Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved that particular and rather melancholy ballad. She sang it when days were especially frustrating and full of problems, even though ours were seldom as bad as the overthrow of generations-old society … bad enough, though. I’m certainly having one of those days. My poor sister Kimberly discovered last night that on her last day of jury duty – she had to report in downtown. I drove her to the Court House, and we found that the pertinent offramp from the 110 freeway has evidently been removed. Probably by aliens. We cast about through the dawn in the morning-glory cloaked canyons of Los Angeles, finally discovering the Court House by accident – I swear, it wasn’t on that corner the first time we went by. On my way home I lost the entire freeway system, but found an unknown end of Glendale Boulevard tucked under an overpass by the Bob Barker Marionette Theatre. That got me home, where I discovered that my CPU and my monitor were not communicating at all. The fault, of course, seems to lie in the CPU, but I can’t afford to get it serviced until the next contract check gets here, There’s one on the way, which is good; but it isn’t here yet. which is bad. There will be more coming if I can send back some of the contracts I have not yet signed, which is good; except that they are all on the inaccessible hard drive, which is bad … Still, I got together what I had and went out to drive to the Post Office. Whereupon my car would not start. Aaaargh! Might be the battery. Might be the alternator. Might be squirrels. Research is required. But I soldier on. CPU to the shop tomorrow. I managed to rescue Kimberly from the justice system without the late afternoon death ray from the solar-mirror Disney Concert Hall frying us – got to the Post Office – got a jump – and now the car is charging its ungrateful battery. I grabbed a few minutes on another of the family computers; and I’m off to print out the other contracts and get more of this writing business working, so I can sit still and actually write something! Back to normal tomorrow. With Spiderpool details. I’d leave you with a photo to contemplate, but … they are all on the other computer which isn’t working anyway …

Kage Baker, or at least the part of her that lives in my head, has apparently been spending a lot of time in the Next World Bar. And the mojitos must be really good … I’ve been dreaming through so many weird places and layers and memories, I ran into the wall this morning trying to go into a kitchen that I haven’t been in for 30-odd years.

Like I mentioned, I have been dreaming of Kage lately. Especially by daylight, as I am stalked by intermittent narcolepsy and keep falling into unplanned naps. (I suppose it’s actually increasing age, but hell – narcolepsy sound so much more interesting.) I lay down for a brief nap this afternoon, and promptly found myself in a dream with Kage. We were starting a day at some Faire, in the usual delightfully crude and jury-rigged wooden building – and the box bed we were sharing fell off the wall and rolled over-and-over down the incline of the Inn Yard to spill us out into the street. We were unharmed, but Kage was swearing mightily that she always knew that was going to happen!

Note: It never did. Cots folded up with us in them, air mattresses deflated, the roof blew off as we slept, and one memorable morning I missed the ladder leading down from the loft above the Tap Room, and stepped 6 feet straight down into the jockey box for the beer – ice! – but the bed, whatever it was, never unrolled under us like a rug.

Anyway, later in the dream – with the nonsensical scene change normal to dreams – we were driving along the narrow roads of the Hollywood Hills in my first LUV truck. (LUVs were infinitesimal 1/4 ton pickups made by Ford in the 80’s. I drove a couple of them when I started getting my own cars –  I could get in without a ladder, and you could fit an uncut 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in the back. ) We were searching for a new route up the hills to somewhere we could get access to the famed and legendary Spiderpool.

The Spiderpool, details of which I will recount tomorrow, is a real but highly bizarre place literally hidden in the Hollywood Hills. It hasn’t been accessible by car or foot for decades. But we always knew roughly where it was, because when the wild oats were low you could see the thing on a hillside two canyons across from our backyard. Kage was enthralled by it her whole life.

Anyway, we were following a new route, which she was sure would get us there. We could see the gleaming top of one of the white-tiled walls peaking over a ridge … however, following her directions, I took us round a curve into a sudden cul-de-sac: and I tried to back us around, and the truck promptly slipped over the edge of the street and rolled over-and-over down the hillside.

