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One Thing Or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – The Drawer of Things We’ll Never Throw Away
By Mark McNease
Every home has one, and ours has several. Not the junk drawer. That’s different. The junk drawer is innocent, cluttered through no fault of its own. It has batteries, rubber bands, expired coupons, a screwdriver that doesn’t belong anywhere else. Maybe a hammer for no discernable reason. That drawer has plausible deniability.
I’m talking about the other drawer. The drawer of things we’ll never throw away.
It might be in a desk. Or a bedroom dresser. Or tucked into a cabinet no one opens unless they’re looking for something specific and end up standing there longer than they intended. You don’t organize this drawer. You visit it.
Inside mine
A program from a musical I don’t remember seeing.
A couple of old photos that never made it into my scrapbook.
Several keys of mysterious origin and purpose.
A napkin from a restaurant I’ve never been back to.
Loose match sticks. -
One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – Staying Visible As We Age
One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – Staying Visible As We Age
By Mark McNease
Stay tuned for the return of the One Thing Or Another Podcast: Interviews and Conversation
There’s a moment that comes with aging, a sort of chronological line we cross, when we realize that visibility is no longer something society affords everyone in equal measure.
Earlier in life, being visible often felt like a requirement. We showed up, spoke up, proved ourselves. Being seen was tied to usefulness, productivity, and momentum. Along the way, many of us also learned how to edit and censor ourselves, lowering our voices, choosing our words carefully, deciding when to speak and when to let things pass. Those habits don’t disappear just because the years do.
And then one day, it all shifted. We became older, and invisibility entered our lives whether we invited it or not. Clerks talked past us. Conversations moved forward without our input. Our experiences were acknowledged politely or not-so-politely, then set aside.
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One Thing Or Another Column: Reunited And It Feels So Old
By Mark McNease
Nothing snaps you into awareness of your age quite like someone’s sudden death or a high school reunion invitation in your mailbox. It’s basically an embossed reminder that time has in fact passed. Suddenly you’re wondering what everyone looks like now, who’s collecting Social Security, and whether anyone else still remembers you making your escape to California in that orange Gremlin three days after you got your diploma. If you’re like me, you never looked back, at least not too closely, until that invitation showed up and you wanted just a peek at the old gang.
I couldn’t go the year of the 45th reunion, and I’m quite certain I’ve got plans that will prevent me from attending the 50th (and if not, I’ll make them). Still, there might be a strange thrill in seeing how this many decades have treated a group of people I once glared at across the cafeteria while they ate at their invitation-only table. I’ll just have to squint at the photos online like everyone else and marvel at how none of them look the same.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU’RE probably old enough to remember the 1978 hit, Reunited, by Peaches and Herb. That song came out a year after my high school graduation, and it seems an appropriate choice now that I’ve been invited to our 45th reunion. I can’t make it this year because we’re going on our annual vacation to Provincetown. Had I been able to attend, it would have been a first: I have not gone to any reunion since leaving Indiana three days after snatching my diploma and packing up my orange Gremlin to head to California. It was a stick shift with no spare tire, but I made it across the continent, and only went back every year to see my parents until they passed away. After that, Indiana became a place to store memories, some of them great, many of them deservedly faded.
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One Thing or Another Column: Not Worth the Weight
By Mark McNease
How things have changed. When I first wrote this column GLP-1 drugs were not yet ubiquitous. Most people had never heard of them, except for reports of some individuals using a diabetic medication called Ozempic for weight loss. I recoiled at the idea. I would never inject myself with something to lose weight! But then, having failed for many years to actually shed the 50 extra pounds I’d put on (twice what’s mentioned in the column), I tried it. Not surprisingly, it worked. Almost a year and half later I’m still using Zepbound, among the most popular, and I’ve lost 35 pounds. Is it forever? Is anything, or anyone, forever? I’m hoping they finally come out with the pill version that’s been promised, but in the meantime I’ve got a steady supply in the fridge.
MY AMAZING WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY began five years ago. With great effort and dedication, I’ve managed to shed four pounds since that first fateful calorie count. How did I achieve this feat of negligible weight loss? I never thought you’d ask.
It all started with a now-defunct company called Lean Chefs. For a reasonable fee, they delivered a day’s worth of prepared food while we slept: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two yummy snacks. The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia. I would peer into the corridor first thing in the morning and there it was, a small black package at my feet, looking like something that might require a call to the bomb squad under normal circumstances. Inside it was the coming day’s food with an ice pack and an unspoken promise: eat these healthy provisions, and only these, and miracle weight loss will occur.
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One Thing Or Another Column: Why November?
