Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was a veteran of Catholic school – an all girls’ high school, in particular. She and I, Anne and Kimberly (and eventually Anne’s daughter Annie, too) all went to Immaculate Heart High School. Kage used to tell people its initials – IHHS, which we all wore embroidered on our uniform breasts – stood for “I Have Had Sex”. Yeah, right.

One of the great advantages of parochial school back then was the holiday schedule: bottom line, you got more of them. Our Christmas breaks were longer; we went back to class usually a week later in the fall than the public school kids; and we had a number of days off for religious events like the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Of course, those extra days were technically Holy Days of Obligation – the Obligation being, you had to go to Mass – but once that was out of the way, it was Liberty For All Hands!

Of course, this was all pre-Vatican II. One of the many efforts Rome made then to convince the Protestants that we were not just fancily-dressed pagans involved disenfranchising a lot of saints and their days. We lost some of the Days of Obligation. I never felt trading them for guitar Masses was really a great bargain …

Those particular magic beans never yielded a bean stalk, either. From being allowed to hear Mass in English, Catholics quickly went to required. People got excommunicated for saying a Latin Mass; they schismed for the right to keep the Latin and other old rites; and very few people learned to play a guitar well enough to warrant singing the Introit to its twangy dissonance. In Kage’s freshman year at IHHS, Latin was still a required language; by my entrance a year later, it was dead and gone … eight years of learning to sing Greek and Latin, and suddenly I was expected to know “Rock of Ages”? Don’t even mention the peppy, preppy crap the “young” priests wrote special for us …

I had never been much of a Christian; I took off for religious pastures where hymns to God sounded like love songs rather than commercial jingles. Besides, all our extra holidays vanished.

I thought of that today while driving past old IHHS, and seeing the flower of Catholic maidenhood returning all disconsolate to their educational cloister. LAUSD – for which Kimberly and her husband Ray both teach – is still out for a third week of winter holiday right now and the public schoolyards are blissfully free of students. The entire household has slowed to a delicious torpor, broken this morning only by poor Michael, who as a college student had to report back today. (His father slept in, radiating false sympathy like a smug nuclear reactor.)

Kimberly and I were also up, because I had lab tests to complete. Wending our way to West LA was interesting, especially as two weeks of weather have bred potholes like mushrooms in the streets. Tinsel and lights are looking decidedly tacky along Melrose today: West L.A. has grown older, and tame. What was the Southern California capital of freaky wildness is now all retro tiles and gilding and excruciatingly cutting-edge fashions. There are Staples and Trader Joe’s and Subways, and only smoke shop I saw was selling imported cigars instead of bongs.

I remember going to the Whiskey with Kage – she in sandals and a gypsy scarf, me barefooted and wearing a yard of lace. Today there was a tour bus parked in front of it… Small wonder I have somehow gotten old enough for my heart to start stuttering!

Tomorrow: Isaac Newton’s birthday

Kage Baker, despite being a totally solar sort of person, liked the idea of measuring the year in full moons. She said it was elegant; also, it just works better. The Moon is subject to all sorts of highly visible and predictable changes, whereas the Sun appears unchanging – all you can really do is count the times it rises and sets, and hope they come out in even pairs.

And while the Sun appears to engage in all sorts of alterations and moods, they all really come down to weather: how much dust or cloud is in the way? Because beyond that special effects veil of illusion, the sun just doesn’t display anything we can notice with our naked eyes. The Moon, she said, is easier to track and has better effects besides.

Kage was part Native American. Those who met her or have seen her photographs will find this hard to believe – the red hair, the freckles, the complete failure to tan – but it shows more in several of her siblings. Her black eyes, though, were not Spanish or Celt, but Iroquois.

The Iroquois and Algonquins gave lovely, lyrical names to all the full moons – Pink Moon, Buck Moon, Sturgeon Moon. Kage loved them. There is, of course, little real correlation between the full moon names of the North East tribes (our family connection) and the strict calendar nomenclature of the Western months – the period between full moons is not 30 days, and anyway there are 13 of them in an annual cycle. But the general time frame is the same. Who could argue that the Justinian month of June is well-named Strawberry Moon?