Note the Second: this never happened either, though we came damned close several times. Probably because, in my hare-brained youth, I often drove with an ice cream cone or a carton of Chinese food in one hand …

Curiously, there was no fright. There was just a sense of annoyance in the dream as we went arse-over-teakettle down through the oats and mustard, a feeling of “Oh, not again!” I remember thinking it was a good thing I’d disabled our internal gyroscope (Huh?) because it would have burned out otherwise. And then we landed right side up on a curve of road 20 feet below where we had begun.

And we brushed off the weeds and we went and got the hood (which had popped off partway down) and stuck it back on and we just drove away. Kage was already planning our next angle of attack, speculating on where we might get a winch …

And she enthused, as we drove off, “Man, that’s weird to have that happen twice in one day! First the box bed and then the truck! What a day!”

“Let’s not do it again, though, okay?” said me the craven.

“Well, I don’t mean to make a habit of it. But – wow. What an amazing thing!”

She wants me to do something, I am sure. Something that may turn my world topsy-turvy:  though how she can top dying is beyond me. Or maybe that was just Kage disabling my gyroscope. But I’ll figure it out.

And when the truck stops whirling round and round and the golden granite dust settles back on the road, I’ll figure out where Kage means me to go, and I’ll go there.

Tomorrow: some Spiderpool

Kage Baker professed an unconcern and lack of interest in how computers worked. In actuality, she understood more than she thought, but not as much as she felt she needed – so she took the stand that she understood none of it, and would expend no energy or trust on the damned things.

Like many semi-Luddites of that stripe, what she really had was an unreasoning faith in the ability of her electronics to work miracles. They functioned by magic, for Kage; she used applications like spells, following the recipes by rote and being utterly astounded and betrayed when they didn’t work. In this particular school of sorcery, this pattern of magical thinking, I was the Chief Sorceress – when the djinn turned on Kage and the press-this-button-and-the-whole-document-will-repaginate button  just didn’t: then it was my job to sacrifice a bullock, rewire the office or do whatever else was needed to get the thing working again.

And since Kage usually retreated to her chair for solace with a Coke and parrot, and thus  didn’t see what I did – I guess I might as well have lit incense and chanted a bit in Latin. It would have made just as much sense to Kage, and also made her feel more like something substantial had been done. She liked the trimmings of a task to match its importance, or at least its complexity.

I think a lot of confused computer owners would be happier with their IT techs if the techs killed the odd pigeon, or invoked the 4 quarters of the world when re-booting …

Anyway: it was all magic to Kage, or so she insisted. I don’t think she was nearly as ignorant as she adamantly maintained, but refusing to deal with that information freed her up from a lot of pointless worry. When the system went down, she could hand it off to me. It made me happier to do so, too, because there were a couple of times when she managed to wreak astonishing havoc on the household machines in my absence. Her personal record was all 3 vacuum cleaners, the desktop, the kitchen radio and the garbage disposal: in one weekend.

Today, my desktop system is acting up. It might be the wireless modem; it might be the network program; it might be some invisible glitch caused by the latest massive Windows update. It might be the little black cat playing with the connections behind the CPU. But the system is intermittently shutting down and informing me that it cannot detect any networks. I’ve tracked down and fixed half a dozen little errors, cables and bent UCB connections, while writing a few desperate sentences between each collapse.

It’s a shame too, because I had all sorts of weirdnesses to share with you, Dear Reader. Today is National Tapioca Day, for instance. An inflatable shark has been discovered in the Phillipines. Also, it is the 100th anniversary of the Nakhla Meteorite, which was a nice chunk of Mars that impacted Egypt just outside Alexandria and reportedly incinerated a dog.

The Nakhla being established as a Martian bolide interested Kage, of course; she was also intrigued to learn that it’s one of those igneous meteorites that also revealed traces of amino acid when examined chemically much later. However, since it did reportedly hit a dog – “… leaving it like ashes in a moment …” as the Smithsonian report put it, the likelihood that the rock was contaminated by local, um, essences, is rather high …

Still, it’s the only record of a meteorite hitting a dog. So that’s pretty interesting.

