Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker (no, she’s not the reason – but I always start with that).

It’s 88 degrees and has been since 10:30 AM.

It never got below 70 last night, and I never got to sleep at all.

The cat ate my flan.

I just discovered I have my underwear on inside out.

I am filled with seething discontent and an inability to concentrate on anything.

The cat drank my coffee.

I spent the wakeful night working out story details – which I can’t remember now, and have been futilely trying to work out on paper all day.

There’s a humungous spider on the wall. It’s staring at me.

I need a theremin and an industrial-grade ruby, and I don’t have a theremin, and I can’t afford a kit until the tax return gets here.

Harry insists on singing in his “monster” voice, which is loud, raucous and distracting.

I miss Kage especially acutely today.  I miss her with chest-aching, breath-catching, genuine pain. Sometimes it gets worse than others. Today is pretty bad.

It’s too hot to sleep. I’m too tired to sleep. And if I sleep now, I’ll be awake all night again tonight.

I have to go to the store.

I give up – I’m gonna go buy ice cream, and sit up on the couch and eat it, and watch Harry Potter movies.

Kage Baker always regarded my yearly travail with the taxes as a sign of Goodies On The Way. The tax returns were ordinarily slated for something neat and much desired – and I usually managed to get us returns, too. Living in genteel poverty helped, and the fact that I never padded the deductions. If you spend most of the year living in a Spartan manner, you’re more likely to get a bit back at the end.

When Kage transferred successfully from the Pink Collar Salt Mines of office drudgery to the wild, free live of an independent writer, her deductions got more complicated. Those two or three times a year paychecks arrive with no taxes being taken out of them – many a new author comes to grief their first year or two, simply by actually spending what they make. This is where Kage’s system of Indulgence Queues came into play – we socked away a portion of every check toward the taxes, and she got to assign the rest to whatever her heart’s desire was at the time.

Home office deductions helped, as well. So did money spent on conventions, which she needed to attend; and magazine subscriptions that she needed for trade information and research. She learned to save receipts – granted, she stuffed them all into one pigeonhole in her desk and handed me the whole rat’s nest when I sat down to the taxes, but at least she saved them. There was a tangible reward for them, like the boxtops she saved up as child for a pair of boxing robots …

Consequently, she wanted me to do the taxes ASAP – as soon as all the W2’s and 1099’s came in. After all, there was usually a book, game or road trip waiting on the returns. I, on the other hand, in my peevish disinclination to be helpful to the IRS, liked to wait until the last minute. Even knowing they would give some of my money back was not entirely satisfying – the gummint doesn’t pay any interest on that 20% of your salary they take all year. And years when we owed (or Kage did; I never made enough, lol) there was that much less interest in sending them the check early.

We usually compromised. I did the taxes earlier than I wanted, not as early as Kage did. But she loyally nagged me into doing them, kept the coffee and sugar flowing during the ordeal, refrained from playing, say, Boris Gudenov, 12 times in a row: and had usually scheduled a visit to a yarn shop for me into the Goodies Waiting list.

This year, the tax deadline got extended – today is a holiday in Washington DC, in observance of Emancipation Day. And the weekend interferes with getting work done. The bottom line is that all us wage slaves have until April 18th to file our taxes this year. However, in my general confusion, I didn’t notice – so I did the taxes on the normal schedule. And here I could have spent the weekend cocking snooks at the Feds!

Oh, well. Kage would have sighed with relief to see me finish up early. Back before the ease of e-filing, we had many late night car trips to the Post Office – there to wait in the line of anxious, snarling drivers until we could inch up to the curb and hand over the precious completed forms to the weary postal workers … Kage, habitually riding shotgun, always apologized sincerely for the trouble when she gave them the envelopes.

And then we usually went and got Chinese food at a splendid restaurant on Highland (now Le Oriental Bistro, but still good food) and drove up to Muholland to park at the side of the road and look at the lights of L.A. Ah, eating chicken fried rice and mu goo gai pan in the dark on a warm spring midnight in the Hollywood Hills … that was our reward.

