Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved to garden. And she was good at it; inspired, in fact.

I kept her company in the gardens. We talked out stories, threatened the weather, waged wars on snails and aphids; before my youth collapsed so spectacularly a couple of years ago, I was the muscle of the enterprise. I dug holes, raised fences, mowed lawns, chain-sawed branches. I must recommend chain saws, by the way, as a wonderful way of letting off steam – you get to commit noise and mayhem in the cause of order, and when you’re done you have firewood!

My sister Kimberly is also a good gardener. In fact, she taught me how to use a chain saw. Also introduced me to weed whackers and how to make bio-degradable pots out of folded newspaper (Kage preferred Jiffy pots. I just carried stuff.) Kimberly especially likes an annual veggie garden, but in recent years has found it more and more difficult to get it in the ground and under control by herself. We’re pretty much entwives in this family – the menfolk don’t do much but admire and eat the produce.

However, since I moved back to Los Angeles, Kimberly and I have been making progress on extending gardening. I have years of sororal experience! And it is now planting season …

Anyone can manage greens and tomatoes. A little effort, enough brains to remember to go out and spend a quarter hour each day and water and weed, and voila! A universe of delightful exotica is available to the gardener who takes up tomatoes, and you can plant a veritable Garden of Iden in pots. It’s nice if you can manage the whole cultivator and raised bed thing, but a dozen pots will yield Paradise to the devotee.

My dear old friend Athene is another native Californian who has been growing whatever takes her fancy in her family home her whole life. She is a true avatar of the Grey-Eyed Goddess, too, and has never steered me wrong with her advice. Two years ago, she turned me on to the joys of Tomatomania.

Tomatomania (www.tomatomania.com) is a Chatauqua Show of tomatoes that appears on consecutive weekends at nurseries all over the country. They specialize in heirlooms, though they sell all sorts – 300+ kinds of tomatoes at every stop. Right now they’re in California, in the San Fernando Valley; specifically, this weekend, at Tapia Brothers nursery in Encino.

Kimberly and I went yestreday afternoon. Oh, the green dancing waves of tomato seedlings! The names, the descriptions, the dedicated gardeners hurrying between the aisles and islands of alphabetized baby plants! People with carts and careful lists and a steely-eyed determination, cutting off other shoppers at desired plants and making sure they were not out-maneuvered for an especially-beloved plant! The little kids climbing on tractors, the giant tomato balloons, the employees wearing shirts that read I See London – I See France – I See Lots of Tomato Plants! It’s no end of fun, Dear Readers.

I must confess, Kimberly and I are happy dilettantes. We go for only a dozen or so plants – ’cause we do plant in pots – and we tend to wander around reading labels and giggling. We buy specific plants because they’ve done well by us for the last two years, and because the names amuse us. This is why we now have a Furry Pink Boar, and a Mike’s Mortgage Raiser. But we also have an Arkansas Traveler, the standard for heirloom tomatoes; and cherry tomatoes both red and green, and three kinds of Romas. We have several great slicers, and a big pink globular one, and one that tastes of pineapple.

You can just go insane with these marvellous plants. Even the wise Athene succumbed to the Furry Pink Boar. It was just too funny a name to pass up.

Anyway, we got them all planted this afternoon. Did the initial grooming on the winter-shaggy yard, and now have a tidy tiny forest of happy baby tomatoes out in the back yard. And since it’s supposed to rain tonight, they will be welcomed into their productive life with singing and banners!

So many great, mad, heirloom tomatoes! Kage would be so pleased. And proud of me, I hope.

Kage Baker … tolerated … my fondness for knitting.

She gamely listened to me describe delightful new yarns and stitches; she wore the socks I made her. She even bought me a Swift, so I could turn skeins of hand-spun into balls of same without accidentally knotting myself to a wooden chair. Mostly, though, she refrained from suddenly stabbing me with a knitting needle just to make me shut up and stop.

You might ask, Dear Readers, why a mild domestic activity like knitting should require tolerance, or my gratitude for same? If you do ask that, it’s clear you’ve never lived with a knitter. You know why there are knitting circles? Why people gather together to play with sticks and string? Because non-knitters soon begin to twitch at having to be around these textile monomaniacs.

