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 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.

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

By Mark McNease

Age has a strange effect on time: the more we have of one, the less we have of the other.

When my mother died twenty-four years ago I told someone that losing our parents meant we were moving closer to the turnstile. Then my father died, and the parents of everyone I knew who was my age or near it. The truth became inescapable that we were next: our siblings, our friends, people we looked up to and people we looked down upon. Everyone, it seems, is destined for the same fate, and it was quickening its pace. Each loss takes us nearer to our own jumping off place, and with the departure of every friend, peer and acquaintance comes the uncomfortable sensation that we really, truly, may be next.

It’s not maudlin to stare at the shortening line and see the rollercoaster coming round the tracks for us. There’s the sense it won’t be long now, and pretty soon—whether it’s a year from now, or ten years, or twenty—I’ll be fastened into the tiny car, have the bar pressed into me and locked for safety, and rocket off into the unknown. It’s a ride we all must take alone. There will be no one seated next to us screaming with delight as we plunge into … wherever it is we go, or don’t go. I’m not personally invested in the next ride, if there is one, or the next. Heaven can definitely wait for me, since I’ve never had any interest in going there. My hope, and belief, is to flicker out, having lived as bravely and as brightly as I could. Beyond that, just drop me back into the ocean, it’s fine with me.