And there was more. But it will have to wait for another day, while I scurry off the Internet before I am (again!) thrown bodily off. The magic isn’t working today. I think I need to locate a bullock.

So go have some tapioca, kids. Share it with un-impacted dog. Celebrate June 28th!

Kage Baker has been in my dreams a lot lately.

I’m more glad than not – it’s such a relief to see her, even if I know I’m dreaming. I try every time to direct the dreams, get her to stand still so we can talk –  but even as a phantom, Kage is having none of that. Getting her to do things when she was on another task was always like herding cats … if she’s a visitant, I must assume she’s too busy being dead to pay attention. If she’s just my imagination, my imagination evidently doesn’t have the wattage to imagine a docile, compliant Kage.

The dreams are ordinary. A lot of them are about Faire – getting ready to open, hunting for props and costumes pieces, setting up beer kegs: situations where Kage was my left hand, and we operated on a shared brain. I must admit, it’s a huge comfort to even dream about it; to glance around the chaos of a Faire morning and think Gosh, I’m glad Kage is over there, handling that!,  before I go back to finding something that will approximate a replacement reed for a desperate crumhorn player. The familiar conviction that she has my back is so comforting …

Even dreams about grocery shopping are cool.

Actually, we never really had ordinary grocery shopping expeditions. At least once a week, Kage had an idea for some amazing new dish, and we’d go to every market in 50 miles looking for a cut of beef that no one had produced since the Depression. Or Blue Bunny strawberry ice milk – only that, nothing else would do. No other brand had the kind of strawberry taste Kage wanted, or was pink enough, or had a high enough level of weird crystalline crunchy bits in it …no, groceries were never a routine errand.

Or we’d be grocery shopping on a Saturday night after a day of Faire. I inevitably reached the end of my strength somewhere in the produce section, and would start crying amid the apples and Asian melons. I dream about that a lot. “Crying in the produce section” became our special code phrase for being on absolutely your last nerve and on the edge of collapse into a singularity. It was DEFCON 1, the ultimate melt-down. Kage was always patient with me.

I’ve spent most of the last year and a half crying in the produce section. The first few months Kage was gone, I was too busy – but after that it’s been one unending crying fit for months on end. Things are rather better now, but the memory of the last several months is like remembering that great vacation you spent in a cave-in: no light, no joy, a dead sameness the colour of old concrete and a feeling you’re encased in it up to your neck.

So even dreams where I am chasing the back of Kage’s head through a crowd are to be preferred to the alternative. Dreams where she’s yelling at me for having forgotten some vital prop, or peeved because the car won’t start; man, dreams about the most mundane crap still make me wake up grinning because she was in them.

Last night I kept dreaming she was behind me. Sunny mornings in the dining room, Harry on top of his cage with a strip of bacon in his wee velociraptor claw, Kage gently bopping me on the head as she moved behind my chair … I woke up laughing, demanding of the darkness “Yes? Yes? What is it?”

No answer.

Kage Baker loved summer. It was warm, there was no school, the grey fog of California spring had usually worn off by Midsummer’s. There were plums; there were all manner of soft fruits, but the plums were the best. When we were kids, there was – somewhere in the length of summer, soon or later, agonizingly awaited  – the annual holiday at Pismo Beach.

And then we eventually moved there, she and I, and she became a self-employed writer: and suddenly the summers returned to their childhood glory – no school, the beach, the Pismo fruit stands, all that glory and all the time! The Summer Country was hers at last, and we dwelt there in the metaphysical sight of the Isle of Glass. Yes, Avalon floats off the coast of Pismo Beach; you can park beside Dinosaur Park and sit on a Maiasaur egg and watch it drift on the horizon.

We never missed the 4th of July celebrations on the beach again.

