I've been thinking about my parents.
Not the parents I knew, but the mom and dad I did not know.
They are both gone but I still wonder about the parents I never knew.
They both had tough childhoods and probably did stupid things like we did as kids. I want to know all about those stupid things.
Well, that wish turned into a crazy thought … about that magic lamp, the one with the genie who grants you three wishes.
I came up with this wish: Let me remember my first year, when I was a baby seeing the world and my parents for the first time.
They were so young. Dad, 21, was still living with memories of war. Mom was bumping 21, learning what it meant to be a wife and now a mother.
I see them happy, stretched out on a bed with me wiggling between them. They are gently poking my nose and letting my tiny fingers grip theirs, making gibberish sounds in that squeaky baby talk voice.
And talking to each other. About me. You know, how cute I am. Who I look like. Will I be president someday? How I learned to walk.
I changed their lives. The parents I came to know began to form and slowly discard the kids they were.
They gave. They sacrificed. And that first year ... all those diapers and me wailing at all hours, their focus of every day.
But that first year had to be amazing. Imagine if I could see it now. Every single moment with two special people. Stan and Helen slowly becoming Mom and Dad.
I’m Lonny Cain … and that’s my Perspective.
