Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker told me – at some point during our long, mad scramble through the health care system -that the hardest part of her year of illness was just getting to where she needed to be. Some of that was literal – her surgery was in San Francisco, 300 miles from our home. They don’t open Ronald McDonald House to middle aged ladies, so it was only through the extraordinary kindness of friends (you know who you are, Steve and Carol!) that we didn’t end up living in our PT Cruiser during that part.

Some of it was  that the more she needed to get done, the less strength she had to do it. The tests, the endless paperwork, the daily therapies – they all took time and coordination, and as she got weaker, the less she had to bring to those tasks. Quite aside from the fact that she never did learn to drive … the waves of red tape just rose up over her like the Red Sea collapsing in Moses’ wake, and Kage said she felt like Pharoah’s unhappy army.

Coping with all this crap was my job. I am proud to say I managed it pretty well. And at this point, I am also thankful I learned what to do before I needed those tricks personally. It’s due to my earlier practice that I knew how to hurry the establishment along, and how to avoid getting ground up in the slow, toothy wheels of bureaucracy and paperwork.

But I still had to fill out forms, sign my name a hundred times, and walk all over the considerable area of Cedars-Sinai for tests. It’s a lovely place, full of people who are not only competent but compassionate – but it’s also long and tall and deep, and some parts of the campus are only marginally connected to the other parts. When you need to have blood work, EKGs and a chest X-ray all in one day, you have to cover a lot of ground.

That’s not something I do very well at the moment. I’m slow, and stiff, and after an appallingly brief time spent walking or standing, I’m pretty uncomfortable. By the time I reached the last test and verified my name, DOB and address for the 10th time – and since they’d tagged me with a bracelet with all that on it at the start, why did I have to keep reciting it? – my friendly smile was more a baring of teeth. I must commend the staff of Cedars-Sinai for apparently recognizing the syndrome, and doing their very best to accommodate my fatigue and discomfort.

And when I wasn’t cursing my way down some long corridor decorated by someone with a fetish for mauve and turquoise, I thanked Kage for teaching me both patience and determination. Most of the time I had a shadow dialogue in my head, telling her all about my current trials and tribulations, and sharing the weird bits with her.

Those omnipresent aquariums, for instance  … there are even more of them at Cedars-Sinai than I had originally thought. Significant portions of the walls are composed solely of glass and fish; I shudder to imagine a temblor in there. And the waiting room aquarium by the hematology lab is back down to a mere two grey fish, too. I don’t know what those grey guys are, but they clearly kick ass. Nothing else survives in their tank.

I had to make a special side trip today, too, to go and sign a new release for my surgeon. The State of California, in its infinite wisdom, requires that before a doctor can do anything to your reproductive organs, you have to sign a release stating you understand that the effects are permanent. So I had to reassure the State today that I realized the removal of my uterus will leave me unable to bear children. Never mind the fact that I am 58, that menopause is years behind me, and that the freaking Geiger Alien has taken over my baby-making equipment: Sacramento can now rest easy.

I don’t know quite what they are smoking up there in the Delta. But if they’d just legalize and sell it, our budget woes would be over …

Anyway, it was a long, hard, annoying day. But they have my blood, my heart trace, my chest transparency; they have all my vital statistics (I gave ’em three dozen times) even though no one can actually pronounce my name so how sure are they that I am me? I am really looking forward to next Monday. I won’t have to drive, I won’t have to park, and I won’t have to walk anywhere. I can recline on a gurney and be transported like a Roman matron in a palanquin, serene and horizontal.

One of the other things I’ve learned in how nice it is to lie down. It really gives you something to happily anticipate. And you gotta take your pleasures where you can.

Kage Baker said that the darkest part of the year was the stretch between January 6th and February 14th – the long haul between 12th Night and Valentine’s Day, where there are no holidays, no celebrations, no real festivals. And Valentine’s Day doesn’t really fill the gap, she said: but at least it includes candy, so there’s that.

With 12th Night past, the Ghost of Christmas Present can no longer be persuaded to loll around eating leftovers. The lights are down, the decorations put away; we’ve left the blue and white frost lights in the bare mulberry tree, in token of the winter nights, but the jewels and gems of the holiday are back asleep in their boxes.