Kage loved fireworks – no, she worshiped them. Sparks, flames and explosions in the sky were the Voice of God to her. But those only happened for a few days in early July – good thing, too, or her head might have exploded from sensory overload – and summer was the season of many, many passions.

She loved ice cream. Soft serve was what she liked best; when ice cream was hard, she would carefully stir and whip it into a frothy consistency she called “textured”. Which was weird, because what it mostly had was very little texture … her favourite flavours were any variant of chocolate, of course, but she did liked to try exotic old flavours as well.

It’s not easy to find nesselrode or an out-of-season spumoni, though, so Kage undertook making her own. My glorious Kitchen-Aide food processor comes with an ice cream maker, and Kage went to town with that. Maraschino (not cherry, btw), the afore-mentioned nesselrode, all manner of fresh fruit and strange liqueurs. In molds that she hunted down on EBay, so they were shaped like roses and bombes and melons striped in weird colours.

Mind you, sometimes the urge to have ice cream for dinner comes on too suddenly to perform art in order to get it. Ben & Jerry’s usually filled in then; many a summer Sunday dinner for Kage was mostly Cherry Garcia.

She loved soundtracks. Not just particular soundtracks of movies and plays: Kage believed in having a soundtrack to life itself. Her music library was immense and eclectic: Gilbert and Sullivan. Edith Piaf. Renaissance dance hits. Joaquin Rodrigo. The Beatles. Cream. The Mamas and Papas. The soundtracks for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. When she couldn’t get exactly thye mood she wanted from a single album, she made mixes – first on tapes, then on CDs. Making her own private music mixes was one of the great miracles of the 20th century for Kage.

Our summers were never silent.

She loved enormous complicated dinner salads in the summer. We had special huge bowls to make up wild combinations for days when it was too hot to cook – some cold chicken sliced up, 6 kinds of greens, some exotic salad dressing, and anything else in the fridge – croutons, dried fruit, eggs, cheeses. Eating them was a treasure hunt. Is this a grape? she would inquire, holding up some dressing-obscured sphere.

No, a garbanzo bean, I would reply (I love them); and Kage would promptly gift it to Harry, with loud cries of disgust and disdain. But surprises in the salads were half the fun. Sometimes I served them with those paper cocktail umbrellas she so loved sticking up out of them …

It’s hot today in Los Angeles; pushing 80 on my wintergreen-shaded porch, and well over it out in the open between the camphor trees. It’s clear and fragrent and baking – summer is well and truly here, now. A day for an ice cream supper, or a salad; probably the latter, as Kimberly has much more concern over my health than I do and probably wouldn’t approve of my making my main meal off a pint of Haagen Daz.

Although, if I can find orange Dream Sickles, all resistance will crumble. Kimberly has her summer weaknesses, too …

Off to plot dietary evil!

Kage Baker ran her daily life around habits and rituals. Most people do, I suspect; it makes it easier to get through those moments when your brain derails and you can’t remember whether to marinate the London Broil or soak your socks.

Who among us, Dear Readers, has not wandered into the kitchen in the morning and become gradually aware that we don’t know: 1) what day it is; 2) where the coffee might be; and 3) who that is asleep on the couch? Life becomes easier to kick-start when you can fall back on some pre-programmed activity.

In summer, and on weekends, habit and ritual come to our rescue. Kage didn’t care if her insistence on taking a path through the house that was as regulated as a toy train’s bordered on OCD – as long as it ended up with her at her desk, caffeine to hand and all her clothes on. Kage felt OCD was a little like alchohol use- if you could keep it under control, it had many positive social and personal applications …

Saturdays at home called for making especially good coffee (we were both coffee snobs, I admit it freely), with half and half to hand. They were occasions for rare take-out – bagels, doughnuts, maddened MacDonald’s food frenzies. Mostly, though, they were time for the kind of lovely food you can only make at home if you aren’t on your desperate way to work. Flannel cakes (not pancakes; those were a dinner dish), biscuits and gravy, English muffins. We preferred Wolfermann’s English muffins, which are not only excellent simple of themselves but make the best base in the universe for eggs Benedict. And they are huge, enormous disks like medieval trenchers – a parrot can barely drag on across the table.

