Lonely Hearts Chapel

My original plan for Election Day was to have an early dinner by myself followed by a medicated slumber. (If America falls to Fascism, I thought, I could at least enjoy the privilege of saying I slept through it.) But after I explained the history of election cakes to my mother, she encouraged me to join her in making an election cake of our own, to share with our family in honor of all the women throughout American history  who couldn’t vote but had to make election cakes for the men who could.

Today is shaping up to be quite a holiday for me, and I couldn’t be more grateful to my mother for persuading me to spend the day celebrating the goodness instead of hiding from the bad.

I gave a toast before we cut into the cake, which I’d like to share with you all:

(To truly appreciate it, you first need to know that my baby cousin calls her grandma “Mammy.”)

“Tonight we honor generations of women who toiled voicelessly, as ghosts among the living, to transform houses into homes by invoking the hard-earned but somehow natural magics of warmth, sustenance, and purpose. Forbidden to build, they graciously accepted the labor of steering, not the vessel but the soul, teaching by learning with a supernatural patience. We must always remember their sacrifices; because before there could be love, family, and a brotherhood-of-man, there were sisters, mothers, and mammies who forged each and every one of us from their own flesh, blood, and tears.

For that reason, among an oceanic Universe of others, these angels find their peace within the Parthenon that is the mountainous eternal gratitude of the self-possessed. We raise our glasses not to celebrate one woman’s progress, and not to hope for one woman’s victory; we raise our glasses to commune with the creative miracle of the Feminine Spirit: not one of us would be alive without you, and we pray you forgive us our weak-mindedness as you guide us all toward the Revelation: that we are truly and forever Stronger Together.”

Okay: we didn’t MAKE a cake, we ORDERED it. And the conservative bakery we ordered it from may or may not have put passive-aggressive quotation marks on it, but that actually works out perfectly because “I’m With Her” is how I ended my toast (in place of “cheers!”)

Love always,

your Mister