Familiarity breed contempt, or so they say. The girl that places my groceries into paper, or sometimes plastic, bags says that, or at least she said that once when I was in line about to check out. She didn’t say it to me, but she said it to the girl who had the better job, the one who grabbed and pulled each item over the scanner. That girl, too, agreed that familiarity breeds contempt, and they were quite sure of it. There was no debate. I wasn’t all that sure, and I’m still not all that sure. I think familiarity breeds criticism, which can be construed as contempt, but is, in fact, a form of love.
This is how I feel when I drive these roads, and wrap around these shores. There are no more surprises for me here. There is no road that I haven’t traveled down, no corner that I can approach with any sense of mystery. I know all of it. I know my road and I know your road, I know where each starts and where they lead. My eyes see the views that they have captured for all of my 35 years. There has been no time spent away, no prodigal departure and no celebrated return. There wasn’t a time when I didn’t see this view, no time when I missed the change in a road, a change in a house, or any change in the pattern.
This familiarity has become my curse. Because there is no new route to explore, no new drive to wander down, there is just the review of the known. When eyes are no longer discovering newness, they look deeper into the familiar. Familiar eyes can critique what new eyes can only marvel at. I see a sunrise and I love it. I do. I take it in and I appreciate every ray and every glint, and when that sun peaks over the Cedar Point horizon I have not yet lost the ability to marvel at it. But the familiarity of the scene causes my eye to wander, to look away from the spectacle and down to the shore, and south some, to see a home that still has their Christmas lights up in April, and I think that’s a shame. The small bit of blight stands in the way of perfection in the way I prefer it.
Or when I drive the lake, and I see magnificence to my right, where those lakefront lanes lazily bend towards the water. How I love that view. But I cast my eyes left, to a section of property here or there that has one too many road unworthy cars in the drive, a blue tarp flapping in the breeze over just one corner of a pop up trailer. It is the Fairmont Edition, which we all know to be one step above the Leisure model, but still. It’s a blight, and my eyes are now drawn to these rare occurrences with vicious regularity.
This lake is remarkably clean, but on certain days when the boats whip and the wind joins in, I can’t help but look at a dirtied section of water and think it is a shame. I can’t look at it and think I don’t need to make an excuse for it. I can’t look at it and wish that the lake would behave better, that it would be on its absolute best behavior. This isn’t its best foot, I’d think, and it shouldn’t be shoreward where I, and these buyers, can see it. In the face of 5400 acres of sparkling clear water, I find myself struggling to accept a few cloudy water bays on a few windy days.
If I were new here, and these were new views and new roads, I wouldn’t think this way. I’d be distracted by the wide grasp of this natural and built beauty, and I wouldn’t dwell on two dead trees near a point that attract too many vultures. I’d see only the green canopy beyond those trees, and I’d see the hawks and the eagles, and the Robins and the Bluejays, and I’d see the majestic homes sprinkled into the scene, and I wouldn’t care one bit about those trees. But, those trees. They’re all I see, because I know the green and the birds and the homes, and this is something that disrupts my known view, so I dwell on it.
Today, I’ll drive. I’ll make my way around this beautiful lake at least once, or, as is my mile-chugging habit, probably twice. I’ll drive past the things I know, down the roads I know, and I’ll do my darndest to focus on the perfect. It is all around, after all, everywhere you look up here. I’ll do my best to view it with new eyes, which should distract me from the things that I know well enough to dislike. I’ll try my best, but when tax season arrives and that Statue of Liberty starts spinning that tax sign, all bets are off.