This time of year, it’s tempting for anyone to sleep away the shortened days. It’s the time of  year when Kage was always most likely to toss the latest manuscript in a corner, and devote herself to playing computer games. Monkey Island never failed to charm, and she’d just work her way methodically through the entire series. For variety, there was also the weird as hell adventures of Manny Calveros in Grim Fandango. Those games saw Kage through the dark depths of the year.

Me, I’ve never really gotten into computer games, except the weenie sort that are really just mechanized board and card games. I’ll play Hearts for hours, or crossword puzzles; the closest I’ve ever gotten to a shooter game, though, is Plants Vs. Zombies – to which, I have to admit, I am intermittently and totally addicted. Sadly, I only found that game -which Kage would have appreciated as she never did my puzzle games – in the last few months of her life. So we never got to share it. I just don’t have Kage’s honed gunner instincts …

But I do have her manuscripts. There was always a manuscript in need of proofing and review in January; this year is no different, and in fact I have two. The Best of Kage Baker is nearly 500 pages, and I just finished it this afternoon. Nell Gwynne II is less hefty, and it went off with its corrections on Friday. So I am managing as well as Kage usually did, at this low point of the rolling year.

The only thing that has managed to distract me seriously has been the narcolepsy – this morning I woke up and found I have slept the clock around. Twelve hours! Man, I used to sleep less than that during an entire weekend at Faire! This constantly sleeping thing is an unmitigated drag, and I cannot wait to heal into a better Arcadian rhythm. Sleep is boring. I am not enjoying it. I could really get into having lots of free time to read and knit and write, but this silly business of being unconscious every 3 or 4 hours has got to stop.

I am putting lots of hope into the lengthening of the days. Spring will get here eventually, and I’ll be feeling better; I plan on blooming with the early bulbs. Kage would expect it.

Tomorrow I must go in for pre-surgical tests. Tuesday I must keep a brace of doctor’s appointments to satisfy requirements from Social Security – I guess to ascertain that I am, yes indeed, sick enough to warrant being considered disabled for a while. One of them is a psychiatric exam, which worries me slightly: I’m not sure if I should try to convince the Feds I am sane, or otherwise. One never knows what they might want. I don’t know why they’ve scheduled this exam anyway, as I haven’t claimed any psychological difficulties … perhaps I just sound like someone who might have a few screws loose.

And probably I am. But I think I have good explanations for why my gaskets may be slightly loose. If nothing else, the low point of the year can help me; I’ll plead my constant sleepiness, and hint that I might have Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don’t have SAD, but it’s a trendy disease right now. It might be fun to have a trendy disease for once. I usually have to settle for just weird.

Anyway, the long winter holidays are over for good and all, and it’s time to renew the fight. Duties galore await me. Time to hobble back in to the fray.

And good luck and wishes to all of you, Dear Readers, who are also slinking off unenthusiastically to your jobs. Be of good cheer – chocolate hearts, at least, will soon be in the offing! Those should see us all through to Spring.

Kage Baker’s sequel to Nell Gwynne is now in editing – once I found out where my email had put the document sent to by the publisher. It, and several subsequent emails, had been tagged as SPAM by a recent update (thank you, Windows) and I hadn’t seen them.

Luckily, Lynn the patient agent let me know that Subterranean Press was trying, futilely, to get hold of me. I found the correspondence, re-educated my email, and set to on editing.

In the meantime, I had also gotten the document for The Best of Kage Baker and it too had been consigned to SPAM. So that’s next.

In consequence, however, nothing much is happening on the blog. So sorry, Dear Readers! But it is one more step on getting two books – 1 totally unread! – out for Kage this year.

Back to work!

Kage Baker had a terrifying confidence in my ability to solve problems. At least, it terrified me. The weight of her trust was enormous, and nothing ever seemed to shake it. She wasn’t much for changing her mind.

Of course, that confidence only extended to unusual problems. Weird things, unlikely screw-ups, improbable disasters – if it looked like it might require the Impossible Missions Force or superpowers to fix, she would hand it off to me with no doubt or misgivings. Strange noises in the middle of the night or inexplicable smells in the fridge were always my province. Dropped jelly jars or bugs on the living room wall were Kage’s.

