Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always chipped away at January bit by bit, little glistening petals of pastel-coloured chill. She made up her January out of these pale ices, still reflecting the glories of Christmas and predicting the beauties of spring.

If you will be so kind as to imagine me seated in my armchair, waving my hands languorously in the light from my lamp, casting glints from my rings (onyx and amber, right now), you will a fair picture of me at the peak of my activity tonight. Which is to say. I am just not capable of much tonight.

Sorry, Dear Readers. I am not rising to the challenges of the New Year tonight. However, I want you to know I’m not dead. Which I’m not.

More later!

Kage Baker truly enjoyed New Year’s, both Eve and Day. It was the definitive pinnacle to the building arc of holidays that began, for Kage, with Halloween.

Halloween began at sunset, and ramped through the hours of darkness until midnight – or until childish energy gave out in candy comas. New Year’s, on another hand, arrives at midnight with peals of trumpets and fireworks, and rumbles triumphantly into dawn. It’s a new year, and the days will be growing lighter every day for months.

And that is what Kage liked to celebrate.

She had her rituals for the New Year; I didn’t know the source or provenance for any of them, really. All I brought from my childhood was an earnest desire to watch the ball drop in Times Square and drink a swig or two of champagne (only a little; I don’t like champagne). Kage, though, loved champagne, and finished off the bottle happily.

But Kage always fixed, very deftly, a special meal of first-class steak, baked potato and creamed spinach. What was the ritualistic point of this excellent repast? I’ve no idea, except maybe it was because that was the only time Kage ever cooked it. With Kage, once was fun, twice was coincidence, and after the third time an act occurred – it was a ritual.

Then we’d watch the Twilight Zone marathon until midnight. Which is what I am doing right now. The especial fun of watching Twilight Zone is finding the young performers who are now revered old actors. Right now, George Takei, at the apparent age of about 14, is relivng Pearl Harbor in some old American vet’s attic. It’s not looking good for the vet …

Right now, the annual barrage of explosives is getting louder – all my neighbors who quietly walk their tiny dogs and polish their BMWs and Mercedeses are bringing out the leftovers from 4th of July and Memorial Day and lighting them up. The most of them will be lit off just after midnight, when it will briefly resemble the Battle of Los Angele around here. That was Kage’s actual favourite part – all the explosions going off everywhere.

Harry the parrot has gone to bed, and is sleeping sound. Fireworks and a few mild urban explosions don’t bother parrots particularly. Now, though, I also live with a dog and 2 cats, who must be soothed after each explosion, the poor babies. I would personally enjoy this much more if the explosions didn’t upset the beasties so.

But here we are. We can soothe the kitties with catnip, and snuggle the Corgi, and watch aliens on the Twilight Zone, and march on to the New Year. I hope none of you have duties more onerous than petting nervous cats, and that everyone has a very Happy New Year!

Kage Baker loved Christmas Day, This was hardly unusual, or even noteworthy; most Christians and most dwellers in the Western world do love and enjoy the central holiday of so many, many cultures.

This is not to ignore all the myriad cultures that are not Christian and/or Western. Everyone on earth celebrates a midwinter festival of some sort, and the birth of a god or prophet figures in lots of them. Christianity, an inveterate pickpocket of other religion’s good bits, got a lot of Christmas and other rituals that way.

Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr in December, Jews have Hannukah. The Incas (yes, they still exist) have the Inti Raymi on the winter Solstice. The list goes on and on.

Anyway, Kage loved Christmas Day. So do I, especially now that I happily spend it with my family. Michael, who is at least half nocturnal, slept in; while Kimberly and I, relentlessly programmed by 60-odd years of rousting our poor parents out of bed in the darkling ere dawn, have been awake since 6:30 or so.

The dog licking my feet also helped. Our Corgi, Syndodd, has a passion for feet, and he burrows under blankets with insane determination. Happy Christmas! Your cold, wet toes mean it’s Christmas Day!

It was a lovely, lazy day of people playing with their new toys. I also got a wonderful set of lounging pajamas, in which I am even now lounging comfortably. I hope you are, too, Dear Readers. Well, not in my pajamas, obviously, but in whatever post-holiday garments make you most comfortable. If you’re in velvet vestments and swigging champagne, I envy you the champagne – but I am happy here in my jammies, with my family, in the light of our Christmas tree.

Happy Christmas, Dear Readers! And a very good night unto to you all.

Kage Baker said the first Christmas Eve she remembered was 1955. For those of you, Dear Readers, who are keeping score – yes, that means she was 3 and 1/2 years old. Her memory went back an amazingly long way; in Technicolor and Surround Sound, for all I know. She remembered everything she saw on television in colour, though her family didn’t get a colour telly for another couple of decades.

The first Christmas Eve I remember was 1957, I believe; I was born in in July, 1953, so that made me 4 and a half. About all I remember about 1957 in general was that Zorro was on Disney, and a wildcat spent an afternoon in the tree outside our house (Mamma wouldn’t let us out of the house, so we watched it through the living room window). My memories were not in colour, except the RL ones, because we had a black and white television.

All the Christmas Eves were Merry, we left the tree lights on all night, and the cookies and carrots we left out for Santa and his reindeer were found satisfactorily gnawed in the morning. THAT, both Kage and I remembered,

I hope you did, too. And I hope this Christmas Eve is splendid and cozy, and the morning is bright and full of the sound of bells and crinkling paper.

