I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was lying on a pier, a white one, and the depth of my dream revealed to me that I was indeed on a pier in Cedar Point Park. If I must be specific, I was somewhere around Oak Birch. I was on the pier, lying on my back, at the end of the pier but facing the shore, surrounded by darkness. It must have been summer, though the temperature didn’t register the way it probably would have had it been warm. Let’s assume it was fall. Like now, but not as late as this. It was a younger fall, but still fall. The pier was cold against my back, less cold than cool, the sky dark above me riddled with uncountable pin holes. There was light enough to make out the pier and the bowl of trees that surrounds the bay, but there was no moon.
I rested there on that pier and I was content. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t calling someone or emailing someone else. I was just there on that pier in my dream and I was happy.
Lake Geneva is like that to me. I don’t have to be doing anything as much as I just have to be here. There was a time in my life when I thought that selling real estate in southwest Florida in the winter might be a nice idea. This was a time before kids, when thoughts that seemed reasonable were not deciphered as the fairytale dreams that I can see them now to be. I thought about the gulf coast, and about playing tennis after work whenever I felt like it, under the bright lights of the Marco Racquet Club, and I liked those thoughts. But the more I thought, the more I realized that southwestern Florida is fun if on vacation in the dead of winter for a spell, but if you’re working there, in a shirt with the ends tucked in, those beautiful beach days just become intolerably hot work days. I nixed the idea.
If a day like today might be beautiful in Fiji, or in Aruba, or some other further flung island in the sand, I would like to be there. But I would only like to be there for a moment, a day, perhaps ten, before I longed for the crisp of a November day such as this. Last night, with the sky growing dark, I visited my parent’s home. I was lured there by my father who told me that he had a gift for me. Catching glimpses of the lake through the newly twiggy gaps that span Conference Point Road, I could see the Cedar Point shoreline was ablaze in light so soft and orange. The lake was quiet and cold and dark while the deciduous shoreline was warmly brown and red. The dying light was focused on those trees, as if magnified and intensified for the sole purpose of presenting to anyone who would look. It grabbed my attention. I savored the sight, snapped a shot for you, grabbed my plural present, and drove home. The lake at my back, my presents of freshly picked acorn squash sliding back and forth over my back seat.
In July, when the sun is hot and the water blue and boat gassed, it isn’t a stretch to say that there is truly no place I’d rather be than right here. Most people would agree, and if they would not agree, then they suffer from some untold ailment that dangerously impairs their judgment. But when I tell you that on a day like today, with temperatures cool but also ample sun and a boat that is mostly out of gas, that this is still the only place I want to be, you might accuse me of lying. Surely I’d rather be on that beach in Aruba, or somewhere, anywhere else, somewhere warmer or sunnier or somewhere with mountains and valleys. I say to you that Majestic is the only “mountain” I need, and that your sun might be warmer, but my sun gets to cast its light onto this lake. Advantage my sun. Advantage my lake. Advantage Geneva.