She also had an unshakeable conviction that I was inept at ordinary problems. Mind you, there was plenty of evidence to support her idea – I have a history, recounted gleefully in the family, of falling prey to any number of perfectly plain difficulties. Vanilla problems, you know, that when confronted by me turned into Bloodthirsty Atlantean Fish Berry Ripple. With sprinkles.

I cannot be trusted to go out and get extra rolls for holiday dinners, for instance – I drive into things. I cannot paint anything without ending up with paint in anatomically unlikely places – under my hair, through my clothes. If there are colds or  influenza going through the household, I will be immune and nurse the victims; but what I do catch will be something on the lines of unknown fungal infections and bacteria no one has ever seen before in a human.

I’m great at first aid. Blood, vomit, the various appalling permutations of mucous – ha, none of that fazes me! However, an insect within 6 feet of me and I have a meltdown. I mistook a dust bunny for a spider last night, and roused half the household to rescue me. A bug on the other side of the windshield will make me whimper; inside the car and I go hysterical.

One summer in Pismo, we had a major infestation of walking stick insects, those favourites of grammar school terrariums: and the buggers kept walking on me. I liked A Bug’s Life, and Slim was probably my favourite character – but the urbane insect with David Hyde Pierce’s voice is a far cry from a 3-inch long monster perching on one’s shoulder, staring with wet, compound eyes … Kage had to calm and rescue me repeatedly, once even guiding our car to the breakdown lane of the freeway while I sobbed in abject terror. She serenely dispatched the thing with a rolled up newspaper.

Thus, Kage took care of the everyday cockups. I got the weird stuff. The night the hot water heater tried to explode (they whistle like demented tea kettles, BTW), the many times we broke down on empty roads or sections of her manuscripts vanished into the aether – those were mine.

So I think Kage would be proud of me – but unsurprised – that I have won these initial battles with Medi-Cal. After all, I won similar fights on her behalf; and even though we lost in the end, the process could have been much worse. Would have been, I am sure, had I not learned how to inveigle my way through the mine fields and thorn mazes of bureaucracy. She was so very sure I could win the paperwork fights that I did. Amazing.

You know what else is amazing? I don’t remember a single bug attack while Kage was sick. No spiders rappelling down from interstellar space, no mutant crickets hiding in the drapes. No mystery crayfish doing ghastly Tai Chi on the front walk … and yes, I know they aren’t bugs, but they look like them. And what were they doing scattered over our front lawn that one spring, anyway? We never found out. But somehow, Kage kept me safe from bugs until I moved back in with Kimberly – whose brace of cats and valiant Corgi obligingly eat them for me.

So, I’m primed and ready, Fate. I’ve batted back your first volley of impossible crap. My shields are active and I’m on the offensive. As long as the State of California hasn’t hired any cockroaches, I will win.

Aroint thee!

Kage Baker, despite everything we could do, slipped right off the official radar once her cancer was diagnosed. I’ve never been able to get a logical explanation for why – her own theory was that, at the most inconvenient time of her life, she had finally achieved invisibility.

Everything took longer than anticipated. We called it the Cinder Cone Problem, because it was like trying to climb a slope of volcanic ash. For every 13 inches we climbed, we slid back a foot. And the lava was coming …

What it meant, practically, was that radiation and chemo didn’t start for 4 months after her diagnosis. Surgery was not for 6 months afterwards. Had they been sooner – ah,  but that way lies madness, and my making the evening news with an assault rifle in my hands.

But I learned important lessons, fighting for Kage. I learned ways to get things done. And by using them, today I got my surgery date – January 16th. At 1:15 in the afternoon – which means a check-in a few hours earlier, and then a few days in Cedars Sinai. I shall be sleeping with the fishes, he he he, since that place is thick with aquaria.

It’s an enormous relief to have the date. I wish it were sooner. The delays caused by Medi-Cal meant that a lot of other people – who were probably putting their own surgeries off until the New Year – got in before me. But they all need their surgeries, too, and I am grateful that this has, actually, gone so relatively smoothly and quickly. As I’ve learned, it doesn’t have to be that way.

