Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker utterly hated medical tests. They always, she averred, took longer and hurt more and revealed less than her doctors told her they would. And she was sure that many were ordered just because of physicianly uncertainty or boredom; common sense would have answered a lot of them, in her opinion.

I suspect she was often right. In my case, making my biopsy procedure wait on the results of a cardiac stress test – to make sure I could survive the anesthesia – seemed a waste of time. While I approve of my gynecologist’s desire not to have me expire on the table, there was the evidence of my Klebsiella infection to consider – where my heartbeat hit 226 beat per minute for several hours. The target in the stress test was only 137 beats per minute – I’d have thought my fitness for a little anesthesia was well and truly evident.

But I have a deep background in improvisation, which is usually frowned upon in non-emergency medicine. It’s that zebra/horses mindset, that is (rightly) suspicious of mad innovation and leaping to conclusions. Dr. House is not really an exemplar of his kind. More’s the pity. I think I could get on just fine with Gregory House; and I am by nature inclined to agree with whatever insane plan he might come up with. More weirdness has worked – and been forgotten – in the history of medicine than in almost any other field.

And you do need to be prepared for the occasional zebra, after all. For unknown reasons,  it was especially hard to start an IV in me – it’s usually a snap, but I think my veins might be getting tired. Took 7 tries.This makes nurses shaky and tearful.

Also, my heart is  situated slightly to the right of my chest cavity, instead of to the left; it’s not that unusual an anomaly, and there are lots of folks who are quite reversed. I’m not that bad. But it does make it hard to visualize my heart, which is tucked further  under my sternum than most folks’. In practical usage, it means ultrasound technicians try to grind the damned wand right through my bones in an effort to get a clear look at my heart. Did you know the breastbone and ribs are richly endowed with nerves? They are. It hurts.

In today’s stress test, I also managed to display a “paradoxical drug reaction” to atropine – as far as I could tell, from the whispered conversation over my head, my heart was slowing down when it was administered. Which is sort of backwards to the intended affect – and since the other drugs being administered were trying to speed up my heart, things got a little goofy. I may have invented a new heart rhythm, something at right angles to the usual two. I ended up on oxygen, and the test was not quite completed – since the same organ that was dancing zydeco on Halloween refused to speed up this morning.

However, it was completed enough to show that yes – given its age and known eccentricities and the several bits of platinum bling in my chest – my heart is fine. I can withstand the anesthesia required to successfully complete a biopsy; and even more, should it be needed. I feel like warning the doctors that there is no guarantee I won’t turn into something outre during the surgery – it seems of a piece with my history so far – but my heart is just dandy.

What a relief.

When I was recovered and let go, I drove home and fell into bed. My rest was broken by a notice from my gynecologist – who must have been sitting next to her phone today – that since the cardiologist had checked me off, my biopsy has been scheduled. No messing about! I like that in a gynecologist; even more in an oncologist.

So, December 8th, I finally get my biopsy. That will clinch whatever endometrial oddity is afflicting me at last, and final arrangements for its ruthless disposal can be finalized. Ta-freaking-da.

Kage would, I know, be alternating laughing and shaking her head over today’s shenanigans. Can’t you do anything normal? I can imagine her asking. Do you have to frighten your doctors and friends with these crazy stunts?

You’re a fine one to talk, I wish I could tell her. You developed cancer no one had ever heard of, and died!

Yes, but I wasn’t weird about it, Kage would say primly. I was ladylike and normal.

Which I guess would put me in my place, because she was, totally, ladylike. And as normal as she could manage. No denying it. She may have ended up afflicted with zebras anyway, but she made them wipe their hooves and behave like horses, damn it.

Me, I’m expecting my zebras to be infiltrated by Przewalski’s horses next.

Kage Baker set up a careful regimen of daily vitamins and herbal supplements in her early adulthood. These were designed to maintain a modicum of health for her, with a minimum of thinking about her body. She set out deliberately to thwart anemia, scurvy, respiratory infections and migraines – the things to which she felt an obsessed young woman in the writing trade might be most susceptible – and left the rest of her health to eating a balanced diet.

