18. The basic need for friendship and friendliness.

All Good Things by Bread and Puppet Press, original masonite cuts by Peter Schumann

These days keep happening: the days where you and your son go to the bank to get his learner’s permit notarized, and you stand in line for fifteen minutes behind an impossibly old woman wearing one blue surgical glove and when you get to the teller, she informs you that, unfortunately, the notary is out today, but you can go to the fourth floor of the Land Title Building next door, because there’s a notary office there, and you do but when the bell chimes and the elevator doors open, there’s just an empty office for senior housing or some such, and you realize you took the wrong elevators to the wrong fourth floor, but when you turn back around the elevator doors are made of the same wood paneling as the walls, and for a moment you can’t see the elevator doors at all, and you and your son laugh because it’s so absurd and improbable, all these silly mishaps on a simple errand on a Monday afternoon, and you go back down to the first floor and out to Broad and over to Chestnut and back in the elevators (different elevators) and go to the fourth floor (different fourth floor) and when the elevator chimes and the doors open there’s a different office, this time full of smiling chattering people, and you and your son approach the desk and ask for the notary and everyone laughs because the notary is on the FOURTEENTH floor, not the fourth, and you’re like the fourth person who has come in today looking for the notary, and you tell them it must be because the notary is out today at the bank and the teller is sending everyone to the fourth floor of the Land Title Building and everyone laughs and laughs. You get back into the elevator, and you go to the fourteenth floor and the bell chimes and you step out into an empty hallway with low ceilings that make you kind of want to stoop as you walk down the hall, searching for the notary. Eventually there is an open door to a tiny office with two tiny desks and a tiny sign that says “notary” and two tiny, cheerful, bespectacled ladies in the cluttered office who are exactly who you would picture if Wes Anderson made a Jim Henson movie of two tiny lady notary public muppets and put them in a crowded office on the fourteenth floor of the gorgeous nineteenth century neoclassical Land Title building on a sunny Monday afternoon in Philadelphia, and you sign on the dotted line and they dote on your son and he teaches them how to use Apple Pay, and everyone laughs and laughs, and you feel and understand what is happening as it’s happening: this is amazing and is this even real life and I don’t ever want to forget this feeling.

These days keep happening where you are shopping for discount panties at the Center City Macy’s and the entire place is empty and while you’re wondering how they keep the doors open and they’re playing tiki lounge music over the intercom suddenly, somebody starts playing the world’s biggest pipe organ, which happens to also be located in the Center City Macy’s; and everyone comes out from the “Backstage” discount section clutching sundresses and duvet covers to watch the organist fill the entire grand hall from the balcony; these days when the saxophone player in the courtyard of City Hall is playing “Take a Chance on Me” by ABBA and for a moment your soul leaves your body.

At the Center City Macy's

These days are so beautiful when you’re looking up, looking forward, one foot in front of the other, like a tightrope or a rope bridge, suspending disbelief, the days and weeks unspooling before you, a clear path. But when you look back or look down, everything starts to wobble.

And things have been wobbly for me lately.

Maybe it’s because I had an exceptionally social month of May, with fish fries and dinner parties and brunches and one night on a dance floor in a sparkly jumpsuit, and I made a couple of new friends, and maybe the inevitable backlash of so much social expansion is a contraction, a hiding-under-the-covers, instagram-deleting, shame-spiraling inventory of all the friendships I’ve lost and why, and all the ones which seem ambivalent and why, and whether I can trust myself to trust people, and reminding myself that #nonewfriends was working just fine, thank you very much.

One of the challenges of changing almost everything about my life all at once at at time when everything in the world changed all at once is that there’s no way to pinpoint the exact genesis of any of the altered conditions of my life: is friendship fraught because I moved away from the place I lived for 20 years? Or is it because I got sober and did some healing and grew out of some old friendships? Or perhaps it’s because I’ve been ghosted or “acquaintance-zoned” by people I love or because nobody knows how to be in community since the pandemic or because of the circular firing squad of social justice/social media identitarianism?

In places where I used to feel belonging, I feel adrift.

Remember Asheville in the early 2000’s when we used to get our bagels and coffee every morning at the bar? Everyone would, at some point between 8am and noon, stop by Vincent’s Ear before going to work at Early Girl or Malaprops or Barley’s. You could leave each other notes with the bartender. You could wash your armpits in the bathroom if your water was turned off. You could sit in the courtyard and smoke all day, and you would see every single one of your friends, every day.

