“What you see is what you get,” is an old saying I heard somewhere. I don’t know where it came from or exactly what it means. Maybe it’s an old horse trader’s saying, meaning “let the buyer beware.” Maybe it’s another way of saying “seeing is believing.” From my personal experience I can say it ain't necessarily so.

Several years ago on a clear, starry, October night I looked up through the bare branches of a tree at a particular star and saw nearby a small constellation of seven or eight stars that I had never noticed before. I moved my focus to the constellation that simultaneously disappeared from my view. I refocused on the star and the constellation reappeared. This was a bit unsettling, for I had never noticed such a phenomenon before. I thought it must be astigmatism. Maybe I needed new glasses.

Months or maybe years later I noticed my reading lamps were not as bright as usual, or perhaps the newsprint quality had faded. I tried boosting my lamp’s intensity with brighter bulbs. This helped a little, for a while, but then the crossword puzzle had some strange little curves in the grid that seemed to change depending on where I focused on the grid. I realized that I had symptoms of age-related macular degeneration, AMD.

It soon became apparent that the small blind spot in the middle of my field of vision was growing. I could see all around the blind spot, but eventually that became dimmer. My friendly doctor was impotent in helping the patient except to say that I would probably not go completely blind and “maybe we can slow down the process.”

Despite the aggravation and the feelings of helplessness, I have seen some interesting things along the way. I never had any control over what I saw or when I saw it. Perfectly shaped little green trees no taller than a person appeared and bore bright red berries while I watched. Sometimes a scraggly little bush with only bare twigs grew a profusion of fine leaves as an asparagus plant, hiding all the bare twigs. My view of the roadside as we rode along the highway revealed young trees that never became closer as we approached them. The trees were ablaze with little egg-sized lights, perhaps masquerading as Christmas trees.

Sitting in a dimly lit room I saw line drawings of faces, usually on a brick-colored background. Most of these faces were new to me and of a great variety of shapes and expressions. There were men with bald heads, with moustaches, with beards of all lengths and shapes. Just about any face one could imagine showed up on this stage. I recognized some of the faces, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John Wayne, for example. I saw few women, but those I saw had pretty fancy hairdos, mostly red. I never got a chance to study a face because it was always changing in either expression or into a different face. The change in expression was almost always toward a glum look.

I have seen other things, perhaps less interesting than faces. I have seem board fences with ivy crawling up them, plain brick walls, segments of straight lines arranged in the fashion of a spider’s web or a promiscuous pattern such as one might find in a flagstone walkway. A close-up of an elephant’s right eye appeared a few times.

One of the more common scenes was that of a ceramic tile floor. It was usually white, inch-square tiles laid in a spiral pattern around a small object such as a small statue, fountain or just a void. A white pattern always morphed into one with brightly colored tiles randomly placed throughout the tile floor. The colored squares changed position and color frequently, never static and boring.

I heard of other AMD people who saw much more interesting things than I have. One saw a group of little girls playing games in the front yard. Another saw a roomful of monkeys scampering about in her kitchen and in other parts of the house.

It has been a while since I have seen visions such as I have described, and I may never see another one. I did find it interesting to experience a tour through the world of surprises and see what there was to “see”. All this leaves me with the notion that “what you see is what you get” depends on who’s doing the looking.