And it worked. For years and years, it worked. As Kage was an exquisite cook and enjoyed it to boot, her dietary arrangements were highly successful – and, speaking as the most frequent recipient, a delight in which to participate. She did good by doing well, in the kitchen; her cooking spanned three continents and several millennia of tradition, and we ate like especially lucky time travellers.

“People nowadays consider root vegetables to be boring. But then why do my medieval cookbooks have so many recipes for them?” she might muse.

“Because if you weren’t willing to eat turnips, you’d starve?” was my crass suggestion.

“No, some of these recipes show real class and imagination … let’s try some and see why anybody bothered to write them down!”

Which is how we discovered that carrots come in a literal rainbow of colours, each of which tastes better than the last; that turnips in cream with nutmeg and ginger taste like a hitherto-undiscovered heaven and have a texture like clouds; that parsnips can be baked in pies and custards fit to be fought over by small children. Potatoes, yeoman roots though they are, are the most boring of all root vegetables – unless you mash several of the coloured varieties together, in which case wonders like turquoise-striped mashed potatoes can be yours: “Parakeet potatoes!” crowed Kage in delight.

Kage revealed to me the delights of boiled puddings when she got carried away with the cookbook from the Aubrey-Maturin novels, Lobscouse and Spotted Dog. Spotted Dog is itself a weasel-worded euphemism, as we originally learned it as Spotted DICK: an innocuous, tasty boiled pudding with currents in it, whose only sin is in making people snicker. (“What part of the dog did you get?” inquired Kage, when first regarding the cylindrical pudding.) Anyway, she could make boiled puddings that amply explained the dessert fixations of 300 years of public school students and Royal Navy sailors. Her plum duff was especially good …

I’ve just returned from a doctor’s appointment; one of those where your doctor looks over the dozen pills you take with a certain dismay, and asks cautiously if you remember why she prescribed it in the first place … my doctor is very lucky, because I do remember. And because I do expend some thought on this, she listens when I argue that I don’t want certain drugs, and we manage to get on pretty well. There are things I learned years ago, with Kage, that work better than pills; and I like sticking to what works and doesn’t make me break out, change colours or sleep 20 hours at a stretch …

Kage fought anemia with beets and stout; migraines with feverfew; colds with echinacia. It all worked for her, and whether or not it was herbal efficacy or a world-class case of the placebo effect, I have no idea. All I know is, it did work. Which is all, really, that matters. Also, the side effects of beets are few and far between, which was also rather nice.

These days, I am hitting the beets pretty hard myself; lady problems all lead to anemia, I have found. Luckily, I like beets. I still take feverfew, too, as otherwise I really do come down with migraines – I honestly don’t care how it works, and if a fraction of an ounce of a (legal) weed will keep my head working, great! My doctors – who have trouble keeping track of all the actual prescription drugs I take as well – just shrug. They don’t know or care how this stuff works, either. If I’d rather eat dried fruit than drink dissolvable fibre, they don’t mind (and believe me, I would).

I can’t help wishing, though, that plum duff was a specific for something. That was wonderful stuff …

Kage Baker had an odd way of reading books. She started from the middle, and worked her way out in long curves through the text; like reading a nautilus shell.

She’d read a little in the center; then a few pages from almost – but not quite – the back. Back to the front, to establish who the hell she was reading about in the first place. Back to the middle again. If there were illustrations – and to her dying day, Kage felt the only real books were ones with illustrations – she’d study each one, usually in reverse order, before she read more than a few pages of text.

She’d read the foreword, the afterword and the dedication. She read the blurbs and the jacket copy- blurbs became a huge thing in her life as her own writing career went on, and so she studied and analyzed them. She despaired when her own blurbs made no sense (and it happens, it really does, even to authors who oversee the entire process) and so when asked to write one for someone else, she always went at it very carefully. It might only be a sentence or two, but she wanted it to be nice, tempting to the reader and above all – accurate.

