Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved having her own bathroom.

Some of this, of course, is the natural consequence of sharing bathrooms with many, many siblings – three of them boys. Some is the result of spending 30 year’s worth of weekends at Renaissance Faires, where the privies were always one of our more outstanding successes at, mmmm, interactive periodicity. And some was just Kage’s native territoriality combined with her urge to decorate every place she was ever in.

Though I was the one who insisted on having bookcases in the bathroom. Kage’s eccentricities ran more to interior decorating. I’ve never understood the need for tchotchkes in a bathroom, but Kage liked … toys. Artistic statements. Thematic deco.

The last several years of her life, we finally achieved separate bathrooms. Not that we had ever minded sharing – but gosh, was it nice! They could be so thoroughly personalized … I was thinking that I would never grab her damned horrible original Listerine again (I like the more civilized minty stuff) but she had whole worlds in mind.

Kage went berserk. She put up beach-themed wallpaper, endless breaking waves on a misty beach, lamenting that there was no way to add crown molding (Kage adored crown molding … ). Her sink and vanity were all kitted out with matching lighthouse motifs. The toilet paper was always blue or green, as were the tissues. There was a shelf shaped like a tiny rowboat on the wall. She had a Davy Jones electric toothbrush, by th’powers! And a night light with a Jolly Roger on it.

When I turned out to be lackadaisical (What do I want in my bathroom? Um – blue towels. I guess … ), Kage took control. My rug and towels were so deep a blue it made your pupils expand. She added wallpaper trim there, too – moons and stars, silver-gilt on cobalt. My water glass, my toothbrush holder, my soap dish: all the same. A mirrored white cabinet with sea-blue knobs added a dimensional portal on one wall. And for a night light, she gave me a fountain of fibre-optic threads that cycled through the spectrum, and she hung blue-white LEDs around the mirror instead of an overhead lamp.

When Kage was done, I could happily have lived in that bathroom.

She gradually expanded each motif out into our respective bedrooms, as well. Hers was maritime and piratical – a Jolly Roger over the bed, and a brass plate on the headboard that read: Officers Only. Prints of sailing vessels. Coloured glass net floats. A bar mirror with Captain Morgan and his blessed rum painted on it. Lamps with glass bodies full of sea shells.

She even managed to coax  moons and stars throughout my room, though what it was mostly decorated in was books. Piles and walls and palisades of books – but on blue shelves, with stellar and lunar sigils on them. I really did live inside her head …

Kimberly and I today embarked on re-making the bathroom here. She is of a like mind to Kage – lights, action, deco! The two of them always shared a great fondness for fiddly bits and googaws, and thought I was a real stick in the mud. And I am, I admit it; that’s why I am handling the hard realities, like a new sink and faucet and the needs of the plumber. Which involve not having the parrot watching him and commenting sarcastically (Oh, no! Ooops!) or the Corgi growling round his ankles and trying to herd him out the door.

Kimberly likes frogs and the colour green, and has many of both all set to decorate the bathroom. But she has made sure that I have deep blue towels available nonetheless, because somehow that is what I have to have. It’s very comforting, really.

Maybe I’ll go really crazy and dig out my optic fibre light again. Acid on a stick! Just the thing to liven up the family bathroom.

Kage Baker and I had a lot of weird teenaged conversations in the back yard of Mamma’s house.

There was a decaying stone staircase that led off down a slope full of yucca and century plants; we’d sit there, under the edge of the eucalyptus trees that marched along all the borders of the yard, and dissect the world. It’s an adolescent thing, I think – you know nothing much at that age, but you have a dim feeling you’re going to need to someday. And you have an over-blown conviction that your mind is the crown of Creation, and all mysteries will open to your perusal.

So you seriously discuss what matters in that particular Mayfly moment: what flavour grey Neccos really are. The regnal order of the Kings of Britain. What the worst sin or curse word is. Sex, drugs and rock n’roll, about which you probably know next-to- nothing, yet.

One summer afternoon between my freshman and sophomore years, we tried to tally up who we knew who was Not Like Us. You know, we were getting out in the world now and discovering exotic people (which was, let’s face it, basically everyone we met), so we were assembling a sort of Life List. It was only on entering high school that we had ever even met black children, for instance; Hispanics and Oriental kids were pretty thick on the ground in Catholic schools, but not black ones.

