GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Working in a bookstore I am delighted to admit

Has some wonderful advantages...some unexpected benefits.

How can I not be mesmerized by the charm and the allure

When I find myself surrounded by the world’s great literature?

It has prompted me to look around and wistfully concede

There are so many books...so many authors whom I have yet to read.

So I went home to our bookshelves with the expressed purpose to explore

If they housed any novels I hadn’t read before.

I discovered we had some classics to my sheer enjoyment and exultations.

I finished Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and I’m on to Dickens’s Great Expectations.

I was reading at my own pace and wondering if I would see

Pip give Estella a kiss on page one hundred and forty-three.

He didn’t, so I quickly turned to page one hundred and forty-four

But before the kiss could be revealed, something fell out on the floor.

I closed the book and picked it up...and was reminded how lucky I am

For in my hand, dated February 2, 2004, I held a 10 year old sonogram.

There was a picture of our grandson Aden packed into Ali’s expanding space.

To help us recognize what we were looking at it had labels...body and face.

Ali’s name was in the corner, it was 9:27 A.M. when the time stopped

And on the bottom of the sonogram...the words Hi Nana and Pop Pop.

In many ways life is like a novel for as we read we’re never quite aware

When we turn from one page to the next what might be waiting for us there.

Sometimes our story is predictable, sometimes there are twists and turns about

And sometimes when we least expect it, a memory floats out.

Will I keep reading the classics? On that question there is no debate.

For thanks to the bookstore and Charles Dickens...my expectations are now great.