Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker would say, Slow down. She would tell me, Take is easy for a while. She would observe,  If you’ve got so much extra energy, do something useful.  She would admonish me to be patient, not to spend my new strength all in one place.

Of course, I never did listen, so it’s not too surprising that I haven’t been remembering her good advice recently. It certainly wouldn’t surprise her. She always felt slightly annoyed about it, and maintained that no one listened to her anyway.

That wasn’t true, of course. By the end of her life, thousands of people had listened to her and were clamouring for more. I cannot tell you, Dear Readers, how happy that made her. Kage had a soft voice, a diffident manner, a bad case of the shyness, and came from – and then went into – enormous families: she was accustomed to being outshouted. But no one can outshout the written word. She exulted in that.

But she still got overlooked in public conversations. It really narked her, too. At first, at science fiction conventions, she was overshadowed on panels – by the loud, the obnoxious, the self-involved; sometimes by the truly famous – though not those last as much, because the real pros tend to be gracious. And tired. They’re glad to share the spotlight … but the people who have self-published a cartoon guide to Ewok footprints, or a parody of Harry Potter: they plough right over a quiet person like Kage.

She learned, though. Some of it was body English – an incredulous stare, a raised eyebrow, a roll of her black eyes could pull the audience back to her end of the table. And when she had the microphone, she was a ruthless moderator. When someone strayed too far off the topic – especially into self-aggrandisement, the usual detour – she would announce, “Annnd, that’s enough of that, as Sister Julian used to say – back to the subject at hand.”

Once an over-enthusiastic fellow panelist on a talk about the rigours of research abruptly announced that the topic was boring – they would now highjack the panel and talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kage leaned over the microphone and said clearly, “Or not“, quelled the rebellion with a long stare, and promptly returned the panel to the necessity of not using historical romances as primary documentation. The audiance applauded.

It was relatively easy to talk over her in a social setting. But with the staff of Authority – or a mike – in her hand, Kage was an implacable Athena Ergane.

Since I got ambulatory once more, I tend to run about and exhaust myself; then I get glassy-eyed and sleep for 4 hours. Most of last week, I was awake all night and asleep most of the day, alternately running around madly and falling over in a coma. It’s been like that since I began to feel better. It must be like living with a large hamster.

Basically, I have somewhat over-reached  myself lately. I need to listen to Kage more in my head – because for once she isn’t saying “Write, you slacker!” – she’s telling me to recover before I start racing off in all directions. And it’s not fair to Kimberly, who has nursed me so far, to be so careless of my returning vigour:  it’s not that Kimberly is neglecting to rein me in, but the poor girl has a husband and a son and a job to see to. When she’s off doing something important, I get loose and do too much. And the wrong things. At the wrong time.

Which leads then leads to my running out of energy before I thought I would, and thus to my neglecting the things I really wanted to do; and could, in fact, have accomplished if I hadn’t decided that just because I can drive a little means I can run off and go shopping for garden statuary. Hence my erratic attendance to this blog. I keep waking up and discovering I’ve been asleep for half the day.

So I’m gonna listen more to Kage. I shall endeavour to cut back on the off-road adventuring for a while, and concentrate on doing my sit-down chores like a sensible person. You need lots of energy to be an idiot, I am finding. I will take Kage’s advice and use what I have to make something besides tracks in a circle.

Kage Baker was not a “people person”. She liked many folks; she loved some; she was fascinated by the species in general and was a devoted people-watcher. She just wasn’t very comfortable associating with large numbers of Homo sapiens.

Children were different. But among the many arguments over child development is the theory that we all learn how to be human. Children are something else, still experimenting with the idea of growing up to be otters or trees or robots or squirrels. Kage was more comfortable among people who were not yet decided on what human means, and most of those are little kids.

Most of the rest are individuals engrossed in the arts. She got on pretty well with quite large crowds of actors or artists, most of whom were paying no more specific attention to her than she was to them. That was a group dynamic through which Kage could move with ease and comfort. Book conventions – which she had initially dreaded – were thus much more natural environments for her than she originally feared. All those people were making something – art, new worlds, social constructs – and not just circling round in cocktail party predation.

Kage could watch, relatively unobserved, and join where she felt safe. And that was what she most enjoyed – watching from the comfort of a hunter’s blind; sliding through the crowds in her own ghillie suit, a social Tarnhelm. I think one of the reasons her observations of the human condition were so sharp and accurate is that she made them while safely, objectively, effectively invisible.

