy’s.DOS, on diskette. Because we used what is called ‘standard English’ and because the Portland paper is sold at Augusta’s international airport, my 1980's PC Figure-outer sold nationwide and a couple even went to France.

I get a bang out of books on creativity. If the writers knew anything about their subject, the last thing they’d do is write about it. Cezanne tried to write. Read him lately? What he painted is sold in the $millions. So this is the best place to get back to more Lively painting.