Knitting is a form of OCD. It is not a single hobby, but an entire group of them; one that requires insane devotion to special tools and supplies, a discipline usually devoted to weapons practice or religion, a focus so intense it renders its practitioner deaf and blind to all else. Not mute, though. A knitter learning a new lace stitch, for example, will talk to herself at a level that approaches speaking in tongues.

Furthermore, it’s a hobby that grows. Supplies multiply magically, like the brooms in Fantasia – to which Kage occasionally compared my stash. There is always an exquisite skein of exotic yarn, or needles in some unusual substance, that the knitter must possess. Then you’ll search through all your books of patterns to find the one pattern worthy to use with the wonderful new toys. And if you don’t have a yarn or needles or a pattern that measure up, why – you’ll go hunt some new ones down and buy them too!

It’s one of the few activities I know where the finished product ends up larger than the supplies that went into it. Babies and buildings, maybe, compare: but neither one irritates your housemate as much, or lies around in drifts and dunes and ecosystems of extras until you get around to building or birthing …

Most knitter have to find projects to absorb their finished product. I mean, you start out with a Trader Joe’s bag full of balls of yarn, and you end up with something that will cover a car. Odds are, you didn’t knit it because you needed it – you knitted it because you wanted to see what the process was like.  And that’s only one product out of your stash of yarn! Which is in plastic Tuppers and bags and spare suitcases all over the house.

Then there are the tools, which are multitudinous and cunning and adorable. Knitting needles! Conversion charts! Winding machines, blocking frames, stitch markers and row counters and tape measures shaped like wooly lambs! You never carry a purse less than 2 feet to a side, because your current project has to fit in it; in fact, most of the time you have two purses, one dedicated to knitting. And you are much more likely to forget the purse with your car keys and wallet in it when you leave a movie theatre.

Because, oh yeah – you take your knitting everywhere. Kage learned that whenever we were standing or sitting still for a minimum of 5 minutes, I’d be knitting. Restaurants, lines, churches – though she objected when I tried knitting at red lights.  She grew used to my snarky sotto voce comments when someone mistook my knitting for crochet, or misidentified the textile I was using (Can you believe that she couldn’t tell this is banana fibre, not bamboo? Sheesh!).

And my frantic cold turkey fits when I went somewhere without my knitting amused her. She even helped me hunt for yarn shops when we were travelling, so I’d have needles and something to use them on when we stopped for lunch or the night. Although she did wax wroth the time TSA wouldn’t let me bring my needles on board a plane, and I smuggled  a circular set on board in my underwire bra …

See how knitting is insidious? See how I go on and on about it? Kage lived with that for years, listening with glazed eyes as I rhapsodized over silk or linen yarn, or described an especially clever new cable design. But actually, my obsessions went hand-in-hand with hers. In fact, I learned how to knit cables in the first place during a weekend in a motel room on the Northern Coast, on a writing retreat while she blazed through Hellfire At Twilight.

I’ve neglected my knitting since she died; one of the many things whose savour has had to come back on its own as my life puts on new flesh. But I do like to knit of an evening, while watching telly. Last night, though, the non-human members of our household were determined that I would not succeed – or if I did, there’d be one of them incorporated into the knitting.

Harry, of course, has launched an attack on my needles. You see, I prefer wooden ones. So does he. he’s already munched up one of my #6 double pointed needles. Well, he went through an incredible stealthy sneak attack last night and managed to steal all my surviving #6 needles.  All. Of. Them.  He dug them out from under the pillows where I had hidden them so I could go to the bathroom, and reduced them all to splinters. He was put to bed, unabashed and crowing victoriously.

Then the elder cat decided to lie in my lap and chase the passing yarn (once I started the cap over on new needles) so I had to repeatedly untangle her feet – she is no longer in complete control of her claws, and kept getting thoroughly wrapped up in a nice grey wool that complimented her silver tabby-stripes. Of course!

And in the middle of the night, I awoke to realize that the small black cat was on my desk. Playing in the dark. With knitting needles. Hand-carved walnut knitting needles she had somehow snaked out of a project bag …

I can just hear Kage laughing her ass off, telling the beasties, “Well done, Harry! Well done, cats! Keep her busy, you little buggers!”

Smarty pants. Sheesh, indeed.

Kage Baker was in my dreams again last night.