A friend recently posted a definition of writing that was Kage Baker exactly:

Writing: an occupation for introverts who want to tell you a story, but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.

Kage adored telling stories.She never outgrew the childhood desire to be the very first to break exciting news; I remember her even getting a kick out of telling people she had cancer. She hid it for months – but when she went public, she ordered me anxiously, “Now, let me tell it my way!” And she wasn’t sparing anyone’s feelings. She was calculating effects.

In childhood, Kage made up stories for other kids to base games on. More often she scripted her own play, inventing entire worlds and personae to enact through the faeryland of the family gardens. One of them was a squirrel – when Kage was tiny, the squirrel made tea sets out of eucalyptus nuts and leaves, and hid stashes of goodies all over the yard. As Kage got older, the squirrel adventures  grew ever more exciting and detailed; Amazonian bows made from saplings, secret code messages in invisible ink hidden in the stones of Momma’s dry-stone walls, secret doors reached by rappelling off the roof. When we were in our teens and 20’s, Missy Squirrel tended to suddenly appear sometime after midnight, a cocktail in paw. Many were her escapades in the Hollywood Hills, accompanied by her faithful sidekick, a Mouse.

Firesides were among her favourite places to tell stories. Even symbolic fires: any light in the darkness was a fireside, and she told most of her tales there. Dashboard lights on late night highways; campfires in woods by the sea, waving a marshmallow on a stick like a wand. By lantern light under oak boughs. Anywhere that eyes gleamed fascinated and blind out of the safe, transforming dark – Kage told stories. Some of you, Dear Readers, heard her then; all of you have heard the results, when she polished up the tales she made to accompany beer and S’Mores, and wrote them down.

You can tell stories so much more easily from behind a mask. The squirrel saga was private and silly; and, yes, alcohol was usually involved. Kage’s other masks, though – satin and leather and beaten gold, engraved and embroidered and gemmed with magic jewels; with eye wide and filled with mirrors and flames, so that you’d think no one could ever see out of them. But Kage did. And didn’t have to make eye contact with anyone but the gods.

Kage Baker – I’ve got no obvious link between Kage, my perpetual background theme, and what I’m whinging about today. Maybe the hope that she would have indulged me in my feeling like road kill (as I do), and tiptoed round my groaning self, and brought me soda crackers and cool water. The rest of you Dear Readers must be getting tired of my being sick – God He knows I am.

I have healed like a superhero from my surgery; the incision is completely closed, and judging from the paucity of twinges from the inside, that’s healing well too. The rest of the family had a horrendous cold sweep through – even the cats were sneezing – which I shrugged off with ease. But third time pays for all, as the old saying goes, and I have fallen prey to a plain fit of gastritis.

My stomach hurts, I’m feverish, and I’m fighting off D-Day waves of recurring nausea and heartburn. I want to be up and doing nifty useful and creative things, but once I achieve a vertical position all I can do is concentrate on is not throwing up. Life is yucky today.

It’s amazing how relatively brave and determined one can be in the face of big, scary ailments, only to revert to a peevish 5-year old when afflicted with a tummy-ache. I want Kage to read to me. I want ginger ale with a bendy straw. I want the special old cut-work and embroidered pillow cases Mamma used to give us (once she was sure we wouldn’t throw up on them) to aid our recoveries. I want a giant box of crayons, a fresh pad of construction paper and an empty Quaker Oatmeal box to turn into a cylindrical castle or space ship … I want fudgesickles and apple sauce and butterscotch pudding.

To tell you the truth, though, I’m not sure these old talismans have retained their magic, here on the edge of my sixth decade. They all worked well enough when I trotted them out desperately for Kage – but Kage was not fixed in time like most people, and possessed  the magical ability to imbue her surroundings with the ambiance of vanished times. In my case, the bendy straw would promptly suck flat, the pudding would be sugar-free, and the crayons would be lacking all the old, old colours in favour of modern crap like Banana Mania, Fuzzy Wuzzy and Screamin’ Green.

So I’m going to go to sleep. Sleeping through this will be nearly as good as not having it at all. Maybe I’ll dream about Kage, and the days when illness could be ameliorated by crisp sheets and a brand new crayon sharpener.

That would be nice.

Kage Baker would be shaking her head at me today. “How do you do these things?” she would ask. “You just stumble from disaster to disaster!”

Which is pretty much gall from the person who was usually at my side when I did it … while it’s quite true I seem to have a knack for weird accidents, Kage was usually right beside me when I fell off a roof, or was run over by a startled deer, or developed a weird disease.

