62. Beloved.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-Raymond Carver, Late Fragment
I’m normally an Election Day voter: I like the ceremony of it, the shared feelings of anticipation, hope, and duty; the stickers.
The last couple of years, however, I’ve been a poll worker on Election Day, so it’s early voting for me. Last week, after my dentist appointment, I stopped by City Hall to vote. I arrived around 4:25, but the security guard turned me away, telling me that they had capped the line already so that they could get out by 5.
Annoying but whatever, I thought to myself.
A few days later I returned to City Hall, arriving by 4pm. Surely that was enough time? But no, they were capping the line again already. I was the first person to be turned away, and I begged to be allowed to wait. I explained my predicament.
Well, since this is the second time you’ve come down here, OK, said the guard. I waited, restless, for an hour, throwing my hands up in exasperation while I watched the other guards, indifferent and unhelpful, turn away dozens of disappointed and confused voters, one after the other. I was admonished to be quiet.
The vibe was decidedly more underfunded elementary school silent lunch than a politics of joy.
When I got to the front of the line, when I was the very last single solitary person in the whole line for the whole day, while I was triumphantly striding across the floor towards the last empty seat next to the last elections worker who would confer to me the last ballot of the day, the clock chimed 5.
Suddenly, it was as if the room transformed into a nightmare of a cuckoo clock, the walls closed in, and a tiny, meticulously coiffed bureaucrat wearing a pencil skirt and a blue lanyard—holding a Stanley tumbler in one hand and clipboard in the other—popped out from behind a wooden door, stopped me in my tracks, and told me that it was past 5, the elections board was closed, and I had to leave.
What? No! I reacted. I’ve been waiting here for an hour! You told me I could vote!
No, said the tiny cuckoo clock manager, smiling smugly, we told you you could wait in line until 5.
But, I’m here now, it would take two seconds! I pleaded. The elections worker next to the empty seat looked at me and then the tiny manager and then back at me with wide eyes.
I’m sorry ma’am, we told you we capped the line, she repeated.
This is ridiculous! I gestured wildly. Do you even want people to vote? I was escalating.
And then I sputtered: is this some kind of… vengeance?
As I said it, I knew I sounded crazy, paranoid even, but what I meant was punishment; is this some kind of punishment for asking to bend the rules, punishment for saying that this it shouldn’t be this way, punishment for noticing that so many people were being turned away and some of them most definitely would not come back?
Please. I just. need. to. get. this. one. thing. done. please. I couldn’t tolerate trying to figure out doing it again, some other way or place. I couldn’t tolerate the sense of injustice of it all, the theater, the absurdity. All these flyers, mailers, phone calls. Billboards, text messages, instagram ads, VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE.
And then when we try to vote? When we write it down in our calendars and spend an hour researching candidates to find the three people on the whole ballot who maybe aren’t enthusiastic genocidaires? We get turned away after following all the rules, after arriving well before 5, after standing in line for an hour, practicing remembering how to breathe?
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS, I scream internally.
Ma’am, if you don’t leave I will call security to remove you. The security guards flanked the door, feet wide, hands crossed in front of their bodies. All eyes on me, white hair, white lady, melting down in my keffiyah. I put my hands up and my head down; I walked out the door.
At some point, I have to acknowledge that the problem is me. In the last month I’ve been in two arguments with vehicle drivers while biking: one, an Amazon driver parked in a bike lane; another who honked at me while stuck behind me on a narrow street—I slowed down, gave her the finger, and she threw her giant Wawa soda at me. When she missed, I taunted her maniacally. And that wasn’t even the first time I’ve had a giant Wawa soda thrown at me in traffic in Philadelphia.
It was only after coming down from the adrenaline surge that I remembered to think: damn Jodi, what if you got hurt? What if a client sees you?
I’m the problem.
And?
What of it? Why not acknowledge that I am at least as traumatized and fucked up and reactive as everyone else? That I am sometimes overwhelmed with rage and dysregulated?
Why not acknowledge that I am not better?
When I worked at the methadone clinic, before I lost my job for refusing to be silent about Palestine, one of my responsibilities as Lead Crisis Counselor was to enforce the closing times for the clinic. Women would routinely arrive around closing time and beg to be admitted and medicated; if they missed their dose, they would be sick, and the likelihood of “picking up” (returning to illicit substance use) would become that much higher.