This is really a big deal. One would think that I’d dream of her often, but such has not been the case. I’d have loved to dream of her after she died, but no – my dreams then were notable for being bizarre, but more along the lines of talking doughnuts and finding myself lost on Faire sites that never existed. Not even my intermittent skill at lucid dreaming could lure Kage out of the mists of dreamtime.

It was a great grief to me. I dreamed of her a lot when she was alive, you see: I dream of all my family members a lot, and Kage was as usual a companion in my nocturnal wanderings as my daylight ones.  But my unconscious mind made no errors of perception to ease the pain of her passing – it knew from that first night what had happened, and I never dreamed she was back.

Both of us had sometimes dreamed of our parents come back to chat. Kage said that, in her dreams, Momma was always cheerfully open about being dead, but just had to drop by to say something. (Had you known Katherine Baker, you’d know how funny that was. Nothing could shut Mamma up.) I usually dreamed that Daddy had dropped by on a day pass – which would also have been logical for him, to have inveigled a day pass from being dead. The dreams were sweet, and made us both laugh.

I’d have rejoiced if Kage had shown up as a baleful spirit prophesying doom. I wouldn’t even have minded silly, nonsensical dreams. It would have been her haunting me, and that would have been better than all the talking doughnuts in the world. Besides, my unconscious would have been hard put to put us in goofier situations than we found on our own in what passed for the real world … but she never showed up. Until now.

Last night, I dreamed that we were moving back into the Hollywood Hills, rather as we did when we were barely in our 20’s and left home for the first time. We had barely more than the clothes we stood up in., which was certainly historically accurate – backpacks, purses, a dozen eggs and $10.00 in cash, as I recall … at least in my dreams last night we had our camping gear and a car. But we still moved into a bare bones little room perched on the edge of a hillside; the sort of eccentric Hollywood apartment that has a glorious history, an incredible view and barely enough room to swing a cat, as they say.

I was triumphant, because when we left Los Angeles I had sworn we would be back. Kage had looked wise and opaque; I guess now she knew it would be only me.

Anyway. We lived in a lot of weird little places in our wild young womanhood. They alternated between being outright subterranean and being narrow ledges clinging to the hills; one or two managed to be both and partook heavily of the nature of those cave dwellings in the Dordogne … Kage painted them all, too. We had friezes of Greek gods, and doors done in trompe l’oeil to simulate panelled Tudor carvings; she painted the horses at Lascaux on one wall for me. Our windows were painted in saffron and scarlet.

You could get away with that sort of thing in the 1970’s, in the Hollywood Hills.

You can get away with it in dreams, too; we certainly were in mine last night. Kage was prepping to do some amazing mural, and our kitchen table – which was her drafting board lowered to flat level, as it actually was for years – was covered with paints and brushes and long strips of stiff paper where she was cutting silhouettes to use as a template. The one room was no more than 12 feet from back to front, but out the blazing windows I could see all the way West to the sea over a plain full of oak trees and red-tiled roofs. The late sun cast Kage’s shadow over all the back wall, like those sacred caves where horses and bison still dance in torch light.

Yeah, that sounds right.

I hope she comes again.

Kage Baker didn’t really like surprises. She was unnerved by the element of ambush implied in them; and after growing up with three brothers, she was especially leery of practical jokes.

Not the boyos were very good at them, you understand. Senses of humour are on the grim side on the spear side of the family, and two of our brothers are also not the brightest members of the clan … in fact, their jokes tended to go horribly wrong. The old classic of the bag of burning dog shit was likelier to set the doormat on fire than trap an intended victim with stinky stickiness.

And Kage simply didn’t like feeling out of control. So presents were problematical, because she fretted so about them before hand. Would she like them? Would she have to be polite if she didn’t? She tried to hedge her bets by being psychotically precise about what she wanted, and learned to soften her blunt honesty when we less-OCD types messed up. By the time she was 35 or so, she was unfailingly gracious no matter what turned up under the wrapping.

I kind of like surprises. I do have rather quick reflexes –  developed by dealing with leaking beer kegs and insane improv theatre – and occasionally shriek or leap straight up in the air when taken by surprise, but mostly I’m cool. And even in these days of postal paranoia, the sight of the UPS or FedEx trucks stopping in front of the house is a thrill. Shopping on the internet has made mail deliveries so much more frequently interesting!