There’s a reviewer out there who thinks The House of The Stag is Christian symbolism. That made Kage insane, and she almost broke her personal rule against arguing with reviewers. She did ask pointedly in several public fora if that particular reviewer actually read the books they reviewed – their reviews are noted among many hapless authors for egregious bizarrity – but that was as close as Kage got to a quarrel.

Despite this weirdly non-Euclidian approach to reading a novel, Kage did absorb entire books in a swift and competent manner. There was no noticeable difference in her retention of plot and character and mine – me, who starts obsessively with the copyright data (I do. It’s a personal flaw …) and reads right through to the end. Usually including the information on the font used, the excerpt from the next novel (who doesn’t like previews?) and a glamour shot of the author.

I took straight lines, Kage took meandering paths through alternate universes. We both got to the end, and usually turned out to have read the same book. What always amazed me was that even when she re-read a book – her beloved Stevenson, or the Patrick O’Brian mega-novel – Kage read them that same way. In serpentine curves, in  little back and forth canters through the plot; like reading Braille engraved on a sea shell. Backwards. In the dark.

How did she process it? I have no idea. I’m pretty sure, though, that it was no more or less than how she saw the hours of the days she lived through. Kage didn’t move through Time in a straight line; cause and effect, for her perceptions, were on interchangeable gears and switched places regularly. Ever see those trick machines with elliptical gears? They interact, but not in a regular rhythm. The track for some of them is a Moebius curve, and the escapement gear is an eternity sign …

I’m pretty sure that was going on inside Kage’s head. If it wasn’t, it was certainly how she saw what was going on outside it. I’ve only begun to suspect this since she died, but I think she really didn’t see Time in the Follow The Arrow To The Exit fashion most of us do. I think she made polite noises about it so as not to embarrass the rest of us, or have to waste time explaining – but things like the way she read gave her away. She saw things, she read things, from the inside out – on curves with only one surface, walking through the walls in as unobtrusive a manner as she could manage.

It makes following her act very hard. It’s like those weird pointilistic pictures where – if you let the focus of your eyes slip sideways and inside out – suddenly the candy-coloured balls reveal a bunny or a doughnut or a humourous sign hovering above the background of the picture. It always makes me feel like my retinas are being sprained. I can feel the movement in the tissue of my eyes, rotating through normal angles into something else.

Somewhere else. Somewhere Kage saw, all the time.

Kage Baker commented, during her last year of life, that she felt she had a good handle on the cancer – it was the side effects that were making her miserable. Some of the things that happened to her were unexpected and even rather interesting – things like the tattoos and piercings attendant upon lengthy chemo and radiation therapies – but what made her physically the unhappiest were drug reactions.

Most antibiotics made her nauseated. And believe me – once your immune system begins to suffer from the attentions of aggressive therapy, you discover all sorts of belligerent bacteria you did not previously know. Many opiates (all hydrocodone combinations) made her throw up; this is a problem when pain control assumes such enormous importance in your ability to function daily. Her sense of taste was a victim of her medication: I spent hours inventing smoothies that would simultaneously nourish and please, because nothing tasted normal.

“This egg cream tastes like violets,” she commented once, staring at a glass of chocolate syrup and soda water.

“Violets? Is that good or bad?”

“Good, I think. Interesting, anyway. If you figure out how you did it, do it again,” she advised.

There was a lot of stuff like that … I never did figure out how most of it happened; Kage was interacting with her sensorium in new and unusual ways, and all the special effects were internal.

Kage didn’t expect to get too weak to stand or walk. She didn’t expect metastasis. She didn’t expect brain cancer to arise from uterine cancer. (“What, the ancients were right and the damned uterus does wander around?” she complained.) She didn’t expect to die. These were all side effects, as far as she was concerned; she dealt with them as they arose, and bitched heartily when new and awful surprises presented themselves.

The one thing she expected and dreaded – hair loss – didn’t happen.  The Brazilian that resulted from the radiation therapy just made her laugh, as long as she still had a good head of hair. Her hair was cut short to accommodate a craniotomy, but she didn’t go bald. She died too fast for that, and was gently vain about dying with her hair still extant.