January, now … sometimes  Wolf Moon, or Old Moon. Often, though, the full moon after the solstice is Starvation Moon. Even for semi-agriculturists like the Iroquois (who kept good gardens) gathering in January is pretty much futile, and the hunters of game are having a hard time as well.

Kage used to joke sometimes that in these modern days, it was meant as instructions rather than a warning; that after the gorging of the midwinter season, it was time to live frugally and get lean. And that was part of the reason she gave me last year, when she simply stopped eating in the days after New Year’s.

Prior to that, I had been able to coax her into little meals – she wouldn’t eat the hospital food (except the occasional cherry ice) so I brought her meals. Really, though – who, given the choice between mystery meat with anonymous salty broth and real home cooking, would not refuse that horrid institutional tray? Our friend Neassa, in a hospital stay several years ago, also could not eat until her Mother brought food from home; it delayed her release by a couple of weeks, as her body adamantly refused the hospital fare.

Anyway, I cooked. It gave me a reason to eat real food, too. I did up a classical New Year’s feast last year – baked ham, collard greens, hoppin’ john, cornbread. Anne and the nieces Katie and Annie came up to share the holiday with Kage, and the festive meal was enjoyed by all, to my delight. The cornbread had been especially challenging, as Annie can’t eat gluten; and if you make cornbread without some sort of lighter flour added in, what you end up with is edible adobe … but I discovered that almond flour works admirably. Anyway, Kage ate that meal and enjoyed it.

It took me a couple of weeks to realize that it was the last full meal she actually ate. She continued her life-long passion for Italian ices, and developed a mad fondness for Gatorade Frost – mostly because it had very little flavour, I think, and all her meds and treatments made everything taste weird.  So she drank – Egg creams. Floats. Ginger ale. Sick-kid-in-bed treats, now that I think of it.

Things were getting so busy and confusing and frightening … we both realized there wasn’t much time, but we both also hoped the other hadn’t twigged – we tended to concentrate on the needs and comforts of the moment, getting Kage through each day in increments of 4 hours or so at a time. The chemo and radiation therapies didn’t help her appetite any, either. So when she snacked instead of clearing her plate – when I had to feed her from my own plate to make sure she did eat – it all seemed more normal, somehow. She never came close to starving – I got very clever in packing a lot into the half-dozen mouthfuls I knew I could persuade her to eat without rebellion – but she Just. Wasn’t. Interested.

Starvation Moon. The thing to bear in mind is that the people who so named it didn’t starve because they wanted to, but because they had no choice. Same with Kage. She realized she couldn’t eat without nausea, and decided (rationally enough. For Kage … ) not to waste her limited time with throwing up. She consented to drink because I made things she liked, and also made a horrible fuss if she did not: but mostly, I think, to please me.

She was winding down, divesting herself of as many extraneous burdens as possible. Expert packer that she was, she was sorting out how much would fit in the rest of her life. Chicken soup just didn’t make the cut.

Kage Baker: my unifying theme. She’ll stay that way, too, I think. It gives me a starting point for each day’s entry – and believe me, a writer needs a goad even more than a goal.

But this month is the home stretch to Hell. More and more posts will deal with the process of mortal transformation. They won’t be very clever, nor very amusing. I need to do this, though, to close off this worst year of my life properly.

However, Dear Readers, you might want to skip this until Imbolc. Or Candlemas. Or Lady’s Day. Or Groundhog Day, or whatever the heck you celebrate on February 2nd.

After all (Spoiler Alert!) Kage dies at the end.

Kage Baker believed firmly in holidays – taking them, I mean. Mind you, she didn’t often bother to do it, but she was loud and determined on the necessity of doing so. It’s just that when she sat down to do relax, the writing usually grabbed her.

In honor of the intention, however, this facility will be Closed For The