Today, I was blessed with two boxes of complete surprise; both were delightful. They came in identical good old USPS flat rate boxes, their return addresses obliterated by enthusiastic stamps, so they were an unknown until I got them opened.

One was a deck of exquisite Tarot cards – The Incidental Tarot, from Holly DeFount of Raven and Rose Art. I contributed to her Kickstarter Campaign, and have just been rewarded with Deck No. 69 of 160 Limited Editions.

The other was a box of knitting goodies from my dear Faire and knitting comrades of Northern California: several sets of wooden double point needles in larger sizes and an hysterical project bag featuring a pattern of alien skulls over crossed knitting needles. And an invitation to join a chemo cap project, so I am happily starting the caps I didn’t need to make for myself, and will pass on my good luck to some cancer fighter who did lose her hair.

Thank you, Dear Ladies!

Wonderful things! Wonderful projects! I have been run over and ploughed under by exhaustion, Finals Week (but it’s over!) and a deepening depressive fit: these things are all just what I need to feel better.

Despite hating surprises herself, Kage was not above perpetrating them. I think she’s doing so now; because, after more than two years, I am suddenly dreaming of her all the time. The dreams are nice – the waking is hard. Twice I’ve fallen out of bed, rising from somewhere I no longer sleep and headed for a doorway that doesn’t exist in this house, thinking I could find Kage. I keep waking myself up talking to her, too, and scaring myself and Harry to bits.

I guess if I can get used to the dreams, I can enjoy them and defeat the depression of being nightly reminded of her death. The cards might help – Kage was a skilled Tarot reader (“The cards never lie,” she would say solemnly. “The old gypsy woman is full of shit, but the cards never lie.”) and maybe I can derive some psychological ease with them. Besides, they’re simply gorgeous … and the knitting will give me something more active and social to do with my evenings.

Lately I’ve been sitting in the dark playing game after game of solitaire mahjong on my computer, until the wee hours of the morning. It’s kind of Zen, but it’s fatiguing and in the end one is left merely sleepless and seeing Chinese ideographs in one’s hallucinations. Is that a West Wind under that willow rose? Can I move the necessary tiles to free it? Where the hell did a Pepsi logo come from?

So I am going to reclaim my seat on the couch and watch some telly with my sister, and knit some caps. Lots of caps. These newest needles are just what I needed to do it, and it will be good for me. And when I dream of Kage, I can tell her I’ve been busy, and a good girl.

Kage Baker believed in … harmonics. The music of the spheres. The Lost Chord, which Sir Arthur Sullivan ecstatically declared came from the soul of an organ into his: such an image! The underlying harmony that underwrote and encompassed the Universe; which Kage devoutly believed was the echo of the voice of God.

There is a passage in, I think, Sir Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music, where he reports that the arcane religious order of The Listening Monks has taken on the goal of determining what that sound was, that brought the universe into being. The best of the monks reports a faint voice chanting “One, two, three four … ” But the best and most pious of the them adds that just before that the same voice can be heard muttering, “one – one, two …”

Kage took this to indicate that Sir Terry, like her, believed that the primal music was rock and roll. It made sense. Those of us who survived the Sixties know it can raise the dead – why not start Life as well? And the shameless Chaos of rock and roll accounts nicely for all the weird things we are constantly finding in the Universe in general. I mean, really – doesn’t it seem like a lot of it has been improvised? And further, improvised by Someone who’s done 8 shows in 7 days, slept (if at all) on a bus, and has been living on whiskey and handfuls of little coloured things that might be M&M’s …

And, oh, how Kage wanted to go for take-away with that Band!

Echoes of the primal song always seem to sound in storms. We’ve got one gradually dispersing here in Los Angeles – not the apocalyptic storm predicted (as usual) by the over-excited weather people, but just a nice, ordinary winter storm. Cold, windy, wet; moderate rain here and there, heavier rain and some hail in the foothills, a pretty good layer of snow in the mountains. A much needed, neighborly storm.