Summer Saturdays were for drives, of course – which sometimes ran into Sundays, if we got far enough afield. If we stayed home, they were still the perfect time for car picnics, which is where you only drive as far as it takes to get a nice view somewhere and then sit in the car and devour whatever feast you packed. Great for brainstorming, car picnics – especially when powered by roast beef sarnies, Harp Ale and chocolate macaroons. Or fresh fruit – cherries, plums, exotic apricots.

Summer Saturday evenings – ah, those were for monster movies. There’s a self-imposed limit on how many of those there are available; especially if, like Kage, you are not fond of blood and gore. The habit had begun in childhood, when Thriller and Chiller and their ilk reigned supreme in juvenile telly on Saturdays. In adulthood, Kage just swtitched the focus to a sort of general cineme fantastique and we had plenty of fodder for hot nights. Turn out all the lights except the Lava Lamps, get bowls of ice creams, and settle back for weird films! Harry would get to stay up late, sitting on the back of Kage’s chair and squeaking excitedly at all the explosions and screams, scrambling down for a bite of ice cream from time to time ….

Yestreday, school ended for the LAUSD. My sister and her husband, teachers both, are finally free – for a while at least, until summer duties kick in. But this morning was a major, household-wide sleep in, and the day has passed tranquilly on a tide of Dr. Who and Top Gear episodes. Fresh fruit and Cheetos have abounded. Dinner will be Chinese food. And we have a charming choice for the evening film, of either some alien invasion or a shark takeover.

My highest claim to  usefulness today has been doing clean-up on a stretch of Marswife, which had apparently been written while I was asleep and channeling Klingonese spelling. And this, of course. But now the afternoon light is filling all the trees with gold, the corgi is asleep on my little private porch, the little black cat is purring behind me. Harry is on top of his cage, singing softly into his shoulder blades. The late day smells of barbecues and plums.

Bliss.

Kage Baker was fascinated with Mount Everest. Or, perhaps more accurately, with the men who climb it.

I thought of that when I ran across this the other day: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2007244/Climber-discovers-frozen-body-best-friend-peak-Everest.html

Everest is the grave marker for an astonishing number of her own suitors, and some climber had just found his friend frozen on her slopes. Kage would have loved the story.

She herself never showed any inclination to take up mountain climbing. If you could walk up a slope to a summit, Kage would try it – the idea of attempting a climb that required ropes, however, filled her with fear. Also, she had a sturdy dislike of snow. But the idea of the people who could not resist a mountain – ah, that intrigued her totally.

She was especially fond of George Herbert Leigh Mallory (he’s the man who said he climbed Everest “Because it’s there!”), who may very well have the man who really first summited on Everest. Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine were lost on the mountain in 1924,  in an attempt at the summit – they were not found again for 75 years. Indeed, Irvine never has been found, which is a distinct tragedy: he was carrying the camera. If he and Mallory did make it to the summit, the only evidence would be on that Kodak that Irvine carried in his jacket pocket …

Their expedition and its doomed conclusion absolutely enthralled Kage. While Mallory went quite modern (for the time) and used oxygen on the climb, he and Irvine climbed in the same sorts of clothes they’d have worn to hike up Snowdon or Ben More: tweeds, wool stockings and good boots, tailored jackets and knee breeches. It’s gallant and hilarious to see in the old photos from the expedition … the very picture of the genteely insane British explorer.

Sir Edmund Hilary is, of course, the man who took the prize: he summited Everest in 1953. (Though his Sherpa guide, the immortal Tenzing Norgay, was right beside him and maybe even first …) However, there have always been a few romantics who thought maybe, just maybe, Mallory had gotten there first – even if he died on the way down. Sir Edmund, not without cause, observed that getting to the top was only half the job and one was supposed to make it back down in order to get the credit. Anyway, there was no way to tell.