I don’t know why I attract such domestic drama. I keep expecting to reach those golden days when nothing peculiar happens anymore – but I am aging like Calamity Jane, and it appears there are no peaceful back waters for me. If I find one, it will turn out to be a breeding ground for mutant skunks with hands. Or something.

Our house has a fireplace. I like a small fire on cold evenings. We usually use artificial logs to at least start the fire, as they are a nice example of recycling – made of sawdust and paraffin instead of some noble oak that was cut down by a mall developer. Night before last, though, the damned thing wouldn’t stay lit. This is about impossible for something made of sawdust and paraffin; or so we thought. But when it insisted on going out repeatedly, we gave up; it was laying there dark and unburning when I went to bed.

Unknown to us, though, the cunning log continued to smoulder through the night. The smell of smoke was pronounced – at which point, we figured it out and closed the glass fireguard doors to keep it contained – there was still no visible  smoke or flame, but sparks are always possible. We thought we were being clever, see.

But the log was cleverer than us. When Kimberly left to pick up her husband, Ray, for a doctor’s appointment, thick white smoke was pouring out of the chimney. Her last frenzied instruction to me, flung over her shoulder, was: “Call the fire department, we might have a chimney fire!”

Panic stations! I called 911, poor nephew Michael attempted to leash the Corgi (who had no idea why we were running around, but was prepared to panic out of sheer camaraderie), and the cats just sat and blinked. Not even Harry, a semi-professional hysteric, seemed upset by anything but us. However, when the firemen arrived – 6 trucks! Dozens of large men with axes and ladders! – all bets were off and all the animals freaked. The cats vanished, Harry started bugling like a dragon, and the dog went into a frenzy.

You have to picture me, in my tatty convalescent sweat clothes, surrounded by huge men with axes and Trojan helmets, rushing around the house. Mike was dealing with the Corgi, who had settled on trying to herd the firemen as a logical response, and answer the phone – which was poor terrified Kimberly, still trying to collect Ray and simultaneously find out if her house and family were on fire. The phone kept going out, convincing her Mike was hanging up on her for unknown reasons; and Mike, in a 20-year old attack of bravado, started yelling at the firemen. Not surprisingly, they yelled back.

Acoustic scientists say that a female voice cuts through ambient noise better than a male one. I have found this theory proven many times upon occasions of riot and confusion, and so it proved yestreday. Or maybe men are just naturally intimidated by loud old women … Despite being shoulder-high to everyone else involved, I was able to make myself heard over the masculine shouting, send Mike and the dog away, get the attention of the lead fireman, and point out that the smoke was, indeed, diminishing as they poured water on the log. Calm descended and rationality resumed.

This would all have been figured out eventually by the firemen (who are, after all, pros at this) but I’d like to think that my leaping up and down screaming had some salutary effect. At the very least, the sight of a middle-aged soprano troll doll having a fit in front of them slowed the heroic firemen down long enough to prevent them from axing holes in the ceiling.

Once everyone was quiet, it was easy to determine what had happened. The log had indeed caught – but all it did was smoulder. No visible flames, no smoke at room level – it had all risen and accumulated at the wire mesh spark guard on top of the chimney. It finally exited in a thick white mass: thus giving the impression that the accumulated soot inside the chimney had caught fire. Ta-da!

Oh was the general reaction. It must have just been … a smouldering log.

The water mess was happily confined to the fireplace itself. The walls were left un-axed. The neighbors were reassured. The firemen and the nephew did not come to territorial blows. The fire captain assured me that it was better to err on the side of caution, and they were glad not to have found a real fire. I thanked them all and sent them on their way with grateful waves; we opened all the doors and windows to let out the smoke smell, and sat around shaking for the rest of the afternoon.

Ray still has no idea it happened at all. But I have this feeling Kage does, and somewhere is stifling a snicker and saying, “Only you, kiddo.”

But, you know? It’s kind of comforting.

Kage Baker had a horror of house fires. It was rather odd, considering she loved fire, pyrotechnics, cannonry and anything else involving a creative use of fire and smoke – but she  was really always afraid of a fire in the house.

Of course, we lived most of our lives in old frame houses. The portions spent, instead, in trailers, tents and pseudo-Tudor buildings (complete with thatch!) weren’t exactly conducive to leaving one feeling fire-proof, either. Then there was the rate at which Kage produced, and accumulated,  piles of paper: inhuman, is what that was. At any rate, she always, logically, sensibly, insisted on smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and other such safety gear around the house.