Happy Christmas to you all!

Kage Baker grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. And she read voraciously. In a stroke of remarkable good luck, so did her mother, who developed a fondness for fantasy novels when I loaned her my copies of Gormanghast. The good luck paid off with Mrs. Baker’s generosity – she not only borrowed all our books, but she also constantly loaned her own purchases to us. And she could buy a lot more than we could! 

Mrs. Baker was a painter – portraits and landscapes – and she was good. However, the life of a painter is rarely rich or sumptuous, and she had 6 kids to raise. She usually worked at home, then took her finished work to art shows to sell. These art shows were often in malls, and the first thing she did was locate the bookstores and candy stores; we’d go to visit and be handed a bag full of new books and See’s chocolates. Good times!

Mr. Baker was a mailman, but a mailman doesn’t make a royal amount of money, either. And then he had a heart attack when Kage was small, and thereafter he was more or less a house husband; he took small jobs when he could, usually as a delivery man for a florist, but again – not a high-paying job, except in free plants. They had the best garden in the neighborhood, with all manner of exotic flowering plants; and Mrs. Baker’s studio had orchids flowering all over.

So, this was a sort of adolescent idyll, filled with See’s chocolates and free books. Kage wasn’t quite living in her parents’ house, but it was hard to move out once Mrs. Baker had taken you in. That was how I became her beneficiary, too: I was Kage’s pal and occasional chauffeuse, and that was enough for her to claim me as one of her own.

With a wider array of fantasy and science fiction to explore, Kage’s tastes began to settle into definite shape. And one of the first things she decided was that she loathed, abhorred, despised and detested (to quote Judy Garland*), trilogies. This was a major heresy in the 1960s and 70s, because following J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings trilogy, everyone was reading and writing trilogies. It was de rigueur, practically an unwritten rule. Lots of readers loved this, though the wait between volumes could be annoying; on the other hand, some writers decided to write absolutely enormous novels and I, for one, loved those outsized, horse-choking books. They were a lovely abundance.

When Kage sold her first novel, she was already well into Number 2; when she sold that, it was the same with Number 3. Sometimes she would have 2 or 3 finished manuscripts on her desk – but when her agent or publisher suggested marketing some as a trilogy – she refused, with varying amounts of courtesy – which meant she handed it off to me, and I used my oily, obsequious charms to dissuade them of the idea of a trilogy. I managed to do it without explaining that Kage had hated ’em from her teenage years because her dear mother bought too many.

Anyway, Kage insisted on having all her Company books published separately. I’m afraid she rather gloated over the few reader complaints she got. “What do they want me to do?” she would ask. “Write less? I can do that …” And she would giggle, I’m afraid. Not that she ever would have written less – I don’t think she was capable of it – but she could have let that stack of finished manuscripts continue to sit on her desk, collecting occasional Coke stains …

Luckily, it never came to that. I’ve lost track of all the styles in which her books have been published since she died: but there is probably a trilogy presentation in there somewhere. Heck, sometimes I can’t even read the covers, she’s been published in so many languages. But I have always done my best, so if an angry ghost of Kage Baker is haunting some publishing clerk … they have my sympathies, but they were warned.

On my part, I sleep unafraid. Of Kage and furiously brandished trilogies, anyway.

Well, hi there, all of you out there in the listening darkness. First of all, I wish you all a Happy Winter solstice – which will occur at 10:27 tonight. Then, it will be well and truly winter.

I know I have been missing in action for an inordinate amount of time in these waning days of the year, but … well … I’ve been sick. I always seem to be sick these days, but there are layers to being a semi-invalid. Sometimes you can make it out to the car and enjoy a refreshing ride to and from the grocery store. Other times you stagger around the house, hacking piteously and trying not to puke on your computer. The least productive times, like the last fortnight, all I do is sleep. It doesn’t seem to help anything.

It’s a merry-go-round of recalcitrant anatomy. I wish it were my knees or something else classically connected with creeping old age. Sadly, it’s mostly internal organs with whom I am not currently on speaking terms; or something to which I’ve paid no attention for 70 years, but which is now attempting a hostile takeover. But I have managed to find a safe place just before Christmas.

Mind you, that has also been a trail of tears. I run my website off some subsidiary of WordPress (I think. The degree of incest and interbreeding on the web has reached Faulknerian proportions.) But it is Christmas week, and I suspect everyone has taken the week OFF. And when they left, they abandoned all the wriggly, tentacular messes infesting the Web to fend for themselves. Us, too. We pitiful users get to struggle to find a way into our sites and actually input something.

Tonight, my only solution has been to start a blog. I can’t get into my website, even though it is supposedly part of WordPress as well. So, now I have a blog. This is my maiden post; while I don’t intend to abandon my website, I have this as something I can apparently use when the other bit won’t work. Now all I have to do is see how many djinn I have to invoke to get it posted where it belongs.

For your personal reference, the URL for this brand-new blog is:

kageandkathleengoon.wordpress.com.

That bit just after my name, by the way, is not “goon”, appropriate as it might be, but the URL-smooshed “go on.” I wish you all good luck if you have to use it.

In the meantime – I shall continue to wrestle with the Web, and hopefully be able to post things in a timelier and more efficient manner.

And in the meanwhile, a Merry Christmas to you all!