So that was interesting. So was the fact that most of them were Episcopalians or Baptists, sent off to us heathen Catholics in order to take advantage of IHHS’s stratospheric average GPA. I had recently been informed by a Baptist friend that Catholics were barely Christians, seeing as how we were idol-worshippers; which was also rather intriguing. And considering that statues of the Virgin Mary stood before candles in every room of the house, we had to concede there was a case for it.

“Do we know any Jews?” Kage wondered. “Myown Hymer  sounds Jewish.”

“But Myown is black,” I objected.

“Myown says she’s a humanist atheist, anyway,” said Kage. (Myown, via a confused reading of her name as Myron Hymen by a near-sighted admissions officer, got herself accepted into West Point two years later. They rejected her, though, when her possession of ovaries was established; which delayed West Point’s entry into the 20th century by another 6 years. But may have saved the industrial-military complex from the fiendishly brilliant Myown.)

“Diane Khefi says she’s a Copt.”

“Nope, still a Christian,” said Kage.

We didn’t know any Jews, it appeared. The crowds of Catholic school girls who haunted the divine delis of Fairfax Avenue after school did not count; they were after good pastrami, not conversion. We knew one British girl. We knew one Argentine named Gretchen, which we were just old enough to snicker about. We knew an Armenian, a girl with a poorly repaired cleft palette who lisped but could sing two notes at once, two and a half twins (one set was boy/girl) and Lucille Ball’s daughter.

“Exotic” is a very broad category when you are 15. And “diversity” was a word reserved for college-level biology projects.

Do we know anybody gay? was not a question that occurred to us. It would have been far more startling at that point to discover than anyone at IHHS had a sex life at all. Statistically, we must have had gay classmates, even in an all-girl student body; even at that early date, even with the small sizes of our classes. While no one came out in those years, certainly some of my old friends have come back to reunions with their sexuality matter-of-factly displayed. I don’t recall that anyone cared.

It never mattered to either one of us. Kage and I grew up on the edges of show business, and Mamma rented to studio people in the houses next-door. Most people came in couples, but couples were not all alike. Like twins, they came in two flavours – different and the same.

What grownups did was no concern to us when we were kids; and by the time we ventured into the dance ourselves, we were too preoccupied with our own choices to worry about anyone else’s. Teenaged tunnel-vision can inadvertently produce what looks like good manners … and as Kage said, sometime later when real maturity had set in, “There’s not enough love in the world anyway. Who am I to question someone else’s? We’re all lucky to find love at all. It’s just the way things are.”

This conversation and observation came to mind this afternoon, when I realized that DADT ends today. Perhaps appropriately, I’ve never thought to ask and no one has told me recently. Which is pretty much the way it ought to be, I think – who you love shouldn’t be a revelation or a social paradigm.

It should just be the way things are.

Kage Baker was a professional observer. Writers, by and large, are – good ones, anyway. They observe both reality and fantasy with objectivity, and write about what they see. She taught me to pay super-secret-close attention to what was around me, because there was no better show than what you dismiss from the corner of your eye.

Kage loved to people-watch, sitting somewhere and studying crowds, noticing and speculating on what people do when they feel unobserved – and for some reason, people in crowds do feel unobserved, despite being surrounded by lots of other people. Maybe the idea of herd anonymity has something to do with that; although I suspect the universal black-and-white camouflage that hides a zebra from a lion just screams out its identity to other zebras. In the case of humans, it only hides you from all the other zebras – the lioness in the shade sees you clearly.

The lioness will eat you. Kage would just stick you in a story. She used to say: “Never offend a writer – you’ll end up in a story.” For that matter, don’t catch their attention at all, or you will join the secret stash of Things That Can Be Used Someday.

Her observations kept me amused on our many long roads for 40 years. Her lessons in watching continue to provide me with entertainment. They also help me avoid trucks and cars evidently driven by blind people – you know, the ones that attempt to change lanes into the patch of road you are currently inhabiting. This never fails to be of aid … and even while driving alone, I am never bored.

There were indeed sun dogs and rainbows all along I-5 on my recent trip: I have never figured out what atmospheric anomaly provides the feast of refraction that always exists along that road, but I love it. I saw all manner of strange road kill – autumn is approaching, when (according to Kage’s theory) the wild beasties beside the road draw lots and send out sacrifices to die strangely and be mummified on the verge. Exploded tires were out in force, too, imitating dead iguanas and giant tarantulas beside the truck stops. I think they were tires …

The hordes of pale butterflies that accompany the Lords of the Upper Air in summer were still sweeping through Kern County. I don’t what they are – they might be Sulfer Yellows. Or Southern Dogfaces. Or even California Marbles. I only get close looks at them when I clean their little wings out of my filters, when the white and gold and purple of them is a little smeared. So whether my grille was full of Perplexing Hairstreaks or San Emidio Blues, I have no idea.