In 1999, the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition climbed Everest, more or less in search of them. There are frozen bodies all over Everest – they usually fell in inaccessible places, and no one can manage to fetch them down. Chinese climbers had recently described “an English dead”  (what an evocative phrase!) in a location that would have been on Mallory’s path, and the expedition wanted to ascertain if it was him.

They were sponsored by Nova and the BBC, and carried simply scads of audio video equipment. They sent out regular radio and podcasts, and Kage was glued to every one. She was seeing Everest from the viewpoint of a climber, and it had her in its grip. She pored over their daily progress, studied maps, openly mourned that she was now to old and stiff to take up mountaineering …

“We could have done that, if we’d started young enough,” she opined several times.

“YOU could,” said I. “Mountain climbing isn’t something I even remotely wanted to do.”

“You have no imagination!” Kage charged.

“I have lots,” I said. “That mountain is paved with dead climbers, and I can imagine one of them being me very easily.”

“Oh screw you,” she returned. “Now shut up, the broadcast is beginning.”

And she would be lost, glued to the webcam recording life in a tent barely bigger than the man in it, staked out on a ice field just below the Rafters of the World.

As it turned out, they didn’t find poor Irvine, nor the little camera he carried. But they did find Mallory, right where the Chinese said they’d seen him. The photos were astounding – both frightening and moving.

Mallory had lain for 3/4 of a century on the slopes of Everest, face pressed to her bosom, half-naked in the embrace of a goddess. His flesh had turned to snow, to marble; the tatters of his clothes and climbing harness were flung around him. He looked like a man fast asleep in the arms of his beloved after a bout of love – and that’s precisely what he was, wasn’t it?

The 1999 expedition buried him there, where he’d fallen on his lady’s stony breast. It can’t be determined from Mallory’s grave if he made it to the summit or not – he could have been going up or down when he fell. Unless Irvine is found, no one will ever know. And no one has found him yet.

But the romance of Mallory’s feat – whatever it was – is almost as great as the glory of having been the first to climb to the top. Kage thought Hillary’s comments were just a little crass. Certainly, surviving the climb is to be preferred to dying on the way back down, but is it really sportsmanlike to snark like that?

And, as Kage observed when they raised the cairn over Mallory, “He’s the one she kept, isn’t he?”

Kage Baker used to say, when feeling indeterminedly ill, “Oh, the Cold Robbies gots me!”

This is a Walt Kellyism, initially cherished by Kage because it sounded absurd. And because no one in Pogo ever knew exactly what it was. And because when I finally found out about kohlrabi and showed her a picture of it, she had laughing hysterics.

Kohlrabi is a vegetable of the cabbage family – related to cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, collybrolly, broccoflower and all the other unnatural hybrids of Brassica that slouch through the world. Kage would eat very few of them, but she honoured them all in the abstract because of their maritime history. Before the British got into citrus fruit and became known as Limeys, they were heavily into pickled cabbage as an antiscorbutic.

Kage always thought that must have put the entire belowdecks on the same safety procedures as the gun room …

Anyway, kohlrabi is a weird vegetable that comes in the usual pale green and livid purple shades of most Brassica kin. It is also known as the German turnip, for reasons I never learned.  It’s main claim to fame is the way it looks in the field – it has many spindly little stalks or leaves or roots or God knows what, on which it grows above the field. It looks exactly as though it is levering itself out of the ground on multiple limbs, like a Martian invader.

Purple kohlrabi

Seen in the grocery store, they have always been neatly trimmed and emasculated, thus occasioning no fear among naive shoppers. However, when seen in the field – and they do grow widely in California, like every other freaky vegetable – they look like an alien army pulling itself out of the ground to come get you.

What do they taste like? I have no idea. But they’re Brassica, after all, so they probably taste like cabbage: which is like wet stone,  with overtones of old newspaper and despair.