In Kage’s case, her two main surgeons had similar names – and at least twice, her insurance got them confused with one another; surgery was delayed while they argued over who was really assigned to her case. Both doctors went on vacation at the same time – and instead of re-scheduling Kage’s surgery, they cancelled it. The chemo and radiation therapies were very effective, but it took so long to get them going that her original cancer metastasized. Time, time, time was the problem; and the wasting of it was what killed her.

One of the few complaints Kage ever made was to abjure me to never, ever let this shit happen again to anyone we knew. And I haven’t. Mind you, I didn’t expect it to be me – even my imagination is not that macabre – but the caution was valid, and I have heeded it.

So now I can start making lists. I’ll over-pack, of course; I always do. But you just don’t know what you might need on any trip, and Kimberly can always read the books on my Kindle while I am dreaming with the friendly morphine pump.

And of course I will send out on the spot updates to all of you, Dear Readers. They ought to be fairly hilarious. I see some very odd things coming out of anesthesia – my anesthesiologist for my first stent implants was a 6-foot tall raccoon, and my recovery room has a chorus of elderly monkeys in it. And the doctor who did my second stent implant last year was apparently Captain Nemo. So God knows what I’ll see this time. Something to do with fish, probably.

Anyway, spare me some thought on the 16th, if you can. In the meantime, I am going to relax and play at packing and start knitting a hat.

Oh, and start marking off days on the calendar.

Kage Baker slept later than the Rose Parade started. Whether it was on a Sunday or no, she saw no reason to get up early during vacation time. Even once she was self-employed at home, she had ordinarily spent the night before up very late indeed – dancing on the beach well past midnight, playing tag with waves in the moonlight. (Champagne was heavily involved.)

Even when I made coffee and cocoa and home-made Egg McMuffins as lures (mine are better than MacDonald’s) Kage refused to get up much before 10 AM. Luckily, the Rose Parade runs pretty much all day here is Los Angeles – over and over, taped the first time and just set on Infinite Repeat. The cool thing about the seeing it the first time is that it shows without commercials – and you get first glimpse of whatever special wonders or disasters occur along the route. Will a float get stuck in the turn at Orange? Will Cal Tech ensorcel the sprinkler system? Will a dinosaur knock its head off on a lamp post?

No end of fun.

My sister Kimberly is a morning person. For her, the 8 AM kick-off is mid-morning; she’s usually been up and doing since 5:30 or so. She’s used to watching the Rose Parade alone the first time, before her husband and son (and now her narcoleptic sister) stir their lazy butts out of bed. But by some happy coincidence, everyone woke up this morning! Before 8! By the time the Rose Parade kicked off in the glorious morning light, the entire family – even the animals – were settled in the living room all bright-eyed and anticipatory.

Haven’t had a Rose Parade morning like that in decades … We ate lemon bars and bagels, cheered for the marching bands, laughed at the silly signs in the audience. Felt sorry for the young ladies in high heels and skimpy costumes, resolutely marching the miles-long route with the morning sun in their eyes. Rooted indiscriminately for the representative Rose Bowl teams, since none of us cared who won – though Wisconsin’s Badger was adjudged the more amusing mascot.

And when it was over – I went back to bed. Only got up a little while ago to hunt for more collard greens. Collard greens are part of the New Year’s magic; you eat them to insure that folding money will come your way in the coming year. It’s never – quite – failed me.

So I’ve spent my time lazing around in these days that don’t quite exist; New Year’s Day pushed back 24 hours to accommodate the parade, a fine sleepy holiday where you can’t remember what day it is and it doesn’t even matter. As Kage always maintained, this week between Christmas and New Year’s is free time: we exist in another plane during it, and can relax all we like.

Tomorrow the year will wake up, and the week will resume, and I will spend another morning on hold with various medical offices. Hopefully, I’ll chisel a surgery date out of the resistant clay of the heath care system. All the more reason to rest up now. It takes a lot of energy to battle the status quo. The Universe, it appears, prefers entropy to energy, and favours stagnation most of all.

But here in the sheltered backwater of the calendar, I’ve been making my plans. Tomorrow I rise and strike! Sennacherib will fall before my cohorts! I’ll cut through the Gordian Knot of bureaucracy with one blow of my snickersee!