Last winter’s motif of fans is still continuing. Hey, Steve and Carol Skold – remember how you told me Thursday that you had seen the blades of giant wind turbines, lying on the ground and also passing you on the backs of huge trucks? Well, on Friday, so did I! One turbine had apparently blown its wings off in the Altamont Pass – cows were grazing unconcernedly under the enormous blades – and another one passed me on three separate trucks, each bearing a 20-foot long white scimitar. What are the odds, huh? They were just as strange-looking as you told me.

The cotton is beginning to pop, and there are snowy drifts around Mendota and the turn-off for Pumpkin Center. Corns fields were ripening everywhere – except around Highway 58, where what appeared to actually be sorghum had gone wild and tangled for several miles. (Motorists are advised to watch out for herds of feral sorghum …) There are lagoons (which have never been there before) near Lost Hills, sporting herons and egrets and reeds and water lilies and a million ducks, all arranged at random just beyond the dried tumbleweeds and Russian thistles beside the highway. Sudden wetlands – where do they come from? It’s a mystery.

It makes for a wonderful drive, watching for all these oddities. They never fail, and if one goes away some other lovely weirdness takes its place. I cannot imagine how people fall victim to highway hypnosis, unless they turn their brains off then they turn their engines on.

Really whets my appetite for winter. Who knows what will come slinking down out of the hills by then, to posture alluringly by the road?

Only Kage, I suspect.

Kage Baker was always deeply effected by films. She enjoyed the sensation. After seeing a movie she liked, she would seek out all manner of associated material – the source novel (or novelized script), the soundtrack, all the reviews she could track down on line. She would work with notable determination to expand the ambiance and environment of the film as widely as possible, so she could drown herself in it.

Even if she didn’t like a film, she was affected on a long-term basis. After we saw Time After Time (H. G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper to 20th century San Francisco in his time machine; much better than it sounds), Kage was terrified. She seriously considered buying a hand gun, before finally admitting that she herself would have to wield it – me being half blind and with a rotten aim – and that our owning a gun would be more dangerous than having the Ripper for our gardener. In the meantime, Kage read all the H. G Wells she had ignored over the years – because, though she was totally freaked by the movie, she loved the atmosphere.

When a movie had action toys, she had to have her favourite characters; especially Disney films, of course: a hulking miniature of Shan Yu from Mulan. Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast. Poseiden from The Little Mermaid. The cyborg John Silver from Treasure Planet. They all lived on her desk for years. And the 18-inch-high, motion-activated Captain Jack Sparrow on her dresser unnerved guests to her bedroom for ages.

Sound tracks were so important to her that we often stopped and got the CD (or whatever format was current that year) on the way home from the movie. Then Kage could just sink into a pool of movie-ness, and bliss out. When she could also surf associated sites on the Interwebs, she was as happy as if she were plugged into the Library of Alexandria.

She was never really willing to have a movie she liked end, you see. It’s the same response that led her to write more of her most beloved books when she was a child. Kage hated to let a story stop. Ultimately, she learned that telling her own was more fun that riffing off someone else’s. But even then, there was more to every book she wrote than was actually published. Most of them are half again as long, with scenes deleted or written afterward; the literary equivalent of gag reels and blooper films. Do other author’s write fanfic of their own works? I have no idea, but Kage did. Ruthless demented satires, usually, that left me howling with laughter.

A bit of that survives in Lewis’ ghastly science fiction novel. Kage came up with most of it while drinking many, many margaritas with blue plastic dolphins in them holding maraschino cherries.  On Catalina Island. While wearing a crown made of balloons … ah, the insane memories.

Me, I just got back from seeing Contagion. Good, scary, grim flick. As the credits rolled away, Kimberly turned to me and said solemnly, “We’ve got to lay in more disaster supplies at home.”

I feel grateful that all Kimberly wants is a few more cans of Spam. Kage would have been agitating for hazmat suits.

Kage Baker was fixed a little loosely in the stream of Time. She liked it like that. She never enjoyed feeling especially constrained or limited by her environment, and Time was no different. There was only so far she would bend to the vagaries of temperature or humidity or Time, before she shrugged off their pernicious impudence and took herself off to milder climes or last May.