By Mark McNease
Temperatures have plummeted, leaves have fallen, the gray days have taken on a certain despondency, depending on your mood. It must be November. I don’t have anything against it, and I always enjoy Thanksgiving, but there will always be something misplaced about the month, which I describe in further detail in this column from a few years ago. It still rings true.
NOVEMBER SEEMS LIKE AN ORPHAN month, stuck between the festivities of Halloween and the extravagance of Christmas. It’s that month when we wave goodbye to moderate weather, and say hello to furnaces and fireplaces. We watch leaves fall helplessly, their spectacular colors melting to a dull compost brown. November has a way of confirming our suspicions that nothing lasts forever. We get the tires checked or replaced, knowing they’ll soon be slipping and sliding in winter weather. We twiddle our thumbs, waiting for sleigh bells and gift ideas. November is just there, like a stretch of time spent in a waiting room. Eventually the door will open and we’ll be invited to the party, but in the meantime we’ll be reading a magazine on dental hygiene and hoping for the best.
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One Thing Or Another Column: Falling for Autumn
By Mark McNease
What better time to add a few new words of introduction to a column about autumn than the day we turned the heat back on! Those sweltering, sticky days of summer are finally behind us, and the mornings are once again greeted from beneath a blanket or quilt. It’s also that time of year, early October, when one day it was 83 degrees, and the next day 65. That maddening fluctuation seems to be behind us, and I can start insulating the window air conditioners and pulling out the thermal socks. It’s also my favorite month, with witches on their way here right now, and a birthday arriving just before them. Autum has arrived, and I’m still falling for it.
I’LL ADMIT IT, I’M A fall guy. We’ve just endured what I and millions like me believe must have been the hottest, longest, muggiest summer on record. Aren’t they all?
I don’t just dislike summer. I don’t just find it uncomfortable, unsettling and unending. I loathe it. Even knowing it would shorten my life by 25 percent, I would gladly get from birth to death without suffering a single blistering July. The only exception was childhood, when summer was my annual escape from the dullness of compulsory education, sadistic teachers, and the torment of other children.
It’s not the events of summer that get to me. Who doesn’t like long weekends at the beach or visiting friends within driving distance? And there are the barbecues, if you happen to have a grill or you’re friends with someone who does, possibly for that reason only. You’ve got swimming pools, water slides, and near-naked bodies to envy and desire. Summer has everything our overworked, underpaid selves long for and anticipate through the frigid dead of winter. But it also has one thing that makes it the time of year I dread from start to finish: the heat.
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One Thing or Another Column: Heaven’s Diner
By Mark McNease
After taking a beloved neighbor out Sunday morning to a church she sometimes attends, we headed for breakfast at a diner not far from there. I was reminded, as I regularly am, how much I enjoy these icons of the American culinary tradition. I remember hanging out at Denny’s when I was a teenager (a quasi-diner if looked at from a certain angle), writing anguished confessional poetry in spiral notebooks (keep reading). The poetry’s long gone but I’ve never lost my attraction for the comfort of a good diner, and I never well.
I READ AN ARTICLE ONCE about New York City’s disappearing diner culture. The writer lamented the loss of a sense of community diners gave the city over many decades, falling victim to technological progress, ever-rising rents and changing tastes.
This was one day after ending a visit to relatives by having breakfast in a Richmond, Virginia, diner. When we walked into the place I immediately looked around at the colors inside. The exterior, in stark black and red, told me I could expect something exceptionally diner-ish. The booths were red and black, the tables yellow. The two waitresses were distinctly post-punk, with tattoos and neon hair. The crowd, as is usually the case in diners, consisted of people who knew each other from years of eating there. Only first names were necessary, if names were needed at all. And each of them—men, women and children—looked as if they’d enjoyed lives filled with grits and hash browns, without a single kale salad from cradle to grave. My kind of people.
That may sound odd coming from an older progressive man who spent years living in Los Angeles and New York before moving to the New Jersey woods, but I was forged as a Hoosier in a northern Indiana town, and there are parts of me that cannot be dislodged by having fled to California at nineteen. I don’t regret having had a solid sense of myself before I was exposed to the L.A. lifestyle. I’m happy to have had a clear identity that allowed me to try on others, discarding those that didn’t fit. Beneath it all I am an Indiana kid who loves a crowded diner and a cup of cheap coffee.
Diners have been my idea of stability and comfort ever since I was a fifteen-year-old poet sitting at a lunch counter, filling spiral notebooks with teenage angst while the waitress kept the .25 cent coffee flowing. I like going to diners in most places I visit. There’s a local one two blocks from where I’ll be once I’ve finished this column. I’ll order my favorite—two eggs, toast and turkey bacon, with tomato juice over ice.
