Narration provided by Wondervox

By Mark McNease

We’ll soon be heading off for our third cruise since January. That’s at least one too many in a calendar year, so we’ll be limiting it to two at most after this. I love to cruise, especially the days at sea when I can relax free from obligations, appointments and cat litter. This time we’re flying to Rome first, which is really how this trip came about—the opportunity to go somewhere both new and very old. I’m especially interested in seeing the Coliseum where the gladiators of my boyhood imagination fought to the death, represented by small plastic figures on the floor of my bedroom. We’ll spend three nights in Rome, then board a cruise ship that sails around the Mediterranean before crossing back across the Atlantic to New Jersey. That’s the other big attraction: we only have to fly one way. I wrote this column several years ago, and every word is still true.

SPENDING TIME ON A FLOATING hotel was never high on my wish list. I no more imagined going on a cruise than I imagined climbing the pyramids at Machu Picchu or hiking the Appalachian Trail. I didn’t have anything against them, they were just things other people did, feature stories in travel magazines I read when I was still flying by choice and not necessity. Then I met the man I’ve spent the last sixteen years with, and cruising entered my life. That can happen when we enter relationships: if you enjoy the unexpected, meet the person of your dreams.

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One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

Having passed the eight-year anniversary of leaving New York City for our little house in the New Jersey countryside, this reflection on life in a rural setting seemed timely again. We occasionally take a bus to Manhattan, or a train to Philadelphia, and we’re not far from some thriving towns along the Delaware River. But daily life is spent on a large tract of land filled with trees, deer, and exuberant animal life that includes a few neighbors along the road. Eight years later there’s not a single regret.

IT’S THE MORNING OF THE time change, that twice-yearly, incomprehensible turning of the clocks by an hour. We’re told, as if it’s an extra treat for puppies, that we’ll have “another hour to sleep.” This is untrue, since most of us inhabit bodies, not clocks, and rather than sleep another hour we just wake up sooner. So here I am an hour earlier than I would have been yesterday, sitting at my living room desk in the true darkness of the countryside, listening to the few sounds a small, old house in the woods has to offer just before sunrise.

Narration provided by Wondervox

By Mark McNease

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Five years after writing this, it’s still true that so many of the conversations I have with friends and peers is about comparing—not so much to one-up each other with our aches, pains, and fears about our future health issues, but to simply share these things we have in common. Perhaps ‘age is just a number,’ as the platitude insists, but the body has a different opinion.

What is it about aging that has so many of us comparing aches and pains, as if we’re war veterans comforted by knowing we’re not the only ones wounded? Life can feel like combat when you’ve survived enough of it, and maybe the time simply comes when the scars we show each other are the result of putting so many decades behind us.

I remember hearing people my age talk about knee stiffness, back pain, inflamed joints, and the malaise that comes from knowing you won’t die young. “It’s better than the alternative,” we say, assuming the alternative is a cemetery plot or an urn from the local crematorium. We console ourselves with having outlasted and outlived so much, but the body knows better the prices we pay. Friends long gone. Parents a memory that somehow becomes more cherished with the erosion of time. The increasing effort needed to get into a car, climb a staircase, and some days just get out of bed.