I tend more to stick it out where I am, especially now that I am not Kage’s chauffeuse. I’m a little stodgy. However, the damp heat in Los Angeles was definitely getting to me when I fled week before last – up to the clean chill and fog of San Francisco, and the simply paradisial last summer days in Santa Rosa. The weather was wonderful everywhere – in fact, driving up I-5 last Friday, I never found temperatures above 85. In that golden desolation of hills and orchards, I was cooler than I had been in a fortnight.

I wandered through San Francisco in bliss for the weekend – Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, the nooks and crannies of the Presidio, the beautiful neighborhoods in the Sunset and Mission Districts … even late at night, the streets were alive with people (they have real neighborhoods in San Francisco, so it always looks like a block party to an Angelino like me) and the moon was bright and benevolent.

Santa Rosa was a lord’s pleasaunce, the epitome of farming bounty, an icon of Harvest Home. Corn was high everywhere -some stands already being carefully groomed into mazes for October festivals – and the vineyards were almost ready to harvest. The wild hills were a solid, improbable gold with wild oats; the oaks were still dense and green, but gilded with the dust of an entire summer. The whole world was ripe, ripe, ripe. I spent the week in a happy daze of perfect High Summer,  hiding in the middle of last month.

On my last morning, though – yestreday – the warmth was gone. There was dew on the grass and the windshield of my car, that heavy pearly dew that foretells autumn. And on the drive home, I-5 was suddenly full of harvesting machines and laden trucks full of corn and tomatoes and melons; the bonfires were starting, where the detritus of fields is burned each year so the rich ashes can enliven the soil. Except for that one fireball at Corral Hollow – I have no idea what they were burning there, but it looked a little vigorous for an aggie fire … maybe a triffid infestation being put down.

A week before I had driven past melon fields, solid green and smelling like paradise. By yestreday they had been stripped, and the heavy sweet perfume of the melons was underlain with a current of rot from the discards left behind. Deformed cantaloupes rolled pale and abandoned, like skulls between the yellowing vines, and the air for a mile on either side smelled of death and honey.

For unknown reasons, I saw few cows (except the Sea of Cows at Harris Ranch, of course) but a lot of horses. Maybe the cows had taken a week off for vacation, too. Or not – I did pass an ominous lot of reeking tankers full of tallow. But the horses were lovely, posing like dancers against orchards and empty hillsides; in the center of every little group, an autumn foal or two stretched out flat in a nap attack, secure in the shade of its mother and aunties. Horses benefit enormously from possessing noble profiles and never speaking.

When I came down into Los Angeles from the Tehatchapies, the Basin was filled with fog – the old stuff still fading in the middle air, while the new evening’s batch respired from the earth. It gave a beautiful haze to the distance, the sort of mild opacity that fools you into thinking the air is clear: even though you can’t see the Hollywood Hills through it, let alone the Sierra Nevadas. It was cooler, softer, definitely autumnal: such a relief!

So I left in mid-July, spent a week in August, and returned home to early October. I seem to have skipped September pretty much all round, which is fine with me this year – it’s been a beastly month. It’s just the sort of strategy Kage would contrive, too, to get free of nasty weather: go visit somewhere and somewhen else.

They say it will get hot again in a few days, but I think we’ve missed our chance for more 113-degree days like we got last year. It actually rained in Needles Thursday, which would indicate that November is drifting in here and there. Good. I’m ready for it. Let’s keep that Time stream swirling, and see what we can trick out of it.

Maybe the irises will get confused and bloom again. That would be neat.

Kage Baker always believed in the therapeutic value of a good collapse after returning from the North. Several hours on the road leaves one noticeably brain-dead and exhausted – especially dimension-skipping down I-5, that Road of Weirdness. So I’m home, but not quite open for business – gonna lie down under a nice pile of cats and recoup my scattered energies tonight.

There was a lot going on today on the road – some of which I may never be able to figure out. At one point, near Corral Hollow Road, I glanced in my rear view mirror just in time to see a fireball rising into the air behind me. It was followed by a vigorous plume of black smoke. Don’t know what blew up back there – all that had been visible for the last several miles were dead trees and live cattle, neither of which usually explodes – but I resisted the temptation to go back and see.

Busy road crews were digging up, filling in, and moving bits of, every road I was on today – which impeded my progress somewhat. What ordinarily takes 6 hours took 8 1/2. But I had a pound of liquorice and my family waiting for me here in Los Angeles, so I am going to settle down for a nice at-home evening.

