On a familiar view

sometimes the only solace is in the repetition

Kris Guay

Feb 12, 2022

Last night while I was scrolling through Instagram, I sent my youngest son in Tennessee a silly video of a cat.

“Did you see my Instagram story?” he said.

I quickly scrolled over to find his.

“Oh no!!” I typed back. “Did she take him back?”

“She just left with him a few minutes ago,” he said.

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Do you want to talk?”

“I’m going out to disc golf,” he said.

We always knew he was a temporary foster to this beloved cat and that someday, post pandemic, the original pet parent would come back for Bandit. I also knew this familiar ruse of his, “going out to disc golf,” meant that he didn’t want to talk. And in this case, I actually think he really did want the solace of the disc golf course that he walks through every week, in all seasons, and all times of the day. The same landscape, and the same repetitive motions of flinging a disc past trees and brush, hoping to hit the metal and chain basket located impossibly far away and practically out of sight.

The other day I was driving back from the gym a couple of towns away. It was early morning, no sun, just a pervasive misty fog everywhere I looked. I pulled over to get a picture of a tree set way back in a pastoral landscape. This happened to be the same one I have photographed in different seasons, different light, and different times of the day, over many years. Janyce and I would pull the car over at the end of the day on our commute home, “Whoa, look at how beautiful it is,” she would say.

In the summer, we would sometimes see an artist pulled over on this same flat stretch of sandy grass. The artist would have an easel set up, and the back of the hatchback open, oil paints spilling out of a brown cardboard box in the back. There is something about this view that makes you want to stop and breathe it in, take a picture, or paint it. We used to call this our tree. There was something special about us watching the scene change throughout the years, and doing it together. So I was happy to be driving by it again, happy for the familiarity and the repetition.

Like so many of us, I feel like I’m starting over. Like I am driving along one of those ingrained routes again after having stopped for years. Well, literally, that was exactly what I was doing. But more than that, I’m trying to make sense of the pause that I’ve had. I’m trying to reevaluate the way back. Do I take a new road? Or do I drive the same one over again and see what is the same, what has changed?

The pandemic is waning, the world has shifted, and all of us are having the shared experience of starting over. And some of us have had more displacement than others. My young adult son has been displaced again and again, right at the start of his audio career in Nashville when things should be exciting and hopeful and one opportunity naturally builds upon another. As his mom, I want to give him back his cat, or get him a new cat. But it doesn’t work that way. If we were talking right now, he would say to me, “Mom, I’m fine. I’ll figure it out.” I have to trust that he is resilient enough to get through all the disappointment lately and come out okay on the other side. But I’m not feeling all that resilient these days, so why would he?

“Man, I have got to get a handle on my online bills,” says my spouse Janyce. She walks in front of me where I am sitting at the dining table on Saturday morning. She is a frenetic blur in her black and white work out clothes. I look up from my screen.

“I just paid the home insurance bill that looked very late and come to find out, I had paid it already last week,” she says. “So I paid it twice. I’m all over the place.”

“You are a little over-stressed these days,” I say. “Come here, I want to show you something.”

She walks behind me and looks over my shoulder and we scroll through a bunch of photos that I took of this same tree throughout the years.

“When did you take these?” she says.

“Every time I drove past the gym.” I said.

“Wow, I remember us driving past that one,” she says. “Beautiful.”

“Let’s take a deep breath and look at these photos for a minute,” I say. “Let’s look at them again.”