Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always took writing to Fairs. And she even usually worked on it, which is a miracle of astonishing proportions.

Those of you, Dear Readers, who have indulged in the mania of historical re-creation know that we all bring real world tasks to Faire at times. We have the very best intentions of working on them between gigs or after hours – and we usually end up precisely where good intentions classically lead one, with an armful of ungraded papers, unfinished essays, unhemmed garments or (one memorable weekend) a surplus sheep left in my Innyard by someone who didn’t find the person they were selling it to.

Kage was different. She brought her writing, and she actually wrote. Before she began to acquire portable devices, she had special notebooks that would fit in a reticule or belt pouch, and could be used in spare moments under the oaks. She even managed to make a gig of it, writing sections of Iden on rough paper with a quill pen at the side of the Innyard; she sat by the straw bale playpen where we kept the toddlers, and we told people she was running a Dame School …

When she graduated to laptops, we’d sometimes run an extension cord from some power box (bolted to an oak tree so the Beverage Stands could run soda pop pumps), and she’d spend evenings composing furiously in electronic ink by the light of a Coleman lantern. The rest of us sat about trading shoes (very engrossing; you should try it) drinking port and reading poetry aloud, and occasionally going over quietly to top up her rum and chocolate milk.

Or she’d just retreat to some spare bedroom after a day at Dickens Fair, and write while consuming the whomp biscuits that are our chosen after-hours nursery dinners. Lots of Nell Gwynne was written like that, while my “daughters” and I wandered in and out in various stages of Victorian deshabille. That may have influenced the plot somewhat …

Me, I don’t have Kage’s concentration. And I am usually orchestrating whatever chaos she was ignoring in her determined way. So, while I do manage to let the world in general know I survived yet another transit of the Dubious Lands, by the time I get home after a day at Dickens I am too exhausted to write. Certainly too exhausted to compose; but also, too tired to move my fingers on the keyboard. They just lie there like sad little Vienna sausages. I was so tired this Sunday that we were nearly to the car before someone (thank you, Kelly!) pointed out gently that I was still wearing my lace gloves …

So this is why daily accounts of my weekend adventures have not been forthcoming. I’m carrying both halves of the weight Kage and I used to share – and while I love every bit of it, sometimes I just can’t walk into the Hall of Tales that was always her special purview. I am stuck in the door, asleep on my feet, having dealt with too many foamy kegs, too many ripped-out hems, too many gentlemen with inexplicable chickens under their arms …

But Dickens continues in its parti-coloured, sparkling, singing, shouting, dancing glory! The streets are full of drifted snow – it’s some alchemical concoction of corn starch, but it’s white and sparkly and piles up on windowsills most charmingly. This weekend past, most of the armed might of the Empire was visiting in my Parlour. Such vistas of scarlet and gold and blue, so many medals, and plumes and knife-sharp creases! So many Loyal Toasts roared out as champagne glasses flashed!

The customers pour past in a constant torrent of wide eyes and happy smiles; and they come in to play, too, sitting cautiously among us in front of my lace-curtained windows. After a few songs or cheery greetings, they relax into proper Londoners, and are soon singing along and calling out to less-fortunate pedestrians still out in the streets. There’s a continual game of Musical Chairs going on as people snitch seats from one another to accommodate another guest, or sit closer to the fire, or get nearer to Charles Dickens or The Pickwick Club or the singing groups. Once the guests have seen us moving chairs to where they are needed, they suddenly lose all shyness and join right in.

There are paying guests who have come to share Extreme Christmas with me and mine in the Green Man Parlour for 10 years now. We know their faces; they know ours. We greet one another with happy familiarity, as if it were a week since our last meeting instead of a year. The magic of Dickens Fair just expands to embrace everyone who comes inside.

And I go home every night drunk on it. Which is why, Dear Readers, you get recaps a day or two later – I’ve been sleeping off gingerbread and snowflakes and Rule Britannia and the Last Waltz of the Evening every night. I’ve been having lunch with Sugar Plum Faeries and dreaming of the long road – it’s not confections dancing in my head, it’s miles of walnut trees naked and white as nymphs in the winter twilight, or sundogs in the icy clouds that ring the moon.

But I’ll still report faithfully back from all the edges where I dance these days. As faithfully as I can manage, anyway. I’m faithful, as they say, in my fashion …

Kage Baker often seized on Faire weekends as escape hatches – rather like magical portals that appeared in the walls, and let us scarper from distasteful situations. Knowing we were heading North in horrible heat, to Dickens in a depressing moment – or simply to somewhere inaccessible when she didn’t want to talk to an editor – increased her enjoyment of the entire thing. Not just an escape, but a goal!

