Mark McNease

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.