And fog has filled the L.A. basin, and it is cool … oh, it’s nice to come home.

More details tomorrow!

Kage Baker – believing, as she did, that computers operated by some inchoate Clarkian magic – was never really surprised when her own computer did something odd. Disappointed, frustrated, enraged – all those things; but not surprised. She rather expected it to turn on her from time to time, like a demon whose binding spells have to be periodically renewed.

I, on the other hand, know it’s(mostly) a machine. I understand the arcanities of GIGO. I know how to sign off things when I am done with them. Nonetheless … someone else’s computer system can still surprise me from time to time. And, of course, there is no telling what the Interwebs themselves will get up to in their spare time. They have such a lot of it! Consider how fast time moves  for the vast mind we have built between us, and you can see that bits of it must always be reaching senility or going quite mad.

This week, I have been lying around doing next to nothing at a friend’s house, vacationing in lovely Santa Rosa. I have done one load of laundry and taken their dog to the groomer, (the Cocker Spaniel is now whisper fresh!) so I guess I have satisfied Hygeia – other than that, I have pretty much been a happy fungus. My Buke doesn’t pull in a signal well here in the hills above the town, so I have been using my hosts’ generously offered computer system … but it has different quirks from mine own, of course.  Topping that, WordPress here has been declining to admit I exist, which has made blogging difficult.

I wouldn’t mind not existing, temporarily – what a way to ensure a vacation! But several of the other sites I habitually use have instead refused to let me sign off. One weird consequence of that is that I just got a book auto-delivered to my Kindle that I never heard of, and a note from Neassa explaining I was inexplicably signed on to Amazon in place of herself …

So I have been back-tracking everywhere this morning, signing myself off wherever I can recall going. And while I do remember already signing off, there I still was anyway on half of the sites. But I think I have managed to erase my tracks now.

And as a reward, WordPress is letting me back on. Huzzah!

Kage by this time would have stomped off in a snit at the evil vagaries of computer systems, and be ostentatiously writing by hand. She always carried a pen and notebook, in anticipation of the coming computer apocalypse. And she could write so that her very posture was accusatory – she was always so personally offended when her machines misbehaved.

But I am fine. I have read a great deal these last several days, which has been incredibly therapeutic. I’ve spent very comfy evenings reading stories about the periodic table of elements, and sharing weird information about gallium and the lanthanides with Neassa, as she worked on an exquisite Edwardian walking skirt and jacket. There has been unlimited cheese and copious fruit. And I am secure in the knowledge that I did necessary bookish stuff first.

I haven’t shared as much of adventures with you, Dear readers, as I should have; but I’ll catch up. To be honest, between the unfamiliar computer systems and my own laziness, most of my adventures have been of the “Oh no, we’re out of half and half!” variety.

Though I did spend yestreday evening in a cemetery, watching the sun set through a grove of old oak trees. Neassa was there for a dress rehearsal on a Rural Cemeteries Tour in which she participates each year; that’s why she’s been making a walking skirt. I sat happily on the edge of a Mr. Rule’s elegantly walled plot, and watched people in clothing of the past 150 years flit through the dimming trees. Very surreal, very lovely.

Tomorrow I head home. Today I am still lazy. On the other hand, I’ve defeated the computer glitches! A very successful vacation.

Kage Baker’s heart was always in Northern California – her Summer Country, her Isle of Apples. Even when we lived for so many years in Pismo Beach, part of the attraction was that we could be in the Summer Country with a half day’s drive. Somewhere around Emeryville – with the towers of San Francisco beside us and the gold hills of Marin ahead of us – she would suddenly sigh and smile.

On clear days, it happened wherever Mount Tamalpais suddenly became visible. All the ley lines were suddenly running straight through Kage, and she was energized.

Why did we never live in the City? Time and opportunity never coincided, I guess. But we spent decades of summer doing Renaissance Faires at Blackpoint; where a weekend’s worth of live was worth a month anywhere else. And for two years we actually lived there. In a trailer, in an oak grove, beside a pond … hares kept our tiny lawn nibbled short, and deers nibbled on the cotton laundry unless you kept a close eye on it; foxes denned under the outdoor privy, and a badger built a stet outside the bedroom window.

