By Mark McNeease

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.

November can be exciting if you celebrate a birthday, anniversary, or early retirement. But the month doesn’t offer much pizazz. It’s like February, that sad, short stretch of days sandwiched between the hopes of the new year and the tease of spring. November doesn’t announce itself with a confident, “I’m here, let’s have some fun!” It arrives with a sudden chill, reminding us to order new winter socks and get the space heater out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Narration provided by Wondevox

By Mark McNease 

Time is not so much an arrow as a comet we ride, streaking across the sky.

You can tell from the first sentence I was 62 when I wrote this. Five years later my perspective on the fleeting nature of time hasn’t changed. I’ve long said that “time is a non-renewable resource,” and I still believe that. The older we get, the less of it we have. That’s not maudlin, it’s just true. As yet another friend died recently, it seemed like a good time to revisit the subject. Pun intended.

The good news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. The bad news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. When I was twenty, I never imagined being forty. It seemed so far away from that youthful ground I stood upon with naive bravado. Then when I hit forty, I thought fifty would be the last milestone to publicly mark, quietly retiring birthday observations with the exception of a few close friends and family. And finally, when I approached the age when referring to oneself as a senior becomes culturally appropriate, I decided I could at minimum look forward to collecting a monthly stipend for my troubles. We should all be paid for getting old, at least those of us lucky enough to live that long.

I was a wild child in many ways, defiant to a fault. I became a teenager whose rebellion was sometimes life threatening, and eventually I grew into a man with the sorts of weaknesses and appetites that make it slightly remarkable I’m still here. So seeing a direct deposit into my checking account every month from the Social Security Administration is a reminder that a lot of people don’t survive to collect this modest reward. Cancer gets them, or leukemia, or car accidents, or sudden organ failure. A thousand different ways to end this train ride called life before it gets to the last few stations. Friends I lost to HIV are long dead, and memories I have of them are flashcards of much younger men. Were they to stand in front of me again, I may recognize them, but they probably would not recognize me forty years later.

Time is not so much an arrow as a comet we ride, streaking across the sky. We only think it drags because we’re on it, like riders saddling imaginary horses that stand stock still while the ground moves beneath us. We experience time when it is behind us or in front of us, but seldom when it is right where we are. And so it seems to move slowly or quickly, its speed determined by our anticipation of something not yet occurred, or our disbelief at how much is behind us.

It’s only fitting we be paid while we’re still young enough to benefit from it. It’s the least society can do to compensate us for our patience. It seems time really is money, and just as fleeting. We may not spend either of them all in one place, but we will certainly spend them all in one lifetime.