I’m trying to be patient about the little shocks to which my flesh has recently become heiress – I have yet to have to cope with anything as bad as what hit Kage, and so I consider myself lucky. The side effects of killer antibiotics for bacterial infections hitherto unknown to Man are hitting me rather hard today, but I can manage. There is always sleep … and in a lifetime that has been short of sleep in general, I’ve built up quite a sleep debt; I can use that up for quite some time, I think, before I slip into outright sloth.

The Lasix I am taking makes me pee constantly, but it’s supposed to do that – the weirdness is that it makes my ankles itch … Prozac gives me heartburn. Flexeril makes me sleepy. Most of the heart meds (all 6 of them) apparently have no side effects, except the thoroughly nice one of not having my heart stop: so, no complaints there.

What I most resent is having to think about all this crap, all the time. It’s boring and horrible; and nothing should be that. So I’m gonna stop thinking about it. I have my meds set up so they are on automatic – I can’t manage to either get up or go to bed without being reminded of them. So, to hell with  ’em all!

I’m gonna think about other things. It’s what Kage did. I have things to write, things to edit, and a new Stephen King just arrived … and even if my stomach hurts, I have all sorts of pudding and jello to assuage it. Time for cocada and chocolate tapioca!

Joy can be a side effect, too.

Kage Baker really enjoyed her last Dickens workshops. She was on her way to surgery, almost literally – she knew she wouldn’t be having a wildly energetic Dickens Fair, but she meant to attend. So we trucked on over to the school where the first weekends’ rehearsals are always held, and she got to spend her first ever workshops where she was guaranteed a place to sit down!

This is because she was in a wheelchair, in which contrivance she was a happy menace to all pedestrian traffic. In her favour, it must be pointed out that she was also an amiable package bin – carried everyone’s lunches and spare notebooks – as well as a perfect baby perch. In fact, she spent a good part of that weekend snuggling our newest crop of babies in the Guild (all girls that year) and giving them teeny little rides in her fascinating conveyance.

Also, singing them to sleep. Kage was a world champion at singing babies to sleep. Part of it was practice; she was cuddling babies from the age of 4 years old, which was when her legs were first long enough to hold a swaddled sibling. It’s rather surprising when you know that what she usually sang to babies were sea-chanties and pirate songs … not the romantic ones, like The Grey Funnel Line or The Dark-eyed Sailor. No, what Kage sang were things like The Eddystone Light and Go Down, Ye Blood Red Roses.

Babies loved those songs. Little eyes would glaze over and their lids shut like flower petals as she softly crooned “Oh, our boots and clothes is all in pawn …” in her beautiful alto. It was Emily and Willow that year – now Emily is a big sister to baby Jack, and Willow has embarked on a career as a perpetual motion machine, I believe. I don’t know if either one of them remembers the red-haired lady and the sea-songs, but they were the last in a long line of Faire babies to be snuggled and sung to by Kage.

This year, we have boys. Connor, born in early summer; Jack and Alexander, born a few days apart in September. Alexander (called Sasha) Kage Palladini, his Auntie Kage’s namesake: a red-haired little boy most devoutly prayed for and now ecstatically celebrated – she was waiting for him when she died, as his production was a project that involved a lot of people’s prayers and storming heaven. None of the new laddies will work Fair, being quite small; but all will visit. And when they do, I’ll sing to them.

I’ll pitch it as low as I can get, and softly, as Kage did. And we will see if another year’s crop of  Fair babies can be lulled into sleep by the  advice: Oh, one more pull and then we’re through – For we’re the boys to kick it through!

Oh, you pinks and posies! Go down, ye blood roses, go down!

Kage Baker. Phantom noises of sleigh bells in the kitchen, phantom perfumes of nutmeg and semolina. Red Door, red doors, doors red with sunset – and the colder it gets the brighter the last red light of day: how does that happen? 

