Richard Ford - Rock Springs, Optomists lyrics

And what I did then was stare at the picture on the wall, the picture my father had been staring at, a picture I had seen every day. Probably I had seen a thousand times. It was two people with a baby on the beach. A man and a woman sitting in the sand with an ocean behind. They were smiling at the camera, wearing bathing suits. In all the times I had seen the I'd thought that it was a picture in which I was the baby, and the two people were my parents. But I realized as I stood there, that it was not me at all; it was my father who was a child in the picture, and the parents there were his parents-two people I'd never known, and who were dead-and the picture was so much older than I had thought it was. I wondered why I hadn't know that before, hadn't understood it myself, hadn't always known it. Not that it even mattered.