She’d settle back in the passenger seat of the car, sigh happily, and observe that now no one could find us. Which was true until cell phones … and fairly true even after, since a cell phone can’t actually find you unless you answer it. And while large portions of the human race are now strictly trained to answer their ring tones, Kage never gave in to our robot overlords on that. The phone had a message function – it was meant to be used.

You couldn’t catch Kage once she was on the road.

Sometimes people could catch me, but it didn’t do them much good. I was just another message function if Kage didn’t want to talk. And I never admitted to knowing where she was until I knew what she wanted to do. This must have frustrated lots of our friends and relatives (who assumed we were conjoined twins most of the time) but really – what’s the use in being an organism with two heads if you can’t hide behind one another now and then?

Anyway – the long road out of town was always the ultimate escape. If it coincided with a Faire weekend, so much the better. Moving on the highway or tucked away in another century: Kage could hide out and feel safe. It was her movable fort.

This noon I cravenly fled Los Angeles, which is an epic mess. It is a Dickens Fair weekend and I’m glad to be going to it, but I am also a little relieved to be out of the disaster zone. My family is safe – there are a lot of branches in the yard; but, once fallen, tree branches are not very dangerous. Kimberly is in fact looking forward to introducing them to her chain saw … they will meet a noble end as firewood.

And so I escaped to the relative quiet of I-5. When I-5 is the peaceful option, it means it’s really time to leave the city for awhile … all I had to worry about were loose cattle, car accidents and scary bathrooms. The scenery was quiet and well-behaved this trip; the cattle were not attacking cars – just blocking traffic here and there – and the accidents did not involve me. There were enough of them to delay me on my way North, but I finally made it to the haven of Vallejo and the amazing Rettinhouse House.

There are no natural disasters here for the moment, so I can concentrate on the glories of the road and the Dickens Fair. Another weekend of Extreme Christmas! And if the most exciting thing I encounter is a feral cow or a surfeit of peppermint bark, I shall be very happy indeed. The dry hurricanes of the last two days were all the adrenaline rush I’ll need for quite some time.

More reports tomorrow, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker loved wind storms when we were kids. Momma’s house was on top of a ridge in the Hollywood Hills, above the Cahuenga Pass; Kage’s room was a tiny little chamber at the top of a cupola on top of the house. She had a view over the entire San Fernando Valley from up there, and whatever happened to be rolling in from it.

Wind storms turned the tree tops below her windows into a tossing ocean. And when the wind got really wild, it howled around the eaves and Kage could look out and see transformers blowing up all over the Valley. It was quite a sight.

The years we lived in Marin, we were in an oak wood – winds would pour, roaring, through the tops of the oaks, and we would get just faint down drafts at the bottom – like being in the sea, and feeling a tempest sporting in the waves far above us. Except on Summer afternoons on the Faire site itself: then the hot winds blew in over the hay fields that were our parking lots. carrying a golden scrim of dust three stories high before them. A simoom of gilded dust, hot as Hell – Kage called it the devil wind.

In Pismo … we’d get gales in winter. You could watch the rain come across the sea as solid as a silver bead curtain; it would hit the front picture window and make it ring like a gong. We kept a tarp folded up by the front door in case it ever blew in … though it never did. In the spring, the winds came from the canyons and scoured the beach into alien cursive script. And at any speed at all, it howled in our eaves and boomed around the house. Kage loved the tumult.

Today in Los Angeles, we are in the midst of what is being called a Century Wind Event. The winds began last night, blowing steadily at 30 or 40 miles per hour, and gusting up to 60 and 70. All night long, I listened as branches fell into the yard, and scraped on the roof like giant claws. The Corgi went mad. The cats took possession of my bed, and pretended nothing was happening as long as I kept the covers pulled over all of us. The power was flickering on and off all night – every time it did, my charging cell phone howled in despair. I finally had to unplug the damned thing because it wailed every time the power went on or off, like a lost soul; when I gave up  on it, it was doing it every 15 minutes or so …

The power finally died completely around noon today. We got out the candles and the camping lanterns, and made plans for not being able to cook.

Trees are down all over the city; freeways ramps are closed, trucks are blowing over, broken power lines are sparking fires in every empty lot. The DWP has been broadcasting advice over radios – if you have one that works – on how NOT to kill yourself. People are explicitly warned not to bring in tiki torches or barbecues, not to put candles in curtained windows, not to try and use their electronic auto starters on stoves and dryers that won’t run anyway … are people really that stupid? Tiki torches?