Mind you, I rather like a nice cabbage, properly prepared. I adore Brussel Sprouts, and in hot weather a lovely spicy slaw is beyond reproach. But I like it as far removed from the feral reality of Brassica as possible. If any of you have ever driven the  miles between Paso Robles and Salinas on a sweltering day – or any night after Halloween, when the fields have been turned and abandoned for the winter – you too would have a twitching abhorrence of the smell of the damned stuff. Antique cabbage is not a good smell, nor does it lie easy in the earth even when it’s been harrowed and ploughed under as fertilizer …

Anyway. Kohlrabi was a source of much snickering for Kage. And the cold robbies, that amorphous disease of Walt Kelly ( who clearly had no good idea what the hell it was either) was her favourite description of general malaise.

And the Cold Robbies has got me today. I cannot sleep at night, and then I keep falling asleep all day. It would be easy to just give up and go nocturnal – reverse my working and sleeping times – but my family likes to see me up and moving from time to time. And if I sit up all night to write and read and recreate, I keep my diurnal roommates awake. (Okay, they’re a parrot and a small cat, but they complain incessently …)

In the meantime, narcolepsy is my constant companion. My back hurts. My arms hurt. When I finally woke up this morning, the feather mattress was on the floor (having somehow crawled out from under me) and my coverlet was still on the bed but was sideways. So I figure I am having St. Vitus Dance episodes in my sleep …

I wish I could recall what the cure for Cold Robbies was.

Kage Baker,  like so many people, hated rats. Humans mostly don’t like them; I suspect even indifference to them is an acquired taste, and genuine affection takes work and special interests.

Kage said that one could go into this human dislike for rats in all sorts of lofty terms about philosophical recognition of a breed disturbingly similar to our own, if one wanted to be stuck up about it. Rats, like humans, are very clever  beasties who have managed to adapt to just about all environments. More than us, even – some of them live in water, and none of us do. Rats, like us, are omnivorous; they have a natural mob mentality; given their druthers, they’re gregarious, highly social, and promiscuous. They exhibit an alarming degree of self awareness. They laugh, they cry and they go mad.

On a less philosophical plane, of course, Kage observed that all this makes the furry buggers really effective competition for humans. They’ve colonized our cities – we have yet to successfully colonize their warrens, and in fact we built most of them. So it’s just self-preservation, she felt, to abhore the little scuttlers.

They aren’t even especially cute, as mice are. Mice have sweetly neotonic faces, and the sure-fire fascination of being teeny weeny little beasties. Rats have faces that are their own by-word for sneaky and underhanded; and rats can be as long as your forearm. True, they have fur, which gives them points over things like iguanas; but they have those weird naked tails. Not to mention those horrid little pink hands …

Full disclosure, here: I, personally, like rats. Years of interest in biology have exposed me to their many virtues. What I am trying to do here is get into the ratophobic heads of the most of humanity. And most of humanity hates rats.

Though there are good reasons to dislike rodents …

I must admit to harboring ill will to a specific few of them. Our cottage in Pismo was ancient and built of things salvaged form shipwrecks – rats invaded it from time to time, and had to be fought out room by room. They mostly stayed in the walls, and practiced  noisy guerrilla warfare from behind the plasterboard: squeaking and shrieking and galloping about with (apparently) tap shoes on their paws, making an appalling racket.  I hated those guys.

And the gophers. They undermined most of Pismo Beach, and made constant forays in our garden. Gophers are evil. I suppose someone is going to tell me now that they fertilize grain or cacao or something else vital, but I don’t believe it. They are vile.

Kage was revolted by all rodents, though.  (Except squirrels. She liked squirrels.) But hamsters, gerbils, mice, rats – all the critters that have been the foes of farmwives and the pets of apartment-dwellers made her shudder. “Remember the Black Death,” she would mutter. “The rats almost got us once, you know!”