See if I don’t, 2012.

Kage Baker liked the Rose Parade. True, she lamented that the weather always lured more people to California. And she never saw it live – the idea of braving those crowds made her cringe in horror. In fact, she never even saw it in real time – always one of the multitudinous time-delayed reruns for Kage, who refused to rise early on a legitimate excuse to sleep in.

But, like most residents of the Los Angeles Basin, she was charmed by the floral inventiveness that poured down Colorado Boulevard every New Year’s Day. Except for when it didn’t …

Weather never stops the Rose Parade. Fires, floods, roaming robots, insane signs and self-aware sprinklers have all tried to slow it down (CalTech students practice their Mr. Wizard skills a lot in Pasadena) and this year, the Parade has even cheerfully absorbed the Occupy Movement into its ranks without a moment’s hesitation. But not today. Not on January 1st.

Why? Because for over a hundred years a handful of Christian churches have prevented the Parade from marching on a Sunday. If New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday – no Parade. It rolls on the Second. And even though Kage was mostly a Catholic, she thought that was outrageous. The churches don’t even enter floats. If they did, and chose to pull their entries when The Day falls on a Sunday – well, that would certainly be their right. But it’s not so cool to dump on the rest of us.

At the other end of this year, we are looking at a handful of – well, wingnuts – who are attempting to scare the world to death with loud assertions of its imminent ending. I think it’s rather a weird pair of eschatological bookends: We can’t  have a Rose Parade today because it’s someone’s sabbath (no one in the Parade, mind you, just someone) and at the other end, the world is predicted to be destroyed by someone else’s various holy writ. Not the people who actually wrote that holy writ – and many of them are, actually, still around – but just by, you know, someone.

No Mayan, no native North American, no Persian or Egyptian scholar contributes to the theory that the world ends in 2012. In fact, most of the very few Mayans whom anyone has thought to ask about it – who include a traditionally trained calendar keeper, by the way – have rolled their eyes and sighed and said, “Look, it might be neat if you idiots did disappear next Winter Solstice: but don’t look in my holy books for the proof. You doofuses don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That last remark is a fairly literal translation of a statement by a Navajo Medicine Way leader on a newscast I saw last night. He was more polite than I was, but he’s a professional, after all.

Anyway: I don’t see much difference between the silly predictions for the end of this year, and the prissy Parade-refusals at its start. Neither did Kage. And even if the world does end next December – or may even because of that – I miss the roses and the marching bands today more than ever. We need them more, times like this.

But, hey – there is still ham and Christmas cookies and coloured lights and my family all safe around me today. It’s a beautiful new year, and even if it does end – well, the world ends for someone every day. Let’s just make the most of this one while we have it, and not borrow trouble from the disaster-mongers.

Happy New Year.

Kage Baker liked summaries and reports. Especially if they showed data in her favour. Amazon numbers that showed lots of readers, or good reader response –  starred reviews in Publishers Weekly – nice columns of sales numbers in the year end statements from publishers. They would make her chortle and dance the “I’m so cool!” dance around the living room. She got a huge thrill from seeing her own name all official on a good year-end report.

Today, of course, is the last day of 2011. It’s also the end of my second calendar year as a blogger – not my second actual year, since I didn’t have the good sense to start this project at anything remotely resembling an even point in the year; but certainly the second time the calendar has rolled round since I started.

And Word Press has given me a nice little present: an analysis of the activity on this site over the last year. It’s rather thrilling … I did pretty well, for an utter amateur. Not to mention someone already pre-occupied with continuing Kage’s writing, as well as surviving the series of unlikely disasters that is my progress through the world.

When I first vaguely thought of blogging, I had no very real idea of how to do it. Neassa was the good friend and guide who literally set this site up, so I could come over and scribble on the virtual walls. She taught me how to use it, and she’s encouraged me every step of the way. Thank you, Neassa!

And all the rest of you, Dear Readers, have contributed so much. This wouldn’t be much of a conversation without all of you – I’d just be standing here, shouting into the abyss and wondering if I was even noticed by all the lovely, gleaming lights out there in the darkness. With all of you listening and shouting back, it’s like having the stars sing back to one on a summer night. Thank you, thank all of you!