Going to get the nephew Michael from CalState LA tonight was amazing. Half the streets I took to get to the campus had closed on the way back, as yet more trees fell over and yet more cars ran gaily into them … we ended up diverted into the black streets around Chavez Ravine (no street lights working!) and worked our way North and East by dead reckoning until we found Silver Lake Reservoir. Then we could find our way home again. Only took us an hour for a 15 minute drive. Which was lots better than the parking lots that were the 5, the 10, and 101 freeways.

There was still no power when we got home, but the living room was warm and golden with candle and lamp light. We had sandwiches for dinner and sat around and talked; set up a light by everyone’s chair and made sure we all had something to read. My family has done Faires for 30 years – we don’t need electricity to have a nice evening. And just as we got all smug and comfy – the power came back on.

I must admit, it was a relief to be able to turn on the bathroom light. And of course, I could finally get back on the computer and post a blog! So here I am, Dear Readers, happily surviving the worst windstorm in my memory, while Los Angeles continues to burn in the dark all around us.

No matter what happens in Los Angeles, Kage once observed, something catches fire … she;d rather have enjoyed this one, as long as we weren’t what was burning. She’d have cursed the lack of her computer, but a pad and a pen would have contented her before long. And we could have brain stormed by candlelight – reams of her stories were conceived that way, while whatever wind haunted wherever we were howled round the windows.

Me, I’ll sleep better tonight having made this entry. And remembering, as I tuck the cats away in the feather bed with me, all those nights of listening to Kage tell stories in the dark.

Kage Baker loved the process of building a Faire. It was magic – slow magic, considered on its own, but when you realized we were building entire villages and microcosms of London, well … it went up fast. Not Brigadoon fast, but very nearly.

Kage was fascinated by the process whereby we transformed empty warehouses or acres of wood and meadow into communities. Watching the wooden skeletons go up, wobble and steady themselves (usually. There were some grotesque industrial accidents, like the time a booth blew into the lake.) and then accrue their muscles of rope and cord, and finally their gloriously painted and decorated skins – that thrilled her. She’d walk around watching the progress, enchanted to see old friends take shape before her eyes, or new ones pop up complete, like mushrooms.

The final result, alive and peopled and roaring with life on Opening Day, is always a physical thrill. It’s like the slow ascent to the top of a roller coaster. You push and strain and groan, then pause just long enough on the crest to draw breath  – and then you plummet over the side, and the ride is on!

The weeks of a Fair are a ride with the Wild Hunt.

I’ve found yet another way to enjoy that Opening Day rush, though. Don’t show up until Opening Day. Then, when you walk into the suddenly arisen and living set, you’re totally gobsmacked by the glory. The total experience is waiting to fall on your head like a bucket over the door, and what you’re drenched in is pure magic.

I didn’t intend to actually get to Dickens Fair last Friday. I drove my careful way up I-5, through wind warnings and weird sights and a total fog-out on the downward North side of the Grapevine – man, that’s entertaining! – and so into the tangle of roads just East of San Francisco. These roads are always mutating, and I think they actually move around deep in the night when no one is there but their Cal Trans keepers – guys in orange hats out there with giant hooked staffs, like worm-riders on Arrakis, guiding the wriggling roads into new configurations.

However they manage it, I missed a turn somewhere around where the 80 and the 580 do one of their several pas de deux. I was tryng to get to Martinez – I ended up on my way to San Jose. I am literally quite lost without Kage … By the time I found a road going approximately Bay-ward again, I was on the 101: so I just stayed there until I saw something I recognized. That was the Cow Palace.  I took it as an omen and stopped to visit Dickens a day early.

There are not enough words to describe the beauty and wonder of walking into Dickens Fair cold. I entered from backstage – itself a demented faerieland of half-costumed actors  and weird props – straight into the street in front of the Victoria and Albert Theatre. There were … thousands of people: thugs and dandies and respectable gentlemen with tall hats and frock coats and heroic whiskers; cheerful tarts and Professional Beauties glittering with jewels, and matrons of every class in bonnets like an explosion of birds. And surrounding them, the stone holding that glittering line of ore, all the crowd and crush of the customers, wandering around in a happy daze, glassy-eyed and open-mouthed. Holly and ivy and glass ornaments and lights everywhere. I was between the Telegraph Booth, whence youths on skates went whizzing forth, shouting for their recipients, and the Pie Booth  – which is certainly what Heaven smells like. I could smell as well chocolate, roasted nuts, fresh scones, beer, perfume, incense, wet stone, straw, mud, the ghosts of cattle … LONDON, alive alive oh at 5PM on  good old Christmas Eve, forever and ever!