Well, but they were press-ganged into that one. Sure, it was rats and their fleas that brought the Plague to Europe (repeatedly) but it didn’t originate with them. They got accidentally infected by the fleas of the original animal reservoir of the disease, just like we did. That reservoir has only recently been identified with any degree of certainty, and small wonder they had to draft the rats to make it to Europe! The goofiest Italian sailors would have noticed plague-twitchy giant gerbils wandering around their ships.

Giant gerbils. From Kazakhstan. They turn out to probably be the original source of Yersinia pestis, and still a potent reservoir for it. The rats were just their patsies. These monsters (Really. Up to 16 inches long.) are at last unmasked. And they are still in business in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, too, where the natives have an ancient and involved mythology on when you can safely hunt gerbils … mostly, never.

Hamster are no better, really. Well, maybe – they don’t spread plague very often; but they do make life miserable for certain lab workers. Chinese Golden Hamsters are renowned for two things – they have some of the biggest (proportional) testicles of any rodents, and they are vicious little bastards. The fact that they are little  bastards with huge balls makes them handy for reproductive research – they don’t take up much room, and are well-endowed for the work. But they chew up graduate students.

Kage found the combination horrible, but hilarious.

Hamsters in general seem to hide their evil with cuteness. Right now, French farmers are having a problem with feral hamsters. The Great Hamster of Alsace has, according to the EU, not been properly preserved by French farmers. The EU is siding with the hamsters and fining the French farmers heavily. The French farmers seem to be giving serious thought to the concept of, if there are no Great Alsation Hamsters there will be no Great Alsation Hamster problem …

I don’t make this stuff up, Dear Readers, I just report it.

I bring all this up today because I have just discovered some of this information – all at once, which is odd. How often do you find serious rodent news all concentrated in just a few days? Kage always said that when you suddenly began finding information on a topic, you should pay attention – there might be a message or a story there.

Also, we are trying to put up squirrel feeders here, and running into some intelligence problems. Some of those are ours, I must admit, but some are the squirrels’ – they are very good at getting in to things, and really, really bad at getting out of them again. We made some clever squirrel feeders out of cut-down plastic liter bottles, and now we have … several hysterical bottled squirrels.

Sigh. How can the rodents lose so many battles, and yet be winning the war? It must be the Giant Gerbils sending dispatches from Kazakhstan …

Great Hamster of Alsace

Giant Gerbil of Kazakhstan

Kage Baker loved the Summer Solstice.

We always celebrated it with pomp and ritual – also with hard cider, brown ale, and a pizza. Kage declared pizza as a perfect Solstice food, being emblematic of a Sun Disk. We used red plates, lit red and gold candles; on energetic years, we lit a fire in the low brazier in the back yard and leaped over it a few times for good luck.

If the night was not too chill and foggy, we did it sky-clad. With Harry (our only livestock) in his carry cage, to be borne over the flames with us. He’d put up with nearly anything for pizza …

One of the things I am working on now is a novel we actually wrote together – oh, long ago! Kage eventually mined out a lot of her parts, and the secondary plot they formed became the universe of Anvil of the World. But she also wrote hymns for the main plot, as the protagonists were nuns. Incompetent nuns, but devout. Devout to a fault, in fact.

I gift you, Dear Readers, with Kage’s Solstice Hymn.

Come to us, Bright One, Beloved of our days.

The fair-haired Boy comes over the hills,

The Morning Son, the Bright-eyed;

Born in the sorrow and darkness of the night,

But rising now to claim His time.

And red and gold He rises on the world

With laughter in His glowing heart,

And though His Father died in dust and blood

He comes again, all shining in the wind.

Summer is His name; no shadow falls

Across His path, the Good One, the Beloved.

High He glides on the warm air,

Far He strides across the blossoming earth.

He is the Undefeated and the Lark,

The Lord Sunflower with His fiery hair,

King of freedom and of all blue skies,

The handsome Lover in the evening light.

His Mother fled in darkness, from Darkness hid

To bear Him secretly:

But He will comfort, will avenge Her wrong,

And all will be amended in His light.

Come to us, Bright One, Beloved of our days!