But, you know what? Those things won’t prevent a chimney fire. Which we did not have today, but thought we did for about an hour; the house, the closets and everyone’s nerves are therefore in shambles. I shall explain tomorrow, when some of the undeniably amusing aspects will have appeared, like risable cream, on the surface of my scrambled brain.

Now I’m gonna go sit on the front porch. The living room still smells unnervingly of barbecue …

Kage Baker always felt February was a sneaky month. It promises Spring over and over, and then reneges and leaves us in Winter again. Days get soft and silky and warm; and just when you find your huaraches and shorts, the wind resumes blowing from the North and you freeze important bits off while you try to start the annual garden ….

You can count on freezes in January. You can count on floods in March. February has no backbone nor consistency, nor honesty either. It eyes sparkle beguilingly, and you end up wearing the wrong clothes when you can’t tell if that sparkle is new leaves or ice.

It’s 71 degrees here in LA, at not quite half-past 10 AM, and destined to brush the ’80’s today. The mulberry tree is still utterly leafless, but the camellia is blooming like it’s May Day; the grass is practically growing visibly, except where the frost-kill has left patterns like cut velvet in its nap. Hawks are courting in the vault of the sky, and last night I heard the first mockingbird. But the snails and frogs and crickets won’t be awake for weeks, yet.

Kage would start to get itchy feet in February, longing to get out and garden. I think one of the reasons she took up bulbs so enthusiastically in her later years was just so she’d have something to do while Winter drained away. She’d haul the tulips out of the veggie crisper (it wasn’t safe to eat anything in our crispers …) and go over them like a hoard of gems. She spent a lot of time trying to figure out by the appearance of tulip bulbs what sort they were: because some of her careful labels always somehow fell off in the refrigerator.

“What are they doing in there, dancing?” she’d growl, turning some sleeping bulb over and over to look for clues. “Here, is this an Insulinde or an Estella Rijnveld?”

“I dunno. They all look like papier mache turnips to me.”

Kage would give me A Mendoza Look, and stare intently at the suspect tulip. Then she’d decide it was actually a Mabel … and 9 times out of 10, she’d be right. How did she do it? I have no idea. She had magic gardening hands.

Now all those bulbs she loved and planted, the rare tulips and hyacinths, live in a Northern town. I sent the pots up there when I packed up the house, and they still live in some dear friends’ yard. And now they’ll bloom for Master Alexander Kage Paladini, who is pushing 5 months old and will be walking this summer, and will like the bright colours his namesake planted years before his birth …

Winter and spring, all mixed up together. Maybe that’s what February is for, to remind me of the way the seasons not only roll along repeating but blend into and out of one another along the way. Kage would have liked that.

And now a flock of parrots just flew overhead. Feral Amazons, noisy happy little thugs that have just swept into the neighborhood from who knows where … the ravens are horrified, trying to hide in the camphor trees while the parrots sweep through the branches like  giggling weed whackers … the sparse new leaves go flying, shredded by wings and beaks and talons, and the occasional collisions of rollicking parrots and startled ravens.

Winter and spring and their feathered avatars, fighting it out in the sky. Man, symbolism just falls like rain around here today, even if it is clear and warm. And Kage taught me how to see it all.

Kage Baker enjoyed technology. She just didn’t understand it much. Nor was she interested in theory – Clarke’s Law*, she often averred, worked just fine for her. All she needed were clear instructions on use, and access to a repair person when everything blew up.

I’m sure this blithe assumption of ignorance was a front. For one thing, when faced with necessity, she could usually manage to coax her electronics back out of whatever coma into which they had slipped. She just preferred to have someone else do it – her clever hands were a lot more comfortable with tangible tools than her mind was with programs and buttons.

“This isn’t even a real button,” she would complain, trying to turn her last two hours of composition back into a recognizable Western font. “It’s just a trick of the light inside the monitor!”

“Yeah, but the computer doesn’t know that. And if you don’t tell it the button isn’t real, you should be fine.”

“Oh, screw you …”

Still and all, things usually worked. Most of the time Kage no idea why, and was happiest that way. She didn’t want to worry about how the words formed on the screen; her primary job was to free them from the confines of her own skull. She expected them to fly, damn it, once they cast off the edge of that nest of Oriental pearls.