Kage Baker never did her own taxes in her life. She had the smarts for it, but not the nerves – and it’s like any other mortal combat: confidence is half the battle. It was the one day in the year when she was the one who went tiptoeing around the fulminating maniac at the desk …

When she was a brand-new author with a brand-new contract, beginning to bring in 5-digit paychecks once or twice a year, she decided to be mature about it and hired a tax consultant. The tax consultant botched the first year, retired during the second year, and then vanished; Kage got audited and permanently traumatized. So she turned the whole mess over to the previous preparer – me.

Aside from those two years of confusion and despair (which took ages to fix; the IRS is not only doggedly determined but as stupid as a box of rocks), it’s just been a matter of making sure I had enough caffeine to hand and slogging through. And since I have a moral revulsion about sending money to the gummint any sooner than absolutely necessary, I always wait until the last minute.

My own taxes will be easy – I am poor and technically homeless. Kage’s post-demise taxes are a little more challenging, but easier than last year when Probate was still hanging fire. Nonetheless: they must all be done.

So I’m off to pay Caesar and placate the durned Revenooers. My sympathies to any of you, Dear Readers, who are also doing this. Just remind yourselves that we are Americans! We get the best government money can buy, and we get to bitch about it! No other country in the world gives you that much bang for your buck.

Kage Baker was not a depressed person. She was as subject to sorrow and annoyance as anyone, but there was always a good and sensible reason for it. Sometimes being depressed is a logical thing to be, because life can get awfully hard.

That sounds, now that I have written it down, like sense of the variety so common it is absurd to actually say it out loud. Of course life can be painful! Of course you can get depressed for good reasons! But after yestreday’s diatribe about Kage’s grammar school days, Dear Readers, I found myself wondering why I had gone off on such a gloomy tangent. Some of it was exploring the source code for Kage’s life as a writer, but gosh! I sure got out the special “Shades of Black” paintbox for that watercolour.

Well, I was depressed. Unlike Kage, I do get spontaneously, senselessly depressed; my body has an eccentric and unreliable approach to the uses of seratonin, which plays merry hell with my moods on occasion. And sometimes even people with clinical depression and a nice prescription find they also have a damned good reason to be depressed on top of it. It’s all very confusing. And hard to manage. And, well – depressing.

Kage’s prescription for dealing with my blacker moods (and few people in the world had to deal with them as much as she did) was to write. Her doing the writing, I mean, not me. She knew that the mere act of writing was always a panacea for her, and she felt it ought to work for me as well. This may have been the original source for the brainstorming sessions, and the long drives in search of ideas – Kage would get me in some situation where I was a part of her writing, and force me to use all my dark energies on The Plot.

“What happens next?” she would say.

“I don’t know! It’s your idea!” I would reply.

“Yeah, but speculate. Give me something to work with. Come on. Come on come on come on,” with the inexorable single-mindedness of a toddler in a toy store, until I flipped out and gave in.

“Oh, screw you!” I would scream with my customary wit. But then – “Hey, RNA is a protein. What if someone had an allergy to RNA?”*

Mind you, my ideas were rarely what Kage needed – but they did give her ideas, or maybe anti-ideas: ideas she could use to push off of, in the search for the right idea. And by the time the session was over, I was no longer depressed, either. Tired, oD’ed on coffee and fried pies (Hostess Lemon, by preference), and often lost, but not depressed.

So yestreday, being inexplicably depressed, I wasted most of the day and then drifted back to this computer. Where, by habit, I began to write … and though the topic was without much cheer, I felt better at the end. So Kage’s secret recipe still works, just as much as her secret recipes for killer lemonade and boiled puddings.

And at the very end of the day, I got some news: Subterranean Press will be bringing out a Best of Kage Baker volume this year: I just got the contract, and it looks like a splendid collection.

And the sequel to Nell Gwynne has been pronounced GOOD. I am waiting for the first edit now. This project, it appears, is a go.

I’m a lot more cheerful today. Thanks, kiddo.

*Facts Relating To The Arrest of Dr. Kalugin

Kage Baker always said, her high school experience was the best time of her life prior to age 14. Those 4 years at Immaculate Heart, she said, were the most formative and valuable of her life to that point. That may not seem like much – being 14 is hardly a great old age – but when it constitutes your entire life experience to date, the four years of high school become highly weighted and very important.