I have never been as happy anywhere as I was in the trailer in the oaks. Close – very close, a few places – but that remains the best place I ever lived. Even when midnight rescue parties had to be formed to drag low-lying trailers out of range of the rising waters of the pond in the rain. Or when the curious (and real) events on which Kage based “Indian Tony” kept us all awake half a night. Even when the frogs got so loud in spring that their bellowing echoed off the hillside; even when a doe ate my best linen kirch. Damn you, Bambi’s mother!

So I am very happy now to be just kicking back in the North, doing as close to nothing at all as I can manage. I drove out to The Cheese Factory just outside Novato this morning, and will be gorging on curds and whey, triple-cream Brie and local bleu cheese for days. I indulged in a honey cake, and shared it with my dear hostess’s copper-coloured Cocker Spaniel. Ginger is a sweetie pie dog, but apparently no one has ever fed her. Ever. Anything. She is always on point of dying of starvation when I get here … she has a lot of energy for a starving doggie, I must say.

She is gazing at me reproachfully now because cherry Jello is not edible by her standards …

Kage and I always made a point of going to The Cheese Factory when we were up here. Kage herself preferred harder cheeses – Swiss, Parmesan, Jarlsburg – to the obscenely soft and fragrent cheeses I like best – which was very cool, really, because neither of us had to share! And we were united in our love of fresh bread and ripe fruit. We’d drive out there, picking up the various bits of a picnic from local bakeries and fruit stands, and then settle down under the shade trees on the Factory’s lawn with the Crown Jewels of lactic art.

I made no picnic today – missed her too much to pause for a rest there, where she no longer can accompany me. But the pilgrimage was fine, and the drive was bliss. And I have an inordinate amount of cheese stashed away now. I’ll remember Kage with each bite; especially during the wonderfuly smelly ones, where she’d make terribly mature gagging noises while I ate. Nothing like a meal with your sister to keep those family traditions going.

I miss Kage incredibly up here in the Summer Country, this land of our mad and misspent youth. Also our equally mad and misspent maturities, middle-ages and encroaching senescences. Part of my heart will always live here, amid the oaks and wild oats, racing along some golden road while Kage pointed ahead and cried: Go there! I want to go there!

And she did go, damn her. And I haven’t found that hidden turn yet, no matter how many miles of yellow hills flow past my windows … I will, though. I have an absolute talent for getting lost. Someday, quite by accident, I’ll find that turn.

And in the meantime, I can still sit here and eat cheese in the Summer Country.

Kage Baker liked the beautiful little city of Santa Rosa. We have friends there – the noble Skolds, Steve and Carol, and their amazing daughter Neassa – who have given us shelter in every kind of disaster and holiday. Sometimes simultaneously, like the night our journey to their Thanksgiving dinner was interrupted by our getting trapped on the railroad tracks … I will tell you all about that tomorrow, Dear Readers.

But today and tonight I am at their gracious house, playing with their dog and mooching off their laundry facilities (as usual) because the bookish rounds this weekend have left me half-dead.

The usual nonsense will resume tomorrow!

Kage Baker and I were on our way to work when 9/11 started. We were in the Black Pearl, our local indie coffee shop, and the telly over the counter was turned to news. We saw the footage of the first plane striking, and went off in a daze with our morning coffee.

We were discussing it in disbelief when the next plane hit. And the day just went on, like it did for everyone else, in stunned horror.

We spent days locating our all New York friends (We had a lot. Half the publishing industry works in New York.) We were lucky as hell, and did not lose anyone. Not anyone we knew, anyway.

I’ll be about Kage’s business today, doing bookish things. They will all be a little somber, because the images of 9/11 are scrolling through everyone’s minds – while we drive, gulp our coffee, eat birthday cake, gloat over new books …

I look over at Linn, recent emigre to Seattle from New York; and I know that part of the reason she is here is because her world was irreparably shattered 10 years ago. She never felt safe again.

I remember Kage looking out at the bright blue sky and saying miserably, “I know it’s stupid, but I feel like this would never have happened if Daddy was still alive. I’m not ready to be this grown up.”

Is anybody ever really ready to be this grown up? Damned if I know. But I know it inevitably comes, allee allee oxen free, everybody come out! And you race for home and hope you don’t get tagged.

And life goes on. To refuse to go on living would be an insult to the dead – who would have liked to be waking up today, if they had had the choice.  So I will go on living, and I will do the things that living people do – drink a toast to friends, eat birthday cake – because that is the whole freaking point of surviving that day 10 years ago.

I’m thinking of the same things as everybody else. And we all go on.