Now it’s shredding away, leaving just enough cloud that we ought to have a nice sunset. There’s a chance of rain tonight, even a chance of thunderstorms! But, to be honest, that almost never happens except in the higher elevations. It’ll be a much softer music tonight; just the occasional drip of leftover water from the trees overhead. And the occasional  raccoon falling off the roof …

Last night, a presumably wet and unhappy raccoon did come in through the dog door in the middle of the night. I heard the squeak and skitter, and then the almost-silent rush by my bed of a Corgi who meant business; and we had some primal music then! Much barking and growling and squealing, then, and skidding noises and the thud of someone running into the doorframe. And then The Triumphant Return of the Corgi, dancing to whatever jubilant war music plays in a Corgi’s head … something with harp and creuth, I imagine, to honor his Welsh heritage.

Anyway, last night was full of music, because the rain was coming down and the critters were coming out; and nothing fills a spring night like those events. Tonight it will be less of both, I suspect; but if the skies clear, then the cold high voices of the stars may drift down and chime along the roof.

Lacking the Voice of God, I can sleep quite well to that.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly, that one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ and enter’d into mine.

Post Script: yestreday, Word Press was having issues, conniption fits and small strokes; it wouldn’t let me post. I found a way in today. So belated St. Patrick’s Day to those Dear Readers of an Irish persuasion: I didn’t ignore the holiday! I just ran pointlessly around the walls until the corned beef and cabbage were ready, and then I went away and ate dinner.

Kage Baker considered herself fairly lucky on an emotional vulnerability level. She didn’t suffer from fits of depression, lethargy, panic attacks … and since several of her relatives did, she saw just how much this can disrupt ordinary life. She was very happy her seratonin metabolism was normal, and whatever was funny in her neuron wiring led to fantastical world-building rather than nightmares.

Of course, there is no one to whom the black faeries of depression do not occasionally come. It was just that when Kage got depressed or panicked, there was ordinarily an obvious cause: a bad review. An overdue bill. Staying up late watching ghost programs …  And when these things hit, it was usually in the middle of the night. Fortunately, at least half the time, she’d find me awake and reading when she came bolting from her bedroom – we could talk, or watch movies, or I could read to her until she calmed down.

Watching telly was a favourite panacea for Kage. She preferred cartoons for migraines, because she claimed they bypassed her visual interpretation channels – she could just let the stimulus flow in without wondering about it. I’m not sure she even saw it then. Maybe it was an automatic kaleidoscope.

Channel hopping was for panic; I could tell when she was calming down by the lengthening amounts of time she’d stay on one channel. While the adrenaline was still surging, she’d be skipping from infomercial to telenovella to dubious science documentary in seconds-brief bursts: anything loud and basically incomprehensible caught her attention. I think she was trying to short circuit some analytical portion of her  brain.

And when she was depressed, she’d put on a favourite movie and sink into the sensorium of some beloved other world. The ability to collect and own movies undoubtedly contributed hugely to Kage’s emotional stability and happiness as an adult. She always, always wanted to be able to replay much-loved experiences over and over: when something had worked well, she wanted it to be dependable and unchanged when she experienced it again. Recorded movies fit the bill like nothing else.

I think the trick with all of these things – Kage’s preference, in fact, for visual input – was because she was trying to shut her mind up. Or down. She needed to stop thinking; the best way, for her, was to overwhelm herself with dependable stimuli. She knew exactly what would happen when she watched The Wrong Box again; her brain fell into line with the expected responses, and the runaway train of depression or panic pulled into the station. By the time the elderly Victorian brothers were wrestling over the open grave in a snowstorm of pound notes (just trust me on this), she was fine again.

Being read to worked the same way, and in fact hit an older harmonic. I read to her a lot in her last year, because she was self-medicating with favourite books; but it was also a trick from years of nocturnal fretting. It never took very long – nothing did; Kage was not, by nature, depressive or panicky. But they hit everyone, sometime or other, and distraction was what worked best to help her.

And then the next step would be, of course, her writing. As soon as the aberrant rhythm in her brain settled down, Kage ran to her writing as the ultimate cure-all. Palliative, stimulant, narcotic, antibody – nothing eased her mind or her mood like writing. Everything else was just to slow her brain down enough to write. Once she was back in the world of her choice, she was happy; not just calm but actually happy.

Kage wrote in a state of ecstasy.

I’m learning this, too. My panacea for decades has been books: the printed word is my drug. But it’s an opiate, there is no doubt of that. I’m safe and content in my clouds of words, but I am also unproductive. That didn’t use to bother me – now, though, I find myself fidgeting in just a few chapters and it’s off to the computer to – as Kage always said with profound relief – fall through the monitor screen …

Yes. Time to go.