Kage hated grammar school. Quite frankly, she slunk through it, hoping to be ignored and assiduously practicing invisibility. This was because her teachers were, by and large, psychotic. We went to a private, parochial, Catholic school. What the nuns did was automatically correct, even the lay teachers were regarded as somewhat anointed, and complaining about the teachers was unheard of. In the 1960’s, no one worried too much about grade school students. And Kage had the misfortune to get the teachers whose wimples were, like,  too tight …

I was both luckier, and harder to annoy. I was so dreamy and absent-minded that most teachers were lucky to get me to notice classwork, let alone sarcasm. Not so Kage – she was sensitive, she was focused, she noticed everything in Panavision, Technicolour and Surround Sound. And she was smart, which was the ultimate sin for a girl-child  around 1962.

She got locked in closets for completing more work than had been assigned. She spent afternoons on her knees in cold corridors to meditate on the hubris of knowing her lessons too well. One  creative teacher had put her pointer through the pencil sharpener, and liked to elicit answers from kids with that sharpened point resting between their eyes to goad recollection: Kage’s slight strabismus prevented her from going cross-eyes, which enraged Sister Edmond. Most teachers had no hesitation in slapping anyone showing the sins of pride or disobedience.

Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist would have been right at home in Kage’s grammar school experience.

Going to Immaculate Heart High School was expected of every bright girl in the local grammar schools of the Archdiocese. When Kage was shuttled off to the (literally) ivy-ed halls of IHHS with the other clever maidens, she discovered an atmosphere of almost unbelievable freedom. It was 1966, and the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary were seriously pondering their vocations – and in the resultant confusion, the students were left to blossom unharassed in a veritable garden of intellectual license.

That’s why the next four years were the best of Kage’s life to that point. This is where her skills at invisibility, her technique of watching life from ambush, her powers of observation and analysis and research all came to fruition. Her devotion to a word, the word, all words: her habit of writing for herself a better world than the one she lived in.

It’s where she cracked the eggshell, abandoned the nest. It’s where she broke through the wall of thorns and found the universe was infinite. Having curled deep within herself in a time of cold and drought, Kage spread her wings and discovered that the inside was much, much wider than the outside.

She never came down.

Kage Baker adored Gilbert and Sullivan. She always especially liked the villains. She said it was because they were usually bass-baritones (and thus easier for an alto to sing) and because they got the best lines. I happen to know, though, that Kage had an enormous weakness for bad guys – especially reformable bad guys; a sort of dark-side father complex. Look at Gard, the Black Sorcerer hero of House of the Stag. And there’s a certain amount of Roderick Murgatroyd, the Bad Baronet of Ruddigore, in Lord Ermenwyr.

As Sir Roderick sings warningly in Ruddigore (backed by the chorus of all his dead fellow Bad Baronets) “Duty, duty must be done!” Mine today have included taking the nephew in search of rare collectibles, plus getting him to college; helping the sister figure out what’s for dinner when the brother-in-law has meetings until 8 PM; and keeping the Corgi calm while squirrels rampage through the new buds and berries of the mulberry tree outside the living room window.

The most pleasant duty of the day so far, though, was brunch with one of my very oldest friends, all the way from high school at dear old IHHS: Kathy nee Malloy. Patient woman that she is, she went to the trouble of coaxing me out of my reclusion today: no easy task.

Long ago, Kathy was one of my co-conspirators in a Freshman Honours class that was so brilliant, so eccentric, so scatter-brained, and so much in some other dimension that the entire Honours program was scrapped by our high school for the three years following us.  I think they were afraid to get that many nerds in one place ever again; even in an all-girls’ school,  it was a wonder no one beat us up. We left burned, salted earth in our wake – but it was scorched by the fires of creativity and watered with the brine of angelic tears!

Miss Malloy was my lab partner in biology. She managed to do her frog dissection at arm’s length, the scalpel held by molecular bonding to the very ends of her anguished fingertips, her straight red Irish air wrapped around her face to keep out the formaldehyde smell. When it came time to pass the visual identification test, Sister Marcia (a true saint, that woman) asked Kathy to identify – a leg. (I got a pancreas.)