I just stood there, in my tee shirt and jeans, grinning like a fool as the gorgeous crowd swirled around me. My heart was shouting Glory! and Happy Christmas! and – louder even than the brass band playing down the lane at Fezziwig’s – Home, Home Home!

And I swear I caught a glimpse of a black skirt and red braid swishing round the corner of the Green Man, as I fought my way through the currents of the enormous crowd. I lost her there, somewhere under our green archway, when all my dear ladies and gentlemen realized I was there – like a Christmas Ghost myself – and rushed to welcome me in. But looking around at the beautiful Parlour, I could see we were all still living in the part of Kage’s mind she left to us.

I sat down with a good pint in my hand, and listened to Brass Farthing sing Steven Foster like baritone angels, abjuring Hard Time to Come Again No more … Home, indeed.

Kage Baker had the lowest possible opinion of hospital bureaucracy. Not actual medical personnel – they are all, in their various ways, heroes, and she appreciated everything they did.

But the massive disjointed machinery of paperwork annoyed her in its monolithic incompetency: the clerks with attitudes, the volunteers who actually despised the frightened and the sick, the dogs in office. Any large institution fights a constant battle to keep them out; but when they entrench themselves in medical institutions is when they are most poisonous.

A day with those folks could be written off to perdition, she said. And she was right. And I had one of those days today.

I have a biopsy and hysteroscopy scheduled for December 8th. Various tests are needed before the actual procedure, and today was the day for them. It would have been easier if someone had told me about it – no one did – but about 11:30 someone noticed I was missing and called me. I abandoned my computer and took off frantically.

Cedars Sinai is a wonderful place, and its medical personnel are all quite courteous and charming and good at their jobs. But they too are at the mercy of the paperwork gnomes, and can be rendered hysterical and helpless as easily as any poor civilian trying to cope with insurance requirements. My paperwork had been lost, found, lost again, sent to the wrong department and recycled as fire starters – but the computer age does have its distinct successes, and one of them is the ability to reproduce paperwork from electronic impulses. I made it through the initial gateway guards, and started a 4-hour journey through various labs.

At the moment, walking is not one of my best things: my tests were all in twin bastions of the North and South Towers, on several floors – none adjacent, no two in sequence even in the same building. Up and down, back and forth, over the 4 square blocks and multiple stories of the buildings I trekked, yielding frightening amounts of body fluids and being wired into and out of various fiendish devices … I met a really amazing number of clerks who could not manage diphthongs, and therefore could not pronounce either my first or last names with any accuracy. One actually summoned me into the sanctum sanctorum of lab work by calling out for “Patient …. um, K or B?”

Holy moley.

But I was finally done, and escaped through the nearest street level door. I was only two block away from my car and somehow on the other side of the building I had parked under … but I trudged gratefully to the garage, drove home, and collapsed back into bed. From which refuge I was woken by a clerk from Cedars Sinai, complaining I had neglected to leave them a urine sample.

Now, a urine sample is something a person tends to be fairly sure of, you know? Hard to neglect, forget or misplace. I knew I’d given one, packaged it with all the right pre-printed labels, swathed it a plastic bag covered with brightly-coloured biohazard warnings – and, most importantly, my actual name – and handed it to the appropriate tech. The clerk finally admitted they had the jar – but it was empty.

I cannot imagine what could have emptied it. Well, actually, I can imagine several things, but I’d rather not. It’s just too horrid to contemplate. And regardless of what it was, I still have to go back in tomorrow and replace the missing sample.

And this, Dear Readers, is why I am not regaling you with tales of I-5 and Dickens Fair tonight, but instead complaining about my day’s adventures with medicine and bureaucracy. Complete with the Mysterious Missing Samples.

Oh, and just to give everyone a Good Night giggle – I must report a most unusual sighting this afternoon at the corner of Franklin and Rowena: a panto horse, rummaging in the back of a gardener’s pickup truck. See? Even in the midst of the most banal and annoying things. mystery and romance are dancing in the corner of our eyes. We just have to notice.

Kage Baker always maintained that Mondays after a Fair weekend do not exist. They are a vacuum, wherein you find your way home, find your laundry and do it before it gets away, find clothes that belong to the current century and that don’t smell of fish, sawdust, incense, beer and 500 miles of roads and gas stations.