The server will know me. The cashier will smile and tell me to sit anywhere. The cooks will be familiar as they move quickly from grill to kitchen window, slapping the bell, “Order up!” There will be lots of people at the tables, and even though I won’t recognize more than a few of them, they will feel like my friends—because a diner is one of the few places in life where it’s possible to believe we’re all in this together.
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One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – Found At Sea
I’m currently updating these columns to publish as a 2nd edition this year, as a handout for my autobiographical journaling participants. They can all relate.By Mark McNease
While I’ve always been a river person much more than an ocean person, my fondness for large bodies of water remains. Humans seem to share this, or at least many of us. There’s something about water … Is it where we came from? Does it remind us of the first nine months of our lives? We’ll be going on another cruise soon, and my favorite part of it is always the sea days. Someday I’ll be as the drop of water returning to an infinite vastness of it. Until then, I’ll be drawn to the streams and the lakes and the rivers and the oceans.
BODIES OF WATER HOLD A fascination for many people, as well as providing an indescribable comfort. I grew up in an Indiana town with two rivers, and I live just a mile from the magnificent Delaware flowing slowly between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For me there has always been something about the movement of these vast waterways that felt like home, as if I really am a fish out of water longing to jump back in where I belong and swim away.
Oceans are like that, too, multiplied a million times. Oceans are adventures without end, journeys we can only take with our minds. Even if we sail out on them in boats or cruise ships, they’re so much bigger than we are that it makes us aware of our true size. Oceans and rivers, lakes, and even streams, cannot be argued with. They are the masters of us, not us of them, and their indifference is acute. An ocean doesn’t care what I think about world events or political developments, loves lost or triumphs enjoyed. Like its celestial counterpart spread across the night sky in a trillion tiny lights, it doesn’t even know I’m alive, reminding me that I needn’t be so consumed with own existence. I’m here. So what? I’ll twinkle like a star, leap like a fish in the shallows, break like a wave, and then I’ll go away. I think of that as peaceful, not sad.
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One Thing or Another Column: Cooler Heads (Hello September)
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
September arrives once again. I wasn’t a summer person when I first wrote this, and at this point in my life I never will be. I prefer the option of putting a sweater on to taking another piece of clothing off—there’s only so much of that to remove. The cool air of a fast-approaching autumn feels good on my skin and on my mind. Waking up with the windows open and a comfortable breeze blowing in is like opening my eyes to a new and exciting day. And so it shall always remain.
I’M NOT A SUMMER PERSON, and when my time comes to buckle up and speed away from this crazy planet on whatever form of transportation the afterlife provides, I will depart having never liked the hot season. I tell myself it’s my Viking blood, although I can’t claim to have any. Ancestry holds no interest for me whatsoever—and I’m adopted, so whose ancestors would I research anyway?
I’m not alone in my preference for seasons. Most people have their favorites, and at least one they put up with because they have no choice. For me it’s when we’re closest to the sun and farthest from a parka. When June arrives in earnest I know the humidity can’t be far behind, and with it the heat that amplifies its discomfort. If you’ve ever wondered what meteorologists mean when they offer the ‘feels like’ temperature, it’s the moisture, the dew point, that awful stickiness only a powerful air conditioner can neutralize, and only when you stay inside. Walk out the door on a hot, humid summer day, and that refreshing coolness is forgotten in an instant. Ovens are dryer, and at least you can make dinner with them. Speaking of ovens … don’t. When summer is blazing, my rule at home is no cooking that requires heat of any kind. It’s possibly the best thing about those record-setting hot temperature days.
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One Thing or Another Column: Cruise Control (All Aboard!)
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 Column: That Relaxed Fit Time of Life
Narration provided by Wondervox
By Mark McNease
I never did buy the bicycle I mention in this, and it’s just as well. I’m sure it would have gathered dust in the garage. I walk as often as the mood hits me, but I haven’t glided down the road on a two-wheeler in a decade or so. I’m still in a relaxed-fit stage of life, perhaps more so five years later, and it feels increasingly as if I’m exactly where I ought to be.It hit me recently when I was out looking for a new bicycle. I told the young man working at the store that I was mostly concerned with comfort. I’m not trying out for the Tour de France, and I don’t imagine myself riding in that event, unlike many of the people I see zipping around the New Jersey countryside with brand names on their backs and Spandex hugging them more tightly than a human ought to be hugged. I’m just a guy who lives in the woods and wants to get my heart rate up a few times a week by circling the back roads of my rural community.
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One Thing or Another Column: Country Mice
Narration provided by Wondervox
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.