Besides – without your kind attention, it would be a pretty static bunch of statistics here. So many entries, so many pictures, so many words: racka racka, la la la. But Word Press has given me this wonderful report! Among other things, it compares the number of visits here to the seating capacity of the Sydney Opera House, with rather amazing results.

But – the Sydney Opera House? Foo, what does that mean to me? What I know is that the Hollywood Bowl – one of Kage’s favourite places, one of mine; a place where we spent hours and hours of our adolescence, planning out our lives in ways that really came true – holds 18,000 people. And that enough people visited this site this year to fill it more than twice over.

That’s a number I can visualize. I can see those people, sitting on the silver-grey wood benches and in the green-walled boxes; eating and drinking and knitting and chasing their kids up and down the sylvan stairs, and dodging confused deer on the way to the bathrooms in the dark. Listening to someone strive to make someone else’s music come alive, to fill the Bowl with beauty and keep their memory breathing.

Now that, I can see.

So I’m sharing this bright little status report with all the rest of you, who made it mean something. Happy New Year’s, Dear Readers. Be careful and joyous tonight.Make careful resolutions.

Me, I intend to survive.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 15 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Kage Baker did not believe in unvarying truths. She felt that most verities had room in them to be altered by new information – that the truths inscribed in stone (sometimes literally) by one generation were naturally subject to editing by the discoveries of generations yet to come.

I used to protest that Science, at least, was not as susceptible to this. Kage argued that it was, of all human endeavours, the most susceptible: because you can maintain the “truths” of religion, politics and art based on nothing more than opinion and personal preference. But science, good science, requires proof – so when a new truth arises and survives, a paradigm is achieved rather than a shift in opinion.

“Einstein’s physics isn’t preferred to Newton’s because he was a kindly old guy who played the fiddle,” she said once. “It’s because he was right, and could prove it. And there are already changes popping up to Einstein’s work, as well. That’s how science works.”

She was right, of course. That’s sort of embarrassing, considering I’m the one with the BA in biology, and she was the one who maintained fish weren’t animals.

She had an ingrained suspicion of revealed truths, though. Unless those truths were revealed to a whole lot of people at once, Kage distrusted revelatory information. If space aliens were really out there and wanted us to know, she felt, they’d stage a big public demonstration – like, over the Super Bowl or a soccer championships. If they didn’t realize this important aspect of human belief systems, then they weren’t very bright, she said – and we were in no danger from them.

It’s interesting to wonder if she was right, and if the reason for Fermi’s Paradox (which boils down to “Where the hell is everybody?”) is that the aliens don’t understand crowd psychology or public relations …

A number of classic revealed truths have met their paradigms this past year, and been destroyed – or expanded into unrecognizable new shapes, depending on your view point, I guess. One of them is solar system and planetary formation: the sharp new eyes we have launched into orbit, the far-seeing telescopes, have brought several new truths.

The Hubble, the Fermi, the several gamma ray imagers – have all found exoplanets. But they are not where we expected them; they are closer or further from their parent stars than we had theorized. And they are almost all bigger than we had ever imagined – leading to questions like: how can a ball of gas 10 times bigger than Jupiter survive in an orbit that practically skims its star’s corona? Clearly, planet formation is somewhat weirder than we had previously assumed.

Those same telescopes and imagers are showing us that the Universe is, as forecast, expanding. Except where it’s standing still. And also except where it may even be contracting. Apparently the Universe is breathing in and out like a hot souffle, and we have no real idea of how or why … but obviously, our ideas are changing.

This year, it was discovered that maybe some particles can move faster than light. That’s so huge a change to Einsteinian physics that it approaches religious heresy.  But even if neutrinos can’t exceed the speed of light, something is making it look like they can – at least to the CERN Super Collider. We clearly have something new to learn about neutrinos, the speed of light, or what is actually happening inside CERN. The shape of physics is changing.

As is the shape of humanity. This year brought many new revelations of things some animals can do that we previously firmly believed were the sole province of Homo sapiens. Really basic things like making and using tools (crows, dolphins and chimpanzees), the making and use of fire (orangutans and bonobos), language (ravens, finches, chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins), and empathy (rats and chimpanzees).