Is it ice in the upper air that makes the sunset look like tinsel? Guy Fawkes, frost on the lawn this morning, rain going, rain coming, wind rising …

Out of this word salad, power lines vibrating and programs going on and off; either the household network (perhaps inauspiciously named Hal by the nephew …) is coming alive, or it’s developing epilepsy. You don’t have to be sentient to have epilepsy, of course – I knew a Labrador with it, and he was as dumb as a box of rocks.

I spent the day in my pajamas re-routing energy through limbs that have forgotten how neurons work. Net result – not much, but at least I am still here and will resume some higher level of functionality tomorrow.

I can’t get much less functional without mutating into a mushroom.

See you later, murels and chanterelles and you funny little blewitts. Gonna evolve me a central nervous system for tomorrow.

Kage Baker, as has been made pretty plain, loved Dickens Fair. It wasn’t just that, as an older lady, she appreciated the joys of flush toilets, chairs to sit on in stead of hay bales, an indoor venue instead of the vagaries of outdoors Marin County (though all of those pertained). It was more a case of simply being in that portion of the population for whom Victoriana is the perfect manifestation of Christmas.

Just after the introduction of Christmas trees and cards; when bells and red velvet and ghost stories and roast turkeys and a Father Christmas with more than just a bit of Captain Morgan twinkling in his eye was the standard: that’s what she loved.  Before commercialism got too carried away with itself, before department stores and soft drink purveyors started inventing secular saints; before the damned dancing reindeer and OCD elves. When the darkness under the oaks trees yielded the home-bound party with venison and Yule logs and winter hymns in the snow, though you knew the trees could just as well have eaten them all. When there still a hint of the oldest Yuletide truths, back when it was all about blood on the snow …

Kage loved the lights and warmth and plenitude of Christmas because the contrast with the cold dark is never so sharp anytime else. You’re really grateful for a mid-winter feast when it doesn’t have to include the seed corn or the elderly.

Dickens Fair was all Kage’s focus on Christmas, the last 10 years of her life. It’s a glorious extravaganza, and we threw ourselves into it with insane dedication. The endorphines of exhaustion always enhanced the eggnog and roast beef for us. It’s a mania, a celebration at that peak of intensity that usually sends small children into fits just before the presents are opened – but as adults, it went on for us for days. We were raving with joy by the time the Sun slipped over the Solstice; by the Yuletide itself, we were in an altered state.

You get to crave that kind of high, you know?

And tomorrow, it starts again. First weekend of rehearsals – held, by necessity and peculiar tradition, in a local, weekend-empty school. Our hordes of evolving Victorians will come to pose and recite amid the half-sized desks and construction paper turkeys: hoop shirts filling a bathroom meant for a dozen little girls with just two wide-load matrons; smudgy orphans with battered top hats lounging criminally by the swings; pallid widows in fingerless gloves clutching styrofoam cups of Swiss Miss as they browse the false-hair booth.

We transmute the world just walking through it.

Alas, I will not be there. Not yet. My lamp of health seems to have spent its terminal lumens in the desperate last year of Kage’s life – since then, it’s been desperately trying to catch up with itself through crisis after crisis. I’m pretty damned sick of this nonsense, too, as I seem to escape each unusual fate only to fall straight into another one. This year, it’s bacteria even I have never heard of – although it has been cleverly suggested by a fellow word-smith (thank you, Maggie!) that the  Klebsiella that struck me down is actually one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters … and once I’ve put paid to that, I’ve still got the fascinating question to solve, of what is living in my uterus that isn’t related to me?

The damned raccoons would not surprise me, at this point.

In the meantime, though, I have to at least regain some strength: so this week, I direct from a distance. The intrepid and flawless Neassa will see my group through its initial classes and paperworks. I will return next week, happily speeding up I-5 in the autumn chill with a nephew, a parrot, a piano stool and half the house linens. And all the lamps Kage so loved, to light up the winter properly for Extreme Christmas.

I am pantingly, pantingly eager to go.

