One Thing or Another: Let’s Face It (Unmasked At Last)

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

I took the gestures we make with our faces for granted. I failed to understand how crucial a form of communication our faces are, and how strange it would become when we no longer exposed them to each other.

For fourteen months I did the right thing for myself and my community. I wore a mask despite finding it uncomfortable and inconvenient. It was required at my job, but I also wanted to be part of a solution when no one was sure what the solution was. This pandemic was a new experience for me, my country and the world. At least it was new insofar as it had been a hundred years since the last significant one.

Then the vaccines arrived, like the calvary showing up in a syringe. Most people I know managed to get appointments after sharing among ourselves how difficult it was, a form of pandemic gossip and communal anxiety. We sat in chairs, we rolled up our sleeves and offered our fleshy arms, and we walked away amazed at how anticlimactic it was. I went through this for months and all I got was this lousy vaccination card.

After what seemed like an endless ordeal for us all, I have been able to shed the mask. I never realized until our faces had been covered how much we rely on, and take comfort from, simply seeing each other’s facial expressions.

Before this health crisis, we never had reason to consider the effects of living in a masked-up society. I took the gestures we make with our faces for granted. I failed to understand how crucial a form of communication our faces are, and how strange it would become when we no longer exposed them to each other.

For over a year I saw eyes, hair, parts of noses … and then a strip of cloth or cotton. It was like hearing a voice and not knowing where it came from, or what it was trying to tell me. I knew people were talking, but could I swear to it? And what, exactly, is talking when there are no moving mouths to interpret the words for us, to tell us a sentence includes humor, anger, sadness, indifference? To communicate with only half an exposed face is to present a strange reality and insist there’s nothing strange about it.

Now that the masks are gone or going away, I not only hear what people say to me, I see it. I can once again detect sincerity, or annoyance, or affection, without having to assume I’m being told the truth. Faces have a much harder time lying when we can see all of them; love and joy are somehow more powerful when they’re not just offered with language and eyes.

Imagine spending a year with everyone unable to move their arms, or gesture with their hands. Human beings speak to each other in ways much more varied, complex, and interesting than just words. The body has its own vocabulary, faces most of all. How wonderful it is to see them again.

Mark McNease is the author of ten novels, two short story collections and six produced plays. He was the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors. He lives in rural New Jersey with his husband and two cats. He can be found most days atMarkMcNease.com