I did spend the weekend at Dickens Fair, and a wondrous time it was , too. I was just too tired each night, Dear Readers, to document it – but I will be able to spend the week doing that! I saw magic and art and cows, met a new quasi-grandson, bested many miles through insidious fog, had enough fun for 16 people, and saw the Queen. Talked to her, too. A Kate can look at a Queen, you know …

I got home today around 3, and have only now managed to settle down and type. (There was a cat in my chair, another on my keyboard, a parrot shrieking “Hi!” incessantly, and a Corgi  doing victory laps around my room.) And all I have to say is – I’m exhilarated, exhausted, starving, and going to bed as soon as I can get a few mouthfuls of dinner in my mouth. It’ll be a near thing …

But I made it to Fair and made it back, and I will tell you all about it starting tomorrow!

Kage Baker always cautioned me to be careful on I-5 in the winter.

“It’s weird out there,” she would say. “The whole place changes – it’s not tame farmland in the winter. You be careful if you ever have to drive it.”

Today I left Los Angeles early in the morning, and hurtled north like a migrating animal – seeking Extreme Christmas in the far North. The long weird length of Interstate 5 is half hollowed out now, with winter and the solstice bearing down on it: the crops have been harvested, the verges are thinly greened over with the grass that rises  like smoke under the first winter rains. All the trees are bare or burning with colour. The seasonal wetlands have surfaced whever the rains have gathered, and herons and egrets stalk the verges like assembling pilgrims.

The white cattle are appearing on the hillsides. Ravens are sporting in the middle air, but every other weathered fence post seats a sulking hawk. Nothing can sulk like a hawk in the winter – not cats, not fourteen year olds. Every line of their bodies, so graceful in the air, sits on a fence post and mimes I don’t want to be here.

Animals are thick on the roadside, the annual sacrifices in their unlikely poses by the traffic. Badgers, squirrels, owls like half-made fans … I passed 4 coyotes in the same pose by the road, miles apart. However, Kage told me about that trick: there is really only one Coyote, and he’s faking. That’s important to remember. Stop your car to check on him, through pity or curiosity or some weird craving for a dead coyote, and he will immediately inflate to his real form. You’ll come around the back of your car and there Coyote will be, grinning at you, singing Pretty Woman in a bad Roy Orbison voice …

A girl can’t be too careful on I-5.

There are tumbleweeds on the median, and cars upside down; does the same wind do that? Windmills and wind turbines turn at every angle, though the air at ground level is still; the blades flash and flicker, shadowing the grazing cows like the shadows of movie film. Cotton bales are everywhere, the size of trailors, vast white blocks of marble under their ridiculous little tarp caps. The bottom half of each bale is bare, blue-white with the memory and ghost of frost. Two months ago, you might see one inexplicably in flames by the road; but now, in this antechamber of winter’s dark heart, nothing anywhere burns.

It took me six hours to reach San Francisco,; six hours and a season and a half. It was clear and bright and warm in Los Angeles, which never can easily decide when winter arrives. But the further North I went, the thicker grew the scrim of silver ice-light in the sky; the thicker rose the clouds from the sea, and the fog breathed out by the silver hills. By the time I crossed the Bay Bridge, the Bay itself was hammered silver under a cold wind.

A whole different world. I parked in the icy shadow of the Cow Palace, and walked into London – eternally 5 PM on Christmas Eve, smelling of sweet pies and ale and the ghosts of cattle.

I’ve driven again straight through a time warp. Guess I wasn’t careful enough. But then, I didn’t really try to be …

Kage Baker did like to literally give thanks on Thanksgiving Day. Some quiet moment somewhere, often at the end of a sudden little drive  – “Let’s go find a good landscape,” she’d suggest, and off we’d go. Not far, not long, just somewhere Kage could find an especially felicitous lookout over the sea or the hills and try to make eye contact with God.

She got the idea from the lovely old comic strip Rick O’Shay, by Stan Lynde. It ran in our local paper from 1958 to 1981, and Kage loved it. It was well drawn, funny, pithy – and it included in its Old West cast the inimitable Hipshot Percussion, gunslinger with a heart of gold. Also with the lean, long-shanked physique Kage liked best in gentlemen … Occasionally – on Sundays or holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas – Lynde would draw a single panel cartoon. It would show Hipshot, posed contemplatively in some exquisitely rendered empty landscape, saying: “Thanks, Boss.”

That’s all. No other message, nothing obvious or heavy or particularly denominational. It was one of Kage’s favourite depictions of honest devotion.