Kage Baker believed that topics in general news come in cycles. She had no theories on why, or what influenced the schedule; but it appeared to her that specific weird things would suddenly fill her purview from time to time, in hordes – and for no known reason, she’d find herself confronting Crayola crayons for several days. Or news about exploding gas lines. Or advertisements for radium water, cocoanut water, ancient glacier water; crackpots, rumpots and How are you, Mr. Wilson?

Harvey was deeply symbolic of this entire coincidental weirdness cycle, you see. And today is a Harvey day.

Oreos has just recently celebrated its centenary with the production of a birthday cake Oreo – a lovely idea, except that they’ve replaced the cream filling with buttercreme frosting, and the cookies no longer taste like Oreos. At all. Or even smell like them, which is tragic: because that slightly bitter, burnt umber fragrance of an Oreo is especially emblematic.

Today the buzzards returned to Hinckley, Ohio (didn’t believe me, did you? Ha!). The first one was seen at 8 AM this morning.

A gorilla has been reported roaming loose in Alabama. No gorillas, though, have been reported escaping from any Alabama zoos. Witnesses are adamant that is was neither a bear nor a Bigfoot (with which, apparently, they are familiar).

A tiny dragon has been discovered in Indonesia. Actually, she is a gliding lizard, and as she was found in the act of laying eggs, it is assumed she is a member of a species:

She doesn’t breathe fire. But we haven’t found her paramour yet …

A new species of frog has been found. Of course, this happens all the time lately, but this one … lives in New York City. Kinda odd.

Bears and squirrels are learning to use tools. A juvenile bear was filmed using a stone tool to scratch itself, and a squirrel somewhere has learned to drink from a straw.

Germans, who have recently begun cautiously returning their wolves to the wild in nature preserves, have released a surprising report. The wolves don’t preferentially hunt livestock, woodcutters, or little girls with flashy hoodies. They hunt other wild animals. Apparently the go-to source for wolf management has previously been The Brothers Grimm …

Someone is turning homeless people into wifi hot spots. Someone else has figured out how to make cyborged snails that generate electricity (slowly).

Someone else reports that obligate carnivores – specifically, cats – literally lack the sensory equipment to even taste sugars: which begs the question, why then do so many domestic cats eat all the cookies and cakes they can get their paws on? Ever seen a cat disembowel a Twinkie? They like something they can taste in sweeties …

I haven’t been saving these up, Dear Readers. This has just been one of those days when weird facts are everywhere I look. The mere proliferation of them is weird in itself; like the station from the Twilight Zone has gotten a new power source and expanded its broadcast range. Maybe it has something to do with it’s being the Ides of March, when peculiar things happen all over Rome, At least in Julius Caesar: lionesses whelping in the streets, burning men wandering the city.

Cats and dogs living together … eating Hostess cupcakes. Around here, anyway.

Kage Baker had an undying fascination with the weather. It arose gradually through her adulthood, and had everything to do with performing at Renaissance Faires. When your seasonal activities are performed outdoors in a low-tech environment, you become as sensitive to weather as any Dustbowl farmer.

Kage hung a barometer beside her desk, and checked it frequently. She had me install weather programs on the computer, so she could follow approaching storms by satellite, doppler and animation; when weather cams began to appear, she found the ones in areas in which she had an interest, and checked those in real time. And she listened very carefully to her arthritic hands, her sinuses, and the rib she broke falling out of a tree when she was a kid – because they all sang loudly when a weather front was approaching.

Not that we who do historical recreations are afraid of getting wet! No way; we’re tough. But we do live in fear of the audience sensibly staying home because burlap is not much a rain screen. We live in fear of getting stuck in an unpaved parking lot that has turned to wet adobe. And it’s not near as much fun as you might think to be wandering around soaked to the skin in three layers of wool; children and small people can become immobilized by the weight of a costume that exceeds their own.

I don’t have to worry about this much anymore, as I am on hiatus from open-air fairs these days. But the habits of a lifetime so far do not leave easily; I am finding that I’m still very aware of the changes in air pressure, the slow spread of thin clouds over the sky, and the faint ghostly thunderheads now appearing from the North. Weatherbug (my adorable weather program) is showing me the front creeping down from Alaska, coloured on my monitor in shades of blue and green.