I believed, and I still do, that upholding boundaries is important, and that the appearance and experience of fairness is paramount, especially in a therapeutic setting where our clients, serially abused throughout every aspect of their entire lives, are so exquisitely attuned to injustice. I also believed in upholding the closing time as a way to respect the nurses and other staff, as I understood that for every client who we allowed to medicate late, there would be eight more showing up tomorrow after hours, demanding to be dosed, and nobody would get to go home on time; resentment would build, nurses would quit; the whole thing would fall apart.
Compassion, mercy, making exceptions: in these institutional settings these acts become unsustainable and untenable.
So, at the clinic, I was the petty manager. I was the cuckoo clock lady with the clipboard. I turned away frantic, dopesick mothers for arriving 30 seconds too late. They raged and they railed. I tried to stay grounded, respectful. But I held the line.
I thought of those women in that moment at City Hall. In that moment, I became them. Not in terms of what was at stake, of course, not even close. But in the feeling of humiliation, I had become like them, and in becoming like them, I also saw in myself the manager, my petty place in the violence that holds this whole system together.
I think this is what is meant by the phrase we are all Palestinians; what Jesus meant when he said the least of these.
Please hear me when I say: I know that nothing I’ve experienced is the same as what Palestinians experience. Or unhoused people. Or parents living with opioid use disorder. Or Jesus. Obviously. Obviously. I’m saying that everything that separates us from each other is a lie. I’m saying that I feel that I’ve been walking in the dark for so long. I’m saying that I wonder if I am actually healing or just losing my fucking mind. I’m saying that I think both are true. I’m saying that I think that to heal we have to become crazy, unhinged, inappropriate, out of bounds: we must become the stranger.
I’m saying that in order to bring this world back from the brink, in order to bring ourselves back from the brink, I believe we must all become rejected, we must divest from the systems of power that create powerlessness itself: politically, materially, spiritually, interpersonally.
March will be five years since Glo passed; she is closer with me than ever before. I met Glo after she and her son came to Asheville having been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. She approached me about collaborating on cakes for the events she was curating: King Cakes for Twelfth Night, gifts for her Mardi Gras Indian friends when they came through town on the show circuit, and a New Orleans-style Dias de los Muertos communal altar/public art installation downtown, which she reverently hosted and facilitated annually for many years.
For months before, she would prepare; we would gather at her house, drink wine and paint canvases of calaveras of famous people who had died that year, and string marigold garlands on threads.
Though Glo has passed and so has an era—I try to keep the traditions. Last week I went to the farm where I do work-trade for my CSA share, and sat at the picnic table beneath the wide maple, to harvest and string marigolds. I brought extra needles and thread in case anyone wanted to join me. The first and only taker was a little girl, a toddler—named Tallulah. Tallulah. Glo’s stage name, her alter ego. Of course. I could only laugh to myself, and say a little prayer of thanks.
Shallow water, oh Tallulah.
I am the problem, hallelujah.
I collect acorns and autumn leaves in my pockets, even as the temperature hits 80 degrees on Halloween and the drought becomes longer and more historic day by day. The leaves crumble and fly away when I open my hand, the soil and even the trash in the gutter dries up and becomes part of the air, my mind thinks, casually: hmmm, a new dust bowl? And then what happens when there’s torrential rain after this drought? Will this city be washed away too? How many more autumns do I actually have upon this earth? How many more months?
These are not morbid thoughts, they are imminently realistic. I don’t have to tell you why. You already know.
The reality of climate collapse brings renewed urgency to the thought experiment: what would you do if you were told you only had one day to live? Or one year? What if this was the last October you would ever sit in Rittenhouse Square? What will you do then with your one wild and precious November?1 Who is not imagining their demise right now on this fresh morning in this broken world?2
None of us will survive this, but that was always going to be true. No matter what, we die. This is freeing. What we do between now and our death can be many things, it can be meaningful. It can be redemptive. Or it can be beautiful. Or it can be meaningful just by being.
Yes, I feel anxious nearly all of the time, guilty and afraid I’ve said the wrong thing and that everyone is mad at me, but you know what else? I have grown into a person who would have protected me as a child, ferocious and intense, a person who stands up, fights back, a person who tries to disrupt injustice. That means more to me than anything else anyone could say about anything I’ve ever done, “good” or “bad.”