It’s a cool grey day here in Los Angeles, skies like polished granite, the whole Basin scented with good cooking and familial affection. (Which smells like pies, in case you didn’t know.) I hope all of you, Dear Readers, have the chance to for a little quiet time – maybe a pause when the gravy comes smooth, or a bit of a cuddle with someone on the couch, watching Twilight Zone.

Me, I’m going to take a little drive in the hills, and admire some quiet places. I have a small message of my own to send:

Now that she’s caught Your gaze at last, God, please take care of Kage.

Thanks, Boss.

Kage Baker liked Thanksgiving. I suppose there are those who don’t, but it’s kind of hard to imagine. It’s a cheerful, low impact holiday, except for the vast amount of cooking required – and then you get to eat it, so that’s got its own built-in reward.

Coming from a large family was always a help; many hands make short work, the saying goes. Sometimes they make whirling chaos as well, but that can be rather fun and enjoyable. Thanksgiving has always been a noisy holiday in our house, whether it was in the full-scale everyone-in-the-world-to-whom-I-am-related mega dinner days, or the quiet two-person feast Kage used to make for her and I.

Mind you, those little feasts were always enjoyed before or after Thanksgiving. The day itself was for family. Big groups. So many people you had to clear a whole room just to set up seating. Tables where you ran out of corners before you ran out of left-handers to seat on them (we’ve always had a lot of lefties); cavalry and football charges worked out in olives and stuffed celery sticks, arguments over which way the dishes were to be passed. The sorts of dinners where three males who all think they’re comedians try to lead funny Graces at once, and all the females over puberty come to the table with aprons on and end up eating with serving spoons …

Every family has its problems, of course, and holiday dinners are commonly where the familial sun goes nova. But Christmas is more dangerous than Thanksgiving; you can usually get through the day in peace, with no overt resentments or misunderstandings to ambush you. Maybe that’s what Kage liked about it.

Tomorrow I will spend a lovely day with my small, closest family, cooking and eating pretty much continually, as Tolkien says of Bilbo’s Birthday. Then on Friday I will load up my car and drive North – to be with the rest of my family at Dickens Fair. I’ll hold my breath and leap off into the deep end of Christmas! I mean to sink to the bottom, still ballasted with turkey and pumpkin pie, blowing peppermint bubbles in the champagne of the season …

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker was a graduate of Catholic school – “Twelve years in the navy blue,” she used to tell people. It was a big deal 40  or 50 years ago. We scrapped in the streets with the public school kids  (not a bad word there, but believe me – it was an epithet) like Capulets and Montagues, an activity enlivened by our being able to use dirty words in Latin back then. Or any words in Latin, and we could claim they were dirty …

This day in 1963, though, I remember straggling home mid-afternoon and utterly ignoring the public school kids also headed home early. We were all red-eyed, all scared; many of us were crying. President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Houston, Texas.

Going to a Catholic school, and Kennedy the first Catholic President, it seemed especially devastating to us. We were all praying while the news came slowly, fitfully over the radio. No 24/7 news cycle in 1963, Dear Readers! No news stations, even. The news came to our school over the radio in the nurse’s office, and was then confirmed by a phone call to the Rectory where Father O’Brien had a television set. Sister Pauline, the principal, confiscated some 8th grade boy’s book-sized transistor and set it up in the office to listen, dispatching runners to the classrooms as news came trickling in.

My teacher, Sister Lucy, was an iron-hard old Bostonion lady. She even talked like a Kennedy. She absolutely forbade hysteria – we went over the rules for the loss of a Chief Executive and prayed silently while we waited. Kage’s  teacher had them on their knees praying the rosary, I think – not so stern and staunch as Sister Lucy, who kept us calm until the news of the President’s death came in. Then school was summarily dismissed, and we all went home to our crying mothers …

Like any American who was alive and sentient that day, I remember most of the details of the hours surrounding Kennedy’s assassination. I was 10, just old enough to realize what a horror show we were seeing; it hadn’t been that long since all our dads had been digging bomb shelters and worrying about Cuba. I remember looking at the artist’s conception  in Life of the proposed shelters in the upright pillars of the freeways … I remember wondering if now the war would start, with Kennedy dead.

Walter Cronkite seemed to narrating the entire world for the next week, a constant sonorous soundtrack like God above the clouds. Weird day. Bad day. Walking home, too scared and sad to even cook snooks at the enemy kids from Atwater Elementary. Wondering how the world could even accommodate so horrible a tragedy.

None of us had any idea what the world had waiting for us.