Now, while I am semi-retired, hundreds of my friends are not. The Southern California Renaissance Faire is in the middle of its rehearsals and construction right now, out in a park in Irwindale. And I know all too well what is going through their minds as they, too, watch the sky …

It’s going to rain. Probably all weekend. All those pickup trucks laden with lumber and pieces of buildings and sometimes entire buildings; all those props and tents, all those yards and yards of canvas and silk and tapestry meant to provide a gentle swaying screen against the Spring sun – are going to get soaked. By next weekend, when building resumes, they’ll be harbouring species of mold hitherto unknown to Mankind.

So everyone is considering how much stuff really has to come out this weekend, and how to keep it dry if it does. The rehearsals and classes, ordinarily held outdoors in the classic Greek tradition, will adjourn to nearby living rooms or be abandoned altogether. But the construction crews – the unseen heroes of the Faire, thse sturdy souls who actually put the set together – will be preparing to work on through storm, wind, hail, snow, and just about anything short of actual lightning. It’s not really cool to be 20 feet in the air on a metal ladder with a belt full of nails when lightning is stalking the hills …

So I worry about my friends.

On the other hand, as a native of Southern California, I know in my bones how badly we need this rain. Kage would say, The storm doors are finally open! and dance the Rain Dance of Glee. The only thing that keeps the annual drought in check is the snow laid down in the mountains in Spring – and it’s sparse to nonexistent this year. What’s bearing down on us now is a full-fledged Alaskan storm, its wings full of ice to lay on our grateful, thirsty hills.

In the end, though, the weather will do what it will and be damned to us little people scurrying around down here on the ground. It may arbitrarily swerve east and blast the Rockies and the long-suffering plains again, as all our other storms have this year. Or it may come straight on down the coast, and sit on us for a week – 4 inches of rain, 4 feet of snow; morning and evening mudslides, and intermittent flash floods in the parking lots of the San Fernando Valley.

But the storm is out there. I feel it in my own bones, in the urge to make sure we have tarps ready against the leaking roof  I no longer have to sleep under. I feel it in the back of my mind, where I’m totting up available dry bed places, and deciding who to put where. I can hear Kage reminding herself to pack an extra coverlet, and a plastic sheet to go over us.

Rain is coming.

Kage Baker used to say – rather sourly – “Never let anyone know you have a truck or can play bridge.”

I had a series of trucks and vans for years, and Kage and I were constantly being pressed into helping people move. Or picking up furniture and appliances. I got the larger vehicles because I frequently had to transport entire 4’x8′ sheets of plywood, or 4 dozen 2 x 4’s, or several kegs of beer – I had no real objection to also transporting couches and book cases and pinball machines and entire oaken dance floors for my friends and relations. But it made Kage nuts.

The bridge playing thing was much worse, though. Kage hated the game. But we spent years having weekly games with dear, dear friends because they were fanatics and Kage couldn’t  to be rude. Judging by the behaviour of other people who found out we could play bridge – and immediately proposed similar excesses – bridge does something to people’s brains, and they become like those ants that are infected with  parasitic fungi that make them want to spread it … and I have to admit, bridge does get tiring. There are simpler games. I still  play Hearts happily, but Kage finally refused to admit she even knew how to play Hearts, Spades, OR bridge.

But, you know? There are things to which you just have to accede, once your dearly beloveds find out you can do them. Kage agreed – she just figured that made concealing certain abilities and resources a logical choice. And she was probably right.

This is finals week in many colleges. It certainly is where my nephew Michael goes to college. It is also the last week to solve any problems a student may have let go hang, or had handed to him at the last minute by a teacher … which does happen. So I have to admit, not all the hungry demons that have been chasing Mike this week are his fault. That doesn’t make them go away, though. And they all seem to require papers written right freaking now. And Auntie is a writer …

To do the young man credit, what I have been doing is the research and necessary editing, not writing his papers for him. I’m very good at that, from years of doing the same thing for his Auntie Kage. I’m also good at keeping a flagging writer awake and productive, soothing piano-wire nerves, talking out writer’s block … lots of late night conferences at my desk, where Mike alternately lies on my bed like a murder victim and groans that it’ll never work, and then flies to his laptop to compose like a madman.

