Summer was slipping away as usual in September 1963 as we got ready to start our eighth grade year at St. Anthony of Padua elementary school (named for the 13th Century Portuguese Franciscan priest and patron saint of lost things), and there was no way to know that in early November a death would occur in the school building that at least one of our classmates thought and may still think was a homicide, or that a few weeks later that same month President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, America’s first (and as of September 2018, only) Roman Catholic President, would be assassinated in Dallas, Texas by somebody or somebodies that may or may not have been or included Lee Harvey Oswald . . . or that in February the Beatles would come to America just as I was (and probably had been for months, maybe even years) falling in love for real for the first time with Mary Elizabeth Albarelli, a girl in our class with the names of the mothers of Jesus and John the Baptist . . . or that . . . I would be fighting for her heart with . . . my scholastic and athletic rival Ronald Biggs whom we called “Biggsy”. . . when Mary Liz and Biggsy were like the two poles of my existence and I was like a charged subatomic particle, forever bouncing between them, but never really striking either . . . Interesting year.
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This is from the novel The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer by Richard Donze (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-secret-saint-anthony-prayer-by-richard-donze-illustrated-by-joseph-cairone/
Richard Donze is a physician author whose poems and essays have appeared in medical journals and newsletters and four anthologies of physician poetry: Blood and Bone, Primary Care, Uncharted Lines and Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities. In 1998 Nova Science Publishers (Imprint, Kroshka Books) published his nonfiction book Dinner Music: How to Compose the Permanently Perfect Diet, a right-brained approach to nutrition advice. The Natural Order of Things, his first poetry collection, was published in November 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Dr. Donze was an undergraduate English major at the University of Pennsylvania before embarking on a medical career, and currently practices at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, PA, part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, as Medical Director of the Hospital’s Occupational Medicine Program. He lives in West Chester, PA with his wife Kathleen. The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer is his first published work of fiction.
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