I Seen Sunshine?

 Why I Seen Sunshine?

The grammatician in me just had a stroke. I have seen sunshine? I saw sunshine? I will have seen the sunshine?

From the time she brought me home from the hospital my mom called me Suzy Sunshine or just Sunshine for short. I was a happy infant, thrust into the chaos of a late 70s home where I was the bonus baby of a too tired undergrad student Mom and an "I'll never make enough money for all this" Dad who had given away all their baby stuff after retiring from the Army with my two older siblings.

I slept in the bottom drawer of my mom's dresser for the first few months.

Maybe the unexpected miracle of my arrival made it critical that I not only sleep through the night from day one, but also wake up smiling and happy each morning. Forty-six years later, I still wake up mostly happy for the first five or so seconds before the panic sets in.

In 2002, I met the love of life for the first time over lunch at an Italian restaurant in the town where we both grew up and had both recently moved back to. Less than four months later we'd move in together, and two years after that, we got married. For 27 years I carried what I thought were the dumbest initials on the planet and if you're from the South where monograming is really a thing, it's a big deal to have dumb initials. My parents named me Susan Elaine East after a coin toss and a gentle reminder from the nurse that it was easier if you named the kid before you left the hospital. A Southern girl with the initials SEE was such a dumb idea that my brother's now wife didn't believe those were my initials when she wanted to have something engraved for me on the occasion of me being an attendant at their wedding.

"Who would make up such dumb initials?" I queried my brother as he was relaying her disbelief.

When I married Danny Nelson I won the salvation his consonant brought me. I was now SEEN, at least for those few days before the nice lady at the Social Security office made me decide once and for all what my legal name would be. 

So I Seen Sunshine... and boy have I. Not that I haven't seen darkness in helpings that would be considered impolite by good manners. Maybe that's helped me see the sunshine even better.

I'm too old for Insta/Tik/Gram-whatever, but if I can bring a smile or some perspective to someone doomscrolling or Facebooking from the best porcelain seat available, then maybe I've brought some light to this world and that's a good thing.

I Seen Sunshine and I feel compelled to share it. Thanks for stopping by.