School girl, Working girl, Wife, Mother, And Bobbe

School girl. Working girl.  Wife.  Mother.  And Bobbe.

“Leslie, said Missus Farnham to her grand daughter,”you’re a young lady. A teenager maybe, but a young lady with lots of dreams. And Leslie,” said Grandma, “they’re not all beautiful dreams.”

                                            II

 “But Bobbe,”said Leslie, winding her long golden blonde hair into a pony tail.. “If dreams

are not all beautiful, how you can tell the difference between the pretty ones and the ugly ones?”

“Ugly dreams get dirty with life,” said Grandma. “The clean dreams stay beautiful all the

time.”     

                                            III

And the Bobbe’s brown eyes trailed oiff into the yesterdays of the past, remembering that morning, when sweepiung the stoop on 92^nd Street and Avenue B in East Flastbush, she overheard a sixth grader on her way to P.S. 233, say to her girl friend “Gee, I wish I was little again.”

                                              IV

 “Bobbe,” said Leslie, all of her twelve years of soap and suds groping for answers into maturity.”How can I know what kind of dreams I have now, if I have to wait till life dirties the ugly ones?”

“That my child,” said Grandma, “maybe why God puts us on this minor planet He wants to see if we can pass the test of life and keep our dreams beautiful and clean.”

“ Did you pass the test, Bobbe?” asked Leslie.

“I don’t know if I did or not,” said Bobbe Esther. “But I don’t think I failed.”

Remembering way back when “What we are is God’s gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God”.

The City that never sleeps, December 4, 2012