Kage Baker caught influenza with a graceful inevitability. Once a year, usually, the last weekend of a Dickens Fair, she would start to glow with fever and ache in every joint; her sinuses would silt up like the lost drainage of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, and she would take to her bed to sleep off the virus.

I never caught any. The great, named, world-wide influenzas (Hong Kong, Swine, H1N1, Media Frenzy …) nabbed me once in a while, but I usually neatly missed the annual strain. Which is good, but bred in me a certain viral arrogance. I did not get the flu, I thought smugly.

However, when I began to ache and radiate heat like a melting bar of cheap iron in a furnace, I figured my luck had run out at last – now influenza was to be added to my zoo of maladies. But it didn’t go away. And nothing actually hurt. And the fever got higher and higher, and the cycle got shorter and shorter … by October 30th, I was hitting highs of 101 every 6 hours or so, interspersed with lows where I almost dissolved in rank sweat. I was dizzy, seeing double, profoundly unsteady in my walk and increasingly incoherent.I figured I was turning into a zombie.

Kimberly finally had enough of my desperate and demented gaze over the edge of my blankets, and dragged me off to the ER at Cedars-Sinai. They are very nice there; I recommend it for sudden plague needs.

My  temperature turned out to be 103.8. My heart beat was somewhere in the 200’s per minute range. Other than suggesting a slow case of spontaneous combustion, though, I was not excessively peculiar; so they made me comfy and we spent 5 hours watching while they fought my heart-beat down to a range where it might be trusted not to leap out of my chest like an alien. Many blood and urine samples were taken, to test for interesting micro-organisms – whatever I had, it wasn’t flu … I slowly got cooler and less demented. I felt merely blurred by the time I was sent home to sleep off what the ER doc determined was a UTI with an odd paucity of normal symptoms.

The next day, Halloween afternoon, he called me back. He told me I had a blood infection with something called Klebsiella and had to return to the hospital at once. No excuses. No delays. Right freaking now. Be prepared to stay a while, he added. (Theramin music, please.)

Note to those in the L.A. area: Cedars-Sinai is a wonderful hospital. Don’t go there on Halloween, though, if you can help it. They are the nearest medical facility to the enormous Halloween Party that is West Hollywood, and the other people in your waiting room experience will be … odd. They’ll be odd enough to make you wonder what your temperature is if you aren’t running a fever; and if you are, you will really be astonished …

The Tippi Hedron from the Trauma section of the ER was inspired, though, I must admit. Wonderful tailored suit, ravens in her blonde hair: a classic.

Anyway. I was returned to a wired up, taped up, stuck with needles state; they resumed pumping me full of antibiotics and fluids and morphine (by this time, everything from my clavicles to my pelvis ached). Kimberly stalwartly stayed with me for a 4-hour stint in a corridor, entertaining me by describing the costumes I couldn’t see coming in the ambulance bay doors behind me. But they finally found me a room (they were really, really busy, with patients from all adjacent universes) so Kimberly got to go home …

I was technically admitted at midnight. I have spent the last 4 days eradicating Klebsiella pneumonea from my blood stream. Klebsiella is a useful little bacterium, in its proper home in the gut; but when somehow loosed into the bloodstream  – like, maybe, trauma during an unusually sanguinary pelvic exam) it can raise hell. And your temperature, your heartbeat and your blood pressure. And if it makes it to your lungs or brain (which it did not, with me) it can have a 50% mortality rate. Hence my doctor’s haste and hysteria.

So that’s where I have been, Dear Readers, fighting off a bug that made me imagine tiny middle-aged Lotte Lenyes running around trying to kick me in the shins. Trying to discourage the interest of bored residents in the eccentric history of my kidneys, the 5 stents in my chest, and my concrete-firm refusal to permit a pelvic exam of any sort.

Through this, I have clung to the goal of making it to the cardiologist who will certify me as fit for anesthesia, so I have a uterine biopsy under less-than-Red Sea conditions, so they can determine what is thickening my endometrium, so I can get a cure for the mystery bleeding that started this whole freaking thing in the first place! And I am pleased to say that I have succeeded in keeping it on schedule. It got moved to November 10th, but that is not too bad – much better than the 6 weeks originally suggested, although the appointment clerk still doesn’t understand why a 6-week delay in finding out what the answer is to my pelvic bleeding might bother me … I may have made that plain to her today, however.