While Kathy may not have shone at frog parts, she was a genius at dramatization. The rendition of Lord Randall My Son she choreographed for English class – which involved the entire cast lurching about in stiff-legged zombie poses to illustrate the syncopation – sent our teacher Sister Callista from the room in homicidal fury.

We were seriously in our own universe. It didn’t help that the class a year ahead of us had been nearly as bad. They perpetrated the usual jokes with the anatomy skeleton (risque underwear, giant brown-paper doobies labelled POT). They hung drying underwear in the furnace room. They organized the kidnapping and liberation of a batch of fetal pigs. They ran an underground paper that led to rewards finally being offered for the names of the editorial staff – which I knew because one of those noms de guerre disguised Kage, who was modelling her earliest writing career on Marat.

It was also Kage – assisted by Kimberly and armed with a quarter as a screw driver – who figured out how to take the art room door off its hinges. Nothing was stolen; but several art projects that had been locked up by the art teacher got finished by unseen means … because they always rehung the door when they were done. Kimberly always blamed me for the Honours Program being cancelled, and she may have had a point – but now that I recall the art room door, it was probably only self-defense on the part of the high school …

Man, we had fun. Duty may have to be done, but remembering the times when it was scrapped for art and glory – those are the best.

Kage Baker really liked doing things in threes – a cultural predilection, perhaps, harking back to the Triads of the Welsh classics in The Mabinogion. Or, as she herself said, more likely because three were as many as she could picture in her mind’s eye without artificial assistance.

At any rate, she usually arranged lists of songs we knew in sets of three. This mattered quite a bit on long drives and hot afternoons at Faires:  a song list we could actually remember, as the tides of afternoon and beer waned. Something to keep ourselves going on the road when the cassette player/CD drive gave out, or we forgot to pack the music, or the only radio stations we could pick up in the middle of nowhere at 80 MPH were brief scraps of mariachi accordion bands and nut case talk radio.

Even Kage, with her encyclopedic memory, was somewhat hard put to find three pretty songs we could sing in a 16th century setting – about cows. We both loved that weird Western ballad of our childhood, Ghost Riders In The Sky – but it wasn’t at its best sung in our girls’ school voices, in our Elizabethan accents. Johnny Cash would have been doing 33 RPMs in his grave.

Luckily, we found a strange little ballad that at least has the mention of cows in it. Once again, the cows are a background to some sort of boy/girl carrying-on; but in this instance, it seems to be about feral children. Maybe changelings. Something weird is going on, that’s for damned sure. But it’s ever so pretty, so it became our third Coo Song.

Bonny At Morn

The sheep are in the meadows,
And the cows are in the corn.
Thou art overlong in thy bed,
Bonny at morn.

ch:         Canny at night,
       Bonny at morn,
       Thou art overlong in thy bed,
       Bonny at morn.

The bird is in the nest,
And the trout is in the burn,
Thou hinders thy mother
At many a turn.

We've all lain idle
While keeping the farm,
The lass will not work
And the lad will not learn.

The sheep are in the meadows,
And the cows are in the corn.
Thou art overlong in thy bed,
Bonny at morn.

Kage Baker ultimately compiled, among her friends and intimates, a trio of Coo Songs. This is Song #2.  It’s a traditional, but the only places I’ve ever heard it were on a Steeleye Span album, and in a brief scene in Shakespeare In Love. We stole it from Steeleye Span, as I recall, altering the harmony to suit our combined bean sidhe alto/soprano blend. Or, as Kage often described it, “floral baritone and mouse on speed” …

We sang these songs to all the babies we knew, everyone who had to drive with us to Faires, Harry the Parrot, and to Scotty – who spent a lot of his adolescence on our living room floor, eating Captain Crunch out of a mixing bowl and inexplicably being soothed by the coos. Good times, good times.

The Spotted Cow

One morning in the month of May,
As from my cot I strayed,
Just at the dawning of the day,
I met with a charming maid;                                                                                                       Just at the dawning of the day,
I met with a charming maid.

