Leon Lessinger, now 92 years old, is a retired US Government official living in California. As a young man, he witnessed the testing of the first atomic bombs during his service as an Army engineer. This experience, and the knowledge of what it led to, left him saddened and shocked at what people can do to each other. After the war, he went on to have an illustrious career as a government official in various fields, including 50 years in supervisory positions as an educator. In his retirement, he ponders life and thinks of what he would like to leave from his experiences to future generations. The biggest gift he would like to give, he feels, is a sense of morality and compassion, in other words, goodness to each other. He expresses these feelings in a poetic form he terms “word paintings,” snapshots of sentiments he models after the “haiku” of the Zen poet Basho.
