An Old Man’s Museum Under Construction

By Richard Leonard

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• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663246271

Richard Leonard

Richard Leonard is a teacher and writer. His work includes the co-authored December (1977), Twixtujons: The Fabulous Realties of a Classroom (2007), and Snapshots in Prose (2012). He is a guest speaker at local colleges and universities.

Book preview

An

Old Man’s Museum

under

Construction

RICHARD LEONARD

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AN OLD MAN’S MUSEUM UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Copyright © 2022 Richard Leonard.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4626-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4627-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022918258

iUniverse rev. date: 11/22/2022

for

Marguerite Sandy Leonard

Louis

Serico

Jon Shubin

A word is dead

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

Emily Dickinson

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

Exhibits

Preface

Just Me

The Lamppost

Dr. Frankenstein

Payne Whitney Gangster

Maman

Mother Superior

Kenny

Contrition and Love

Brother Synan

The Supermarket

The Watch

The Gunslinger

Kathy

Sweet Dream

Gotcha Last!

Duty Period

The Exhibition

Harmony

Taurus and Libra

Their Mom

To a Postcard

Love at First Sight

My Classroom

Her Smile

Another Night

Joe

Places, Spaces

Daydreamer

A Dialogue

The Past

The Tess & Jack Show

Dawn and Dusk

An Old Man’s Museum under Construction

Acknowledgments

Preface

For the permanent exhibition in An Old Man’s Museum under Construction, I’m indebted to the youthful honesty and courage of my former students. During your tour, imagine displaying your own exhibition. Why not? I never imagined there were so many memories and thoughts waiting for me to share.

Covid isolation and my mind made peace when I realized I could entertain myself, building this museum to house the memories of former loves, old friends, my mother, and thirty-two years in a classroom.

I also wanted to record those fabulous realities in the corners of my mind, difficult to see sometimes because of the shadows, but always there. Looking at the trees outside my window, I realize that we are the rings within a tree, and mine is close to the center.

In the last few months, I’ve assembled poetic, antipoetic, nonpoetic, narrative, descriptive, dramatic, and stream of consciousness exhibits. Unlike Twixtujons and Snapshots in Prose, I often used people’s real names. I want to honor them, because many of them are now only memories.

Just Me

I did it on my own, some say.

Not me. How could I?

I wasn’t there before I was there.

When I was there, my mother was waiting

with the midwife

and the screams

and the love

all for funny-looking-I’m-here-now me.

I was a bald Caucasian male.

Speechless, what could I say?

I hope hair grows

but genes have a mind of their own.

Suffering from WWII malnutrition

my French mother couldn’t feed me, but

my father, an American G.I., gave us food

without ever discussing it with me.

In St. Catherine of Siena grammar school

I would be all me.

But at Sunday mass

in front of all those people, as far as I could see

I forgot which knee was the kneeling one.

Everyone pointed at me, I knew.

Sister had taught us to kneel

on the right knee and make the sign of the cross.

I remembered the hand but forgot the knee.

Stage-fright gene, maybe?

My mother saved my soul

1. look at your crayon hand

2. slap the knee below it

3. kneel on that one

4. make the sign of the cross with the same hand.

And the very first time, it worked!

Good thing my crayon hand was my kneeling hand.

I turned, but my mother sat with the parents

behind the students of all the grades.

And yes, thanks to my mother again

I don’t bite strangers anymore.

I stopped just after my perfect genuflection.

In the park across from church

I liked the girls in the sandbox and on the swings

and hugged them, and kissed them, and bit them.

I never bit the boys, because I preferred girls

so why play with boys and hug them?

I was born to be wild, no one said.

I was a bad boy, my mother said.

And then, saving my reputation

my good name

she bit me.

Betrayed, I looked at her and screamed

and stared at her and cried

for almost a minute.

I didn’t have the biting gene

because I stopped biting right away.

But I still had the hugging one.

Not for the ones I bit, of course.

They wouldn’t be seen with me

in sandboxes or near the swings.

Because I was a hugger, not a biter

I could choose my own shoes.

Thom McAn or Buster Brown.

My hands behind my head

helped my thinking face.

Buster Brown!

Of course.

Buster and his dog, Tige

lived in the shoe, I knew.

Their picture was right there

in the shoe.

Proud of my thought-out decision

I needed some help with the laces.

What do you do with them?

Watching