Yes After No, And Other Small, Good Things.

I comfort ate a lot last week, the week after the referendum returned a crushing No vote.

I am a psychiatrist. I know about comfort eating.

I know it’s best avoided.

And I did it anyway. Quite a bit.

Interestingly, I did it more when I was being attacked on Twitter.

I’d posted saying the Aboriginal Flag meant more to me than the Union Jack of my birth country, as I’d grown up under a southern sky.

I naively left the comment option on, imagining that for every trolling I got, as in the Marriage Equality Plebiscite of 2017, there would be several supporters defending my tweet and its cause.

This time there were still plenty of supporters, but for every one of them there were ten trolls. Their comments ranged from the just plain weird to the just plain nasty, although as I’m clearly a straight white middle-aged bloke, it was never as bad as what some of my Twitter heroes regularly cop. 

I followed their advice and blocked early and often, but it got to the point where blocking them all was taking too much time. 

The writing was on the wall – Twitter was not the place for me anymore. I deleted my account.

And then, you know, cake.

Munching away, I started to ruminate on the hiding I had copped.

I am a psychiatrist. I know about ruminating.

I know it’s best avoided.

And I did it anyway. With cake.

Would those humans who treated me like that online say those things to my face? What were they like when not on their devices?

Did they have jobs, friends, family, kids, suspect lumps they knew they should take to the doctor, a dream to learn Salsa, an ex they were reminded of every time they passed a certain shop in the mall?

In other words, were they pretty much just like you or me?

And then a story came back to me from a very long time ago, one of the most powerful, shocking and beautiful I know.

It’s about cake, but that’s not the only reason it came to mind.

If you want to check out Raymond Carver’s 25 minute-read short story A Small, Good Thing without spoilers, stop now (don’t scroll past the bread photo!) and do it here. It’s a classic of the genre. Otherwise, I’ll sum it up below:

(Content warning – a child character dies.)

A suburban mum orders a named cake from a baker for her only child’s eighth birthday, but before she can pick it up and pay he is hit by a car and soon lies in a coma in hospital.

The story stays with his parents as they deal with vague prognoses and hollow reassurances from doctors, and the effort to cope daily as their son’s life hangs in the balance. The cake is of course far from anyone’s mind.

Amid this, a mystery caller begins ringing the house, his calls becoming more and more aggressive. He knows their son’s name. He mentions the cake to the husband, who didn’t know about the cake, so the mystery and fear mount.

But we know, and the baker’s anger about a cake just seems so absurd and revolting.

Suddenly the boy dies, after seeming to wake momentarily, in a moment I recall from the film made of Carver stories (1993’s Short Cuts by Robert Altman) that’s more disturbing than anything I have seen in a horror movie. 

Grief off the scale collides with another wee-hours call from the baker, at which point the mum twigs and the parents show up to the bakery to confront the man over his calls. The mum tells him her son is dead.

So now we see a troll face-to-face with the effects of his actions. And we find out if Carver believes in the better angels of our nature.

Please sit down, you people, the baker says. Let me say how sorry I am. God alone knows how sorry…sorry for your son, sorry for my part in this. Forgive me if you can…I’m not an evil man, I don’t think so.

Then this: You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem.

And finally this: You probably need to eat something. I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.

The small miracle Carver pulls off is that his descriptions of the fresh baked goods the baker offers up are actually enticing, hard as the reader’s stomach was pummelled over the previous 28 pages.

Maybe that’s because the parents miraculously rediscover their hunger after days of eating so little. Because of the small miracle of the baker’s remorse somehow finding them where they were.

The sheer relief – however temporary – for aching bellies in a warm place in the depths of the night comes off the final pages like steam from a roll fresh from the oven.

They talked on into the early morning, goes the last sentence, and they did not think of leaving.

God, I needed this story this week. Of all weeks.

On October 14 2023, the child that was run down was Reconciliation, our hope of being better to each other, of healing after so much wrongdoing. It didn’t matter that the Voice would be far from perfect, and far from enough to heal anything properly – it was a start.

A small, good thing.

Will Reconciliation make it out of this coma? Sadly, no doctor can give more than vague prognoses and hollow reassurances.

Meanwhile the calls in the night have ramped up. Emboldened by the stunning success of No, the trolls have dialled up the bile. I found it was mostly old white men attacking me during the campaign, but now it’s all kinds of white people, male and female, young and old in the profile pictures. 

Hardly any real names, though. No chance of a face-to-face reckoning.

Face-to-face is where healing has a hope, I think Carver is saying.

No baker can bring back a child the doctors couldn’t save, no matter how fresh the bread, how beautifully made, or apologetically offered. But the boy’s mum and dad ate it and talked, face-to-face with the baker and did not think of leaving.

To my questions that recalled this brutal, brilliant, sustaining story, Carver adds some others:

Can we ever really know what is going on in someone else’s life?

Is it ever really safe to assume another cake got forgotten – or tweet sent – because other people are just plain shit?

No.

But in the darkest hour, when we have done our best and failed, is there still any kind of hope in small good things?

I’d say that’s a Yes.