“Good morning to you!  Whither?” said I,
“Good morning to you , now.”
The maid replied, “Kind Sir,” she cried,
“I’ve lost my spotted cow.”

“No longer weep, no longer mourn,
Your cow is not lost, my dear.
I saw her down in yonder grove;
Come, love, and I’ll show you where.”

“I must confess you’re very kind,
I thank you, Sir,” said she.
“You will be sure she’s there to find?”
“Come, sweetheart, go with me.”

Into the grove we did repair,
Across the flowery dell,
We hugged and kissed each other there,
And love was all our tale.

So in the grove we spent the day,
We thought it passed too soon.
At night we homeward bent our way,
While brightly shone the moon.

If I should cross the flowery dell,
Or go to view the plough,
She comes and calls her gentle swain:
“I’ve lost my spotted cow.”

Note: This is a fun one – the melody is sort of circular, with a hurdy-gurdy rhythm that can end up going faster and faster until the singers trip over their tongues and fall writhing to the floor …

Kage Baker loved to sing. Her prodigious memory allowed hundreds of song lyrics to live comfortably in her head, and some trick of mental organization gave her an extraordinary ear for harmony. She could improvise harmony instantly, to just about anything, in particularly gorgeous ways. She also had a beautiful smoky alto voice, sometimes husky but never hoarse.

We sang together. A lot. Our household was always filled with music; all our trips had sound tracks. I, being a soprano, sang melody – it takes so much oxygen to sing that high at all (said Kage) that one cannot expect a soprano to manage harmony as well …  and anyway, I was used to being the trellis, the sturdy  frame around which Kage wove arabesques and tessellations of harmony.

We sang at Renaissance Faires – not usually as an act (though there was a brief trio with our good buddy Athene, memorably named – by Kage – as Dame Fortune’s Privates …) but just sitting about. Group singalongs were common in the Inn Yard, beautiful explosions and fireworks of music. For those occasions, of course, we learned every folk song we could find – and believe me, the dedicated singers and musos of a Renaissance Faire can find a lot of music. It didn’t take us long to exhaust Steeleye Span and mind out everything intelligible from the Watersons – though one or two of those we actually had to translate out of the original Yorkshire, as otherwise no one could ever have told what the hell we were saying. Some of those turned out to be amazingly risque, too …

Anyway. I could go on for days about our singing – and probably will, eventually – but someone raised a question concerning yestreday’s post. Medrith (such a lovely name!) asked for the lyrics to The Cow Song.

Now, I don’t remember where we learned this. But it was one of our favourites. The trick of it is, every verse has a slightly different melody – so it’s a bit of an exercise in memory, especially for Kage, the Queen of Harmony. Also, there is the amusingly relentless way the girl in the song just keeps yelling “NO – I think my mother will see us,” no matter what her sweetheart pleads. Even after he gives up.

This song – called, by us, back in the sweet misty dawn of time, The Coo Song to make the first couplet rhyme – was a favourite. We sang it to Scotty, our then-little friend who is now a paternally bearded man of 46 … we sang it as we walked under the flowering oaks and willows, through the thickets of wild rose, between the booths breathing perfumes of frankincense and marinated beef. There are other songs about cows (and we knew them, too) but this is It. The One. The. Coo. Song.

If I figure out a way to attach the melody, I will try. But it will not have Kage’s voice of liquid amber working through the changes … still, Medrith, I offer what I have. Enjoy it.