I am at least as bewildered about love and belonging as I have ever been, but I’m learning that maybe being loved unconditionally—to feel yourself beloved on the earth—is not to be loved perfectly; nor is it achieving a perfect internal ecosystem of self-love that is impervious to the vagarities of human attachment, bonding, and affiliation.
Maybe to call yourself beloved is simply to modulate with the frequency of love, wherever you find it, and finding it absolutely everywhere.
Exactly everybody in Western North Carolina needs our sustained support and attention at this time. It has been five weeks since Hurricane Helene changed the landscape and the lives of everyone and everything in Southern Appalachia. Asheville now has running water but it is untreated and many are only using it to flush toilets. Many more remote places still have no power, water, or cell service. People are tired. People are traumatized. People are struggling to access aid; people are grieving even while their lives and livelihoods become more and more uncertain.
If you are able, please join me in supporting Olga Perez, my dear friend and the owner of Short Street Cakes—the business I started in Asheville, NC almost 20 years ago, which she now lovingly stewards—to help her and her three daughters get through this season of grief and precarity with their business and home intact.
Sometime in the mid-2010’s, October replaced June as the busiest wedding month of the year, at least in WNC. Hurricane Helene washed away the work that would have carried Olga through the winter. She just re-opened the shop a few days ago, forced to fully close the business for almost a month, and yet the bills continue to arrive, unabated.
I first met Olga in 2009 while writing my feminist-ethnography-disguised-as-a-cookbook, Cake Ladies. Her tres leches cake was legend; we became fast friends. She came to work at the Cake Shop shortly thereafter, and in 2016, she purchased the business, like the total badass she is. I love and admire Olga, her family, her joy, her kindness, her tenacity, her integrity. Olga has poured her heart and soul into the business. She deserves to be able to see it through; to carry on the legacy—not just her legacy, or mine, but that of everyone who has called the Cake Shop a kind of home, everyone who has been a part of that most magical family and community.
Another great way to support Olga is to purchase a Short Street Cakes gift card. Instantly put it in your digital wallet for the next time you are in West Asheville, or send it to a WNC friend or loved one. And if you can’t donate or purchase a gift card at this time, please share the links and spread the word. We are truly all in this (all of this) together.
And now that I’m getting nostalgic, please enjoy my very first ever blog entry from My Life in Cake on Blogger entitled “2008 is going to rock!” by clicking on the image below. What a world. I’m so grateful.
Home + The World is a newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring 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.
Home + the World observes the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and I am a proud signatory of the Writers Against the War on Gaza statement of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Visit Home + the World on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, and—of course—healing, self-help, and social justice. If you purchase a book through my shop, I will receive a commission and so will an independent bookstore of your choice.
Dear Temperance is a Tarot advice column for paid subscribers of Home + the World. Send your burning life questions with the subject line “Dear Temperance” to homeandtheworld@substack.com. If your query is chosen for publication, you will receive a year’s paid subscription for free. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
P.S. A little bit of housekeeping: in order to encourage people to download and use the Substack app (rather than just interacting with the platform through email or your browser), Substack has launched “Substack-funded gifts.” Substack is offering qualified free subscribers a one-month paid subscription to Home + the World for free (free to you; I will get paid by Substack for the subscription). So if you get an email from Substack making that offer, I encourage you to accept it! And I give you my word: a new Dear Temperance advice column (Home + the World’s paid-subscriber-only content) is in the pipeline for this month, along with a return to mostly weekly posts. ⚔️❤️
from the Mary Oliver Poem The Summer Day:
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
from the Mary Oliver poem Invitation:
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
For the past 13 months it has been a struggle to regulate my nervous system. On many days it feels impossible to do so. I do my best to always make sure I am present for my little the one the best I can while trying to keep up with all the things going on in the world. It feels so, so, hard on most days. I say that to say, you are not alone Jodi! You are a beautiful, vulnerable, human. As always your writing makes me reflect on how two things can always be true at the same time. Sending you a warm hug.
Dear Beloved, I respect your enormous capacity for self reflection and willingness to be vulnerable with us. It empowers my own capacity and willingness, a gift you’re writing continually gives me. Thank you.