I romanticize those days now but the truth is that friendship was fraught then, too; it has always been fraught and belonging has always been fleeting, ever since my 3rd grade crush Leroy banished me from his lunch table, since Vicky Sharp passed me a note telling me she was breaking up with me to have a better shot at being cool in 9th grade, since every anarchist collective meeting ever; the places where we should feel belonging we feel adrift.

It feels unseemly to bang on about feeling slighted and abandoned and ashamed at feeling bad at friendship: me, a grown woman, with a rich, full life. It seems obscene to care so much about strangers, or ruminate over people who never should have been granted my trust in the first place, or maybe who did nothing wrong but let a thing run its course- but who cares about appearances when the world is on fire? I won’t shut up about it and I hope you don’t either. I want to read about your heartbreak as you dig wild onions in the desert, your embarrassment at feeling like you should have this friendship thing figured out by now, your ambivalent friends activating your fight-or-flight nervous system more than your outright enemies do. I want to unpack our anxious attachment styles and talk about our inner protector parts. And when we’ve sung our songs and shed our tears, may we turn to each other, to the the ones who remain, to the friends who listen to our ten minute audio messages about feeling lost, to the muppet ladies and the pipe organ and the pineapple cake and the rosewater lemonade, the school plays and chicken dinners and sleepy mornings, and hold hands and set out together once again across this tiny, narrow, tightrope bridge.

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Home

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

My husband and his brother both had birthdays in May, so we got together for a little family celebration with our all-time fave, Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Here’s the recipe from my book, Cake Ladies: Celebrating a Southern Tradition.

For the topping:

• ½ stick (¼ cup) butter

• 1 cup packed light brown sugar

• 1 15-ounce can of pineapple slices, drained and juice reserved

• 1 small jar of maraschino cherries (I didn’t have cherries on hand so I used strawberries)

For the cake:

• 1 stick (½ cup) butter

• 2 cups self-rising flour (or: 2 cups all purpose flour + 1 tablespoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt)

• 1½ cups sugar

• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten

• ¾ cup milk

• 2 tablespoons reserved pineapple juice from can

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 375°F.

Melt the butter for the cake in the skillet, then transfer to a bowl to let cool. Combine the brown sugar and butter for the topping in the skillet and melt until combined, then arrange the fruit and nuts on top. Whisk together the dry ingredients, then combine the egg, milk, and juice. Add the cooled but still liquid butter to the wet ingredients, then combine the wet and the dry. Pour the batter over the fruit and topping and bake for 40-50 minutes. Let rest for 5 minutes then flip to invert. Happy birthday!

How Aldi did me dirty

I’m sorry to report that there is trouble in houseplant paradise. When I did my massive repotting project back in April, I used a bag of potting soil purchased from my beloved Aldi, which, unbeknownst to me, was latently harboring fungus gnats. At first it was minor enough to ignore; now it’s a full-blown infestation. Apparently fungus gnats are not just annoying, they can destroy your plants. So, like any other normal person would, I’ve completely lost my mind trying to eradicate them. So far, I’ve tried:

• watering with a hydrogen peroxide solution

• not watering at all

• placing yellow sticky traps everywhere

• vinegar traps

• neem oil spray

• lavender and tea tree essential oils

• covering the top of the soil with sand

• covering the drainage holes with fabric

Fastening fabric around the bottom of my houseplants like a completely sane and normal person

So far, the infestation continues apace. I’ll keep you posted. Suggestions are welcome.

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The World

Pride means no vacancy for fascists.

“Moms for Liberty,” the anti-LGBTQ, anti-civil rights Christian nationalist hate group propelling school board takeovers, anti-trans legislation, and book bans across the country (with their biggest membership in Florida and Pennsylvania) is slated to host their national summit at the Center City Marriott in Philadelphia on June 29th with a purported theme to “rock the cradle of liberty” (LOL). Tell Marriott there’s no room for hate in Philadelphia: call using this script, sign this petition, and join ACT UP Philly in protesting.

“liberty”

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A Card

There’s a guy I know from Asheville who now lives in Florida, who I gave a quick reading to one time, years ago, at a fundraiser. I don’t remember it specifically but he does: every time I see him or we interact on the internet, he reminds me that I pulled this card for him and I told him: YOU ARE AN OVERFLOWING VESSEL OF LOVE and he says that it changed him forever. So that’s what this card means to me now, that guy, feeling himself transformed by noticing that he is an overflowing vessel of love, all of us being an overflowing vessel of love, becoming it by believing it to be so. So may it be, and so it is.

Home + The World features personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.

⚔️❤️ Jodi