Hey, trolly lolly lo, maid, whither go you?
I go to the meadow to milk my cow.
Then at the meadow I shall you meet,
To gather the flowers so fair and sweet
Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not be!
Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Now in this meadow fair and green
We may esport and not be seen
And if ye will, I shall consent
How say ye, maid? be ye content?
Nay, in good faith, I will not mell with you!
I pray you, sir, let me go milk my cow!                                                                                      Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not  be!                                                             Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Why will ye not give me no comfort,
That now in these fields we may us sport?                                                                               Nay, in good faith, I will not mell with you!
I pray you, sir, let me go milk my cow!
Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not be!
Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Ye are so nice and  meet of age
Ye have greatly moved my courage
Sith I love you, love me again.
Let us make one, though we be twain.
Nay, in good faith, I will not mell with you!
I pray you, sir, let me go milk my cow!
Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not be!
Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Ye have my heart, say what ye will,
Wherefore ye must my mind fulfill,
And grant me here your maidenhead,
Or else I shall for you be dead.
Nay, in good faith, I will not mell with you!
I pray you, sir, let me go milk my cow!
Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not be!
Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Then for this once I shall you espare,
But the next time ye must beware,
How in the meadow ye milk your cow (your cow)
Adieu, farewell, and kiss me now!                                                                                            Adieu, farewell, and kiss me now!
Nay, in good faith, I will not mell with you!
I pray you, sir, let me go milk my cow!
Nay, God forbid, that may not be, that may not be!
Iwis my mother then shall I see
Iwis my mother then shall I see

Kage Baker had an adversarial relationship with the ON/OFF switch of her computer.

For one thing, she could rarely find it. Changing out CPU’s at intervals (which we did, of course), Kage would remember where the switch was located two or three  machines back, rather than now. It always took her a few days to get the new arrangement straight in her mind – I think it was because she expected it to be instinctive, and so did not actually learn the new system. She just repeated the action over and over (usually under my incredulous direction) until unconscious muscle memory developed; that way, only her left arm had to worry about how the thing worked and she didn’t have to waste brain cells on it.

Turning programs off followed the same habit: for the first year or so, she had a tendency to just yank the floppies out of the drive without shutting down.  It is a minor miracle Garden of Iden and Sky Coyote survived to publication – Kage pulled the floppy disks out so often without saving, I backed up the files every time she got up and went to the bathroom. (I couldn’t enable autosave – in those old days, it slowed the keyboard response time and drove Kage nuts.) I finally installed a safety on the EJECT DISK button – a neon green Sticky Note labelled STOP!!! It gave her enough time to think about the sequence and save her files. And finally, she got the pattern  established in her memory (somewhere between the lyrics to The Cow Song and a recipe for egg gravy probably) and never did it again.

We spent a lot of time at Kinko’s first, though, saving huge chunks of her manuscripts. It left her with a permanent terror of power failures, too – so paranoid about a flicker or a high wind that she would usually have to shut down writing altogether. She couldn’t concentrate while wondering whether or not the electricity was going to fail. And in Pismo, which had above-ground lines, constant ocean winds, thousands of sea birds and occasional UFO flaps, the power went down all the time.

A heavy rain (hell, a heavy dew) could knock down a line. So could a car, a truck, a wind-born kayak … all of which happened at least once. One afternoon a pelican snagged the line that ran from the power pole to our cottage roof: when it snapped, the recoil brought the power pole down. It pulled down all the power poles behind it for two blocks, just like in a Warner Brothers cartoon, and when the dust settled – we had no power, a telephone pole blocking the road every 100 feet for a half mile, and a crispy pelican in the Mr. Lincoln rosebush.

Today, of course, I dwell in that modern megalopolis, Los Angeles. Of course, it’s also full of  trees, birds, squirrels, helicopters, advertising planes … and we have a wind advisory right now, too,  as a late Arctic storm bears down on us.  Ravens are flying backwards past the window, to Harry’s amusement; squirrels keep getting blown out of the mulberry tree to bounce on the front porch and make the Corgi insane. And the lights are flickering …

I started this entry, Dear Readers, with no idea of how long it would last. I just thought, Well, I’ll maunder on a while and see how we do. And it’s been pretty cool, but now it’s getting serious. We’ve browned out twice – did you know, a dishwasher in a brown out slows down to a noise like a cow with a hernia? Amazing. Anyroad, I am signing off now while I still can.

That will probably ensure that the wind dies and the storm misses us. Careful  precautions usually avert Fate. But you never know! I have faith in my technology, but Kage was never wrong when she decided to err on the side of caution. So I’m gonna check the candles and flashlights, find a nice manual book, and curl up with the parrot for a low-tech afternoon.

I’ve got a thermos already full of coffee. I’ll be fine.