But she loved techno toys. Whenever we upgraded the home computers, she spent a blissful couple of days customizing her desk top – some things had to reproduced exactly, but she also wanted to try out all the new stuff. She loved computer games. She loved her Buke, the netbook I gave her for her last birthday. The ability to take photos with her phone thrilled her – not because she didn’t have a camera, but because the idea of the combined functions was so intriguing.

She was fascinated with the rumours of e-readers. That was all she ever saw of them: rumours; she died just before they became common on every bus and beach. She quite hated reading off the computer screen, because the  wide scale made her eyes ache from all that switching back and forth. So the idea of a book-sized screen cajoled her.

I got a Kindle last year, and have been very happy with it. I am now spoiled by the  ability to carry around thousands of books in one slim volume. Man, this is magic! I think about Kage every time I turn it on, and how thrilled she’d have been with it.

But the basic Kindle is black and while. That’s fine by me; the austerity of the written word is soothing. Kage, though – Kage loved colours. And covers. And illustrations. And touch screens. My memory of her fascination has been tempting me since the New Year, whispering in her voice that I really need a Fire …  but I don’t. So it runs games apps, so what? That’s  just what I do not need, another way to waste time on Plants VS Zombies.

But Kage would never be denied. A toy was designated for purchase each time a royalty check came in – budget the luxuries first was another axiom she cherished. Well, I got a payment last week. And today, I bought a Kindle Fire.

Okay, it’s wonderful. I am lost in its glassy gaze, its gliding movement, its promise of music and movies and dead zombies … in an attempt to justify my caving, I spent this afternoon clearing my own books off my original Kindle. I stocked it with Terry Pratchett and Henry Turtledove, and I gave it to my nephew. He’s thrilled. His earnest study of the French Revolution has been derailed in favour of a very strange football game in Ankh-Morpork.

And I am now off to read a new volume of genetic anomalies. I can hear Kage chortling in glee, and in my head.

It’s like champagne bubbles.

*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Kage Baker detested professional sports. I’m afraid it wasn’t simply not caring, or a knee-jerk stereotypical gender response – she actively, personally, and with considerable glee, detested them.

She said it was a morality of intellect issue. Sports, she felt, needed some nobility to be interesting. She liked the Olympics – there were events she would go out of her way to actually follow, especially the Winter ones. She liked watching New Zealand soccer teams do the haka. Sometimes baseball would conjure up a moment of heroism that moved her – Kirk Gibson’s slow wounded-warrior passage around the bases to win the 1988 World Series thrilled her.

But Kage hated football.

Maybe having far too many uncles and brothers had something to do with it. Maybe it was because she could never figure out the scoring. Certainly, living her last 15 years in a small holiday beach town exacerbated her dislike. When Superbowl weekend came round each year, every hotel, motel and holiday cottage rental in our tiny little town was full of football fans. Team colours flew from every motel balcony and car antenna. Giant motorhomes took all the street parking, and emitted vibrations and uncouth noises like portals to the Nether Dimensions.

It meant getting our shopping done before noon on Friday, unless we wanted to to have to swim upstream for a gallon of milk or some chips. It meant giving up on going to a restaurant on Friday or Saturday – they were all full of  drunken out-of-towners. It meant that by mid-morning on the Sunday, the loudest sounds in the entire town were cheering, cursing, and inarticulate primate noises.

We used to take walks mid-game, and count the actual human words we heard, as opposed to assorted simian grunts, coughs, howls and pant-hoots. Usually words were restricted to obscenities and despairing cries of “No! No! No!” Kage sneered and muttered imprecations.

The beach would be inhabited  by teenaged girls and small children, happily exiled from the sacred precincts of the television. Even the surfers were mostly female. The arcades were half empty, taken over by the pale, weedy kids who ordinarily couldn’t get close to the good games.

Kage and I lived next to rental houses most of our time there – the cottages that rented for exorbitant sums to the aristocracy of Bakersfield and Oildale, come to the beach for holidays. That did provide us with great views of many hilarious barbecuing accidents – the best ones were the deep-fried turkey disasters. I may have seen more of those than anyone who’s not a paramedic. The best results seemed to occur when the chef failed to realize he had to thaw the bird before dropping it into the boiling oil – that always resulted in a head-high fountain of hot oil that usually caught fire on the way down and napalmed the cook.