And in the meantime, I do NOT have the flu.  And I got a flu shot, too. So there’s that. I cock snooks at you, Klebsiella!

Kage Baker would tell me to go back to bed. I don’t feel sick, exactly – nothing hurts – but I’m dizzy and light-headed and my ears are ringing. And I’m running a fever of 100 degrees.

My doctor, too, tells me to go sleep whatever-this-is off. So I’m gonna. Talk to you all tomorrow.

Kage Baker, when faced with the necessity of fashioning a segue where none easily presented itself, would usually remark, “Speaking of camels …”

I don’t remember why. At some point, it must have been something that cracked us up, because we both still snickered when she said it decades later. But the provenance has vanished in the corrosive mists of time; unlike some of the other life-long private platitudes that made us both guffaw … “Put that in your smipe and poke it” was a self-righteous Spoonerism dating back to high school; to the end of her days, though, neither one of could say or hear it without giggling helplessly.

Another one, indicating an egregious non sequitor, was “Look, a bust of Micky Mouse dancing on the lawn with an evil-minded baby prune.” That one was born of a game of Mad Libs in our early teens, and never died. Especially when it got conflated with Creedance Clearwater’s Looking Out My Back Door in Kage’s mind; she would often insert the evil-minded baby prune in with the dinosaur Victrola and the flying spoon.

Kage loved Mad Libs. On long car trips we would often grab a pad of them from some gas mart featuring ways to keep your kids from going postal in the car, and proceed down the highway howling with hysterical laughter. It was a game of Mad Libs and a poorly made date shake that once left us facing backwards on the traffic island in the middle of a Santa Barbara street, covered in ice cream and macerated dates …

Being, as she was, a lover of language, Kage couldn’t resist playing with words. Lewis’s horrible science fiction novel, outlining the adventures of a hypothetical Edward into the future, was something she wrote out in great detail and glee. She loved being asked to write pastiches for special collections – one of her personal favourites was “The Leaping Lover”, wherein she postulated an ill-starred romance between Springheel Jack and Dickens’ ingenue ogress Fannie Squeers, from Nicholas Nickelby. Kage had a wonderful time coming up with Fanny’s voice.

Sometimes we’d play Mad Libs with the cities and characters in stories – trading nonsense syllables back and forth until some selection proved euphonious. The languages of the Yendri and the Children of the Sun had rules of composition and grammar, known only to Kage; but a lot of the music of them arose from just juggling sounds until a dozen shining names stayed in mid-air …

I have lists. Lots of lists. Kage’s indecision on spelling (and my inability to spell in any tongue, real or imagined) led to a dichotomy around 1970 – from then on, most of the lists show what we came to call the Yendri spelling side by side with the sort preferred by the Children of the Sun. Kage spoke her own fantasy languages with an accent suitable to Troon or Flame City; some inland town of artisans and runners.

I still write the names Gard’s kids with the older, Yendri spelling. But then, for decades I’ve had to change my spelling for business letters and reports anyway – as you may have noticed, Dear Readers, I use mostly English spelling in my personal discourse. It’s what I learned first.

Anyway, speaking of camels … I think I have a touch of flu, a soupcon of salmonella, a wee bit of narcolepsy today. The tertiary fever is acting up, or something; and CVS doesn’t carry any Jesuit’s bark, the slackers. At any rate, I entered into this today with nothing to say and determined to just maunder on so as to fulfill my minimum blog post obligation. Instead, it’s been a rather amusing ride through the games one can play with words … enhanced and made interesting by the mild fever I’m running right now.

Time to finally post this, secure a slice of Philly cheese steak pizza, and then go to bed. Harry is singing Spongebob Squarepants to me, and the little black cat is lighting the way to my pillow with her beryl-green eyes.

Unless she’s an evil-minded baby prune in disguise.