I'm going to head out of the office a little early today and drive down to Mom and Dad's. I'll get to the home where I was raised, kiss Dad on the forehead and hug and kiss my mother as I always do. It will smell good at my childhood home. Mom will most certainly have something - carne con papas, potaje de frijoles colorados, chicharos - on the stove, simmering away, filling the entire house with its delicious aroma.

I'll hang out chatting with Mom and Dad for a bit as we always do. Talk about this and that, about their health, about how my Tio Pepin is doing, about the news.

My wife will join us as well, maybe my sister and my nieces. We'll sit down to an early dinner and enjoy my Mom's cooking together as a family - something we dont do nearly as much as we should.

Mom will have somewhat of stern countenance today. She always gets this serious look on her face when she has to do something she doesnt want to. Dad will just give us all that dont pay attention to your mother look and ask us to help him pick something out for him to wear.

Mom is a little nervous, you see. Tonight is the premiere of My Suitcase Full Of Hope, the documentary on the Freedom Flights which we were interviewed for, and we're going to watch it on the big screen at the Tower Theater. Dad's been bragging about it to anyone that would listen for weeks, Mom, not so much. She is too humble, muy penosa, and has never wanted to be in any limelight.

"I wouldn't have done it," she said the other day. "If I would have known that we'd have to go watch it at a theater with other people around."

Mom is a little worried - a bit embarrassed - that people might come up to her after the film and talk to her or congratulate or or something. Of course, my joking with her that she's the "star" of the film and that people will be clamoring for her autograph at the premiere didn't really help much.

I've yet to see the finished film, but if it's anything like Joe Cardona's previous documentaries, we're gonna need plenty of tissue. In this film, we'll see each persons story as told by that person. And as Ive said a million times, I could sit down to write my Mom and Dad's story of exile, but I could never capture it and show it as well as they themselves telling the story in their own words.

Mom will get all dressed up tonight and will keep what she is thinking as she does all to herself. She will be fighting nervousness and a little apprehension.

I'll help Dad with his clothes. Make sure his laces are tied nice and tight. Make sure all his buttons are buttoned. Make sure his belly is nicely tucked inside his double-X shirt and his collar is straight.

When we're all set we'll hop into the Buick and head down to Calle Ocho. We'll drive through the streets of their adopted city, each road sprinkled with one memory or another. We'll pass many a house adorned with steel shaped and welded and formed by my father's hand. "Remember the time when we..." we'll ask each other as we pass this landmark or that benchmark of our life in exile.

We'll park somewhere near Tower Theater, a few blocks away from where dad found the bed in a trash pile that my sister and I first slept on here in the land of freedom. A block and a half away from our old apartment and my grandparent's old place just a few steps away. Across the street we'll remember where my first school was and how I kept crying and yelling that first day. We'll remember Evelio, my old barber that my grandfather would take me to whose shop was right next door to the theater.

Tonight, three generations of the Prieto family will sit down inside the Tower Theater - the first theater we all ever went to here in Miami - and watch a documentary that tells our story of arrival. Mom and Dad will be up on the big screen, humbly telling their story that is resonant of so many others'.

And I'll sit there next to them, among family and friends, fighting tears and in awe and wonder, asking myself if forty years ago, when they took their first steps here in the land of freedom, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their love and convictions in their hearts, they could have ever imagined this particular moment. Or if, as they take in this film, they realize just what a gift they gave my sister and me.

Twenty years from now, when my parents are long gone, those broken dreams of theirs that led to their exile will have been mended. Some day, when their great-grandchildren are in college pursuing their own dreams, they'll have this film to show them how their Abuelos - the ones they remember from childhood memories - paved the way for them. How their Abuelo's sacrifices made their dreams possible. They will realize just how lucky they are, how lucky we have all been, to have had my Mom and Dad open the doors of freedom for us.