Twice the fryers were blown apart. And once we saw a guy knocked arse over elbow by a frozen, flaming turkey to the chest. Being good neighbors, we called 911 – but his furious wife had put him out before they got there, and no one was hurt. By the turkey, anyway. We saw a very large pizza delivery made later …

Anyway, football was not Kage’s cup of tea. I don’t much care one way or the other, myself. My family is happily ensconced in the living room now with Game Day Treats, enjoying the game and the commercials with equal pleasure; I am here at my computer, very gratefully out of the line of sight, working instead on the games in my head. I don’t mind football, but, you know – meh. It does nothing for me.

Maybe if they had to catch some of those fireball turkeys, now …

Kage Baker didn’t really like animals, generically. She liked some individuals, based on their personal virtues and flaws, but she just was not automatically charmed by fluff and four paws. She liked birds instead.

However, she preferred dogs to cats – partly because she was mildly allergic to cats. It’s difficult to be really fond of someone who makes you itch and sneeze … and, in fact, one of the few cats she did like was the elegant hairless Sphinx who lived at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco.  Cats are damned funny looking naked, but Sphinxes tend to have enormous dignity; Ridley always managed to suggest by her very posture that hair was vulgar.

Even in dogs, Kage preferred distance. The family kept a lot of Labradors over the years; it was the quiet ones that Kage liked, rather than the dancing clowns. Probably her favourite dog ever was a friend’s Great Dane – the Rettinhouse’s Harlequin Dane, Patches. Patches was a delicate, ladylike dog with the soul of a swan, and Kage was very fond of her. They would sit together and sort of amiably ignore one another, apparently taking comfort in one another’s reserved quiet.

I like all sorts of dogs and cats myself. My heart, like Kage’s has long belonged to parrots, though, so it’s been a long time since I lived with any on a regular basis. When Kage died, though, I discovered … dog shows. Come the evening, after the long aching days of working on boxing up the house, I’d collapse in front of the telly and just stare at whatever was there. One night it was the Eukanuba Dog Show. And I was immediately enchanted.

After that came the Westminster Dog Show, which was really a gorgeous event. So many kinds of dogs! All so beautiful! All apparently having so much fun! I was hooked, in which pastime I was encouraged by friends and family members. It appeared that nearly everyone I knew – except me – had been watching these for years!

So now they are on my forever list. This is Super Bowl weekend, of course, and the gentlemen of our household are not that into dog shows … but the wonders of recording come to everyone’s rescue. Kimberly and I can watch the Eukenuba Show without interfering with The Game, and everyone ends up happy.

My stomach is still feeling doubtful, so it’s very nice to sit amid cushions and purring cats on the couch, and eat yoghurt, and watch pretty dogs prance. Those dogs were the first new thing to get my attention when Kage was gone – I am grateful for their ever-so-characteristic canine rescue, too. They saved me from some of the awfulness, in their various ways, from enormous Venetian Mastiffs down to puffball Pomeranians.

And the Cardigan Corgi took second place in the Herding Dogs tonight! We cheered and cheered, and fed Milk Bones to Dylan the House Corgi – who didn’t know why but also doesn’t care, as long as there are treats and tummy rubs involved.

Kage would approve. She approved of dogs that did something, you know? And all these shining, grinning, furry heroes have made me feel better at the darkest point of the year three times running, now. So everybody is better off tonight.

I think I’ll have a chicken pot pie and see how the Toy Breeds turn out next. Family and dogs are cool.

Kage Baker was outraged when she was diagnosed with a gastrointestinal infection after her cancer surgery.

“How can I get a plain old stomach flu when I have cancer?” she demanded. “It’s just not right. Hell, with all the drugs I’m taking, how is it even possible?”

Good question (for which no one had an answer). But she was quite incensed at the injustice of it; she felt that if you have something major, you ought to be spared the wretched little things.

I agree. I was patient about the weird attack of Klebsiella. I was patient about the infection with enterovirus E. cocci that kept me in the hospital an extra three days post-surgery. But now I seem to have a plain old gastroenteritis, and I protest! Wanly, weakly and plaintively, as I am shivering in my bed with a fever and trying really hard not to throw    up …

My incision is quite healed over at the surface. Nonetheless, I think puking with a recent slice in one’s abdomen is probably contra-indicated. Whether or not it is clinically unwise, I simply don’t want to do it.

Luckily, my bed is warm and soft and I have lots of red jello and chocolate pudding to hand for when I think I might survive a meal. Kimberly thinksof everything. In the meantime, I’m going back to bed.

How easily we get whiney about small problems when we’ve defeated the big ones! Maybe it’s a sign I am really recovering, that I can waste time bitching about the flu. As soon as I have some energy, I’ll feel ashamed of myself. In the meantime, this is no fair.