And, in fact, this year has even shown us that We are not just Us. Most of us carry genes we know originated in other hominid species – Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans. This last would have delighted and amused Kage no end, as she had always maintained that Neanderthals and CroMagnons had indeed interbred. It would have especially made her laugh because she herself was descended from one of the areas where the Neanderthal genes are likeliest to be preserved: Northern Europe.

Red hair and freckles may, in fact, have been a gift from some Neanderthal grandmother to Kage. Maybe the Asperger’s was, too. Whether or not we can pinpoint specific Neanderthal traits that closely, what is now inarguable is – we carry their blood. It is, in fact, our blood. So much for that first Neanderthal skeleton being identified as a bear or a lost Cossack.

It’s rapidly getting to the point where we are going to have to re-define just what is is to be human. It’s probably not so much a shape of body as of mind. Maybe it’s an ecological niche. Our long-held self-knowledge certainly needs some fine-tuning.

I hope I make the cut.

Kage Baker used to pray for rainy weather on New Year’s.

Not that the weather mattered much to us – it was the foreigners she worried about. All those non-Californians watching the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day, seeing our crystalline air and abundant sunshine and total lack of snow, who then tended to pack up the family and move out to what they thought was paradise.

That was what bothered Kage. She felt our state was Paradise, too, and frankly didn’t want to share it with more people. But our eccentric weather patterns and whatever pact the Pasadena Rose Parade Association has made with the local gods usually kept the day dry and gorgeous. Kage’s prayers were in vain.

We weren’t real partiers, she and I – our New Year’s observances were quiet. We tended to an early dinner and then immersion in the Twilight Zone marathon until it was time to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Then we’d open our champagne, drink our toasts on the front porch while the neighbors shot off guns, firecrackers, signalling cannons and mortars, and eventually take the first ceremonial walk of the year …

When we still lived in Los Angeles, the walk was up and down the narrow, weird streets of the Hollywood Hills. We’d ghost along the sidewalks, spying in through lighted windows at the jollity displayed. We had our favourite neighbors – the families whose children we watched grow up, the house where we never saw anything alive but cats, the living room graced with a stuffed rampant polar bear … we’d walk up to the crest of the hill we lived on, where the rolling land dropped away to the west and the scent of the sea came in across 10 miles of the twinkling, improbable  city. We would breathe in the salt air and resolve to survive.

We took our walks in Pismo, too. The barrage was especially loud there: for a city with only 8,000 permanent inhabitants, we had a lot of firearm enthusiasts. And every holiday tourist seemed to arrive with guns, fireworks and turkey deep fryers that they didn’t know how to use and tended to launch into the air on trails of flaming oil. It was pretty exciting. But when we walked out, it was a mere block or so to the sea itself, where the dark sands and luminous Pacific were a perfect well of peace.

Kage used to kick off her shoes and hand me her coat, and wade out into the surf. No matter how cold the night, no matter if it was raining in Pismo, she’d sprint into the waves. She’d bathe her face in the icy sea-water and vow to write; she’d promise her soul to her muse if only he would continue to inspire her. Then we would go sit on the sea wall until her feet dried enough to brush off the sand and get her shoes back on, watching the waves roll in reflecting the Christmas lights on the Pier.

We would trade my pocket flask back and forth, warming ourselves on single malt, and make our one constant resolution: to survive. And then we’d walk home, with Kage cursing the fine weather and the locust tourists all the way, and go to bed.

The weather forecast for the New Year is clear, sunny and 77 degrees. I don’t know if I’ll be walking out this year – especially if I’m post-surgical – but I will most certainly be swearing at the lovely weather. It’s traditional.

You’d think the million people crowded like lemmings along Colorado Boulevard would discourage people watching on television; but those shots of the snow-capped mountains above the orchards always turn up and there we are. The whole damned place looks like a fairy tale, or an orange crate label then: Kage would groan, and claim she could hear thousands of pupils dilating in the depths of the frozen country East of the Rockies …

So we pray for rain. It doesn’t work, but you never know. This year it might. Whatever it does  – I’ll survive.