But it’s been arduous. And time consuming. Between Sunday night and early this morning, we produced 8 economics papers. The Poverty Cycle is interesting, though tragic; but Exchange Rates will make your brain implode into a gooey pink hole. This morning we also produced an historical analysis of The Sting, which revealed that my nephew has an excellent working knowledge of 20th century American history. It’s certainly better than mine was at 21; I was happily immersing myself in 16th century Europe, while he has been figuring out the Great Depression, Prohibition and the like.

He got 16th century Europe in the cradle, after all. He was raised at Faire.

Anyway: do not doubt that I am proud of him, and proud that he has slogged grimly on through a difficult end of semester. But I haven’t had the time to blog, so that’s where I have been the last several days. I am helping to produce a history teacher.

It’s more worthwhile than helping someone cart home giant rolls of toilet paper, or even a 19th century fold-away couch. (Yes, they existed. I now own it.) Mike’s brain may yet explode from all this – he’s running in the red zone, I can see it in his eyes. But I think I am also teaching him how to survive educational ambushes, and husband his energies, and meet insane deadlines.

Because, intellectually at least, I still have that handy truck.

Kage Baker loved tamales. It was the masa more than anything else, I think; masa being one of those substances that perfectly explains why most Native American cultures worshipped corn as a deity. Masa is a transcendent food stuff – so complicated in its reaction with sauces and fillings and yet so simple in itself – it’s not so much a food as an experience.

Mendoza’s maize fixation was one of the few direct transplants between author and character. Usually, Kage was perfectly aware of the walls between Them and Her, and in fact couldn’t influence most of them, anyway. They were their own people; she just wrote down their adventures. Though she always said that she earnestly hoped she never met Mendoza; whom she was pretty sure was going to punch her in the nose …

Nonetheless,  Mendoza got a pretty big dose of some of Kage’s passions, and corn was among them. Growing it, breeding it, researching it, and eating it in all ways possible. Masa was one of the best, because it was so versatile. Any meat, vegetable or sauce could be slapped on, and the results were gloriously edible; you could even add sugar and raisins and such, and make a pretty good steamed pudding. Though when Kage informed a Latina friend that that was what a sweet tamale tasted like, the friend was rather taken aback …

We grew corn several years, in the backyard of the cottage in Pismo. Kage found a variety that grew in opalescent and exquisite colours – pink, blue, lavender, green – yet was still a soft corn, suitable for eating. It enlivened many dinners.

For good masa, though, you really need to start with a hard corn. Rock corn, as Alex the Parrot called it; something out of which to grind the peculiar silky-oily flour that is masa. Despite success in several grinding experiments (And failures. Always check the torque and the horsepower of your food processor before tossing in granite or dried corn.), it was a hell of a lot easier to just buy masa pre-ground. Then you could spend all your prep time making tamales, or corn pancakes, or dumplings for southwestern stew …

It being a warm, glass-clear day in Los Angeles today; a day with a wind like a silk chemise on the skin, and a scent of orange blossoms everywhere – we decided it was a day for indulgences. My family decided that it was time to pay a visit to Tommy’s. There is a Tommy’s on Colorado Boulevard, out east of Eagle Rock – it used to be a Weinerschnitzel, of all things, and so is a drive-through. Kimberly and I went off and came back with chili dogs, chili burgers, chili fries and chili tamales. Wonderful, soft, fragrant, chile tamales …

It was divine. Harry – who has a most un-birdlike fondness for both spices and gooshy foods – ended up chili and masa to the his eyebrows. Even the Corgi – who has a most un-doglike pickiness about what he eats – gobbled his share down. And we humans just ate and ate … there is nothing like a Tommy burger. Or a Tommy whatever.

My aging stomach is currently debating whether or not chile tamales was a good idea, but I don’t care. I’ve been well-behaved for months, and I refuse to waste a beautiful soft spring day like this one was on sensible foods. Aroint thee, fresh veggies and whole wheat bread! Away, you sliced breast of chicken! I want onions, and unnaturally huge slices of tomato as red as blood, and chili so strong it dyes my spoon orange.

And masa, masa like pale velvet that dissolves on the tongue and fills the mouth with the memory of harvest sun and heat. Mouth to mouth with a kindly god, that’s how I wanted my meal tonight; and that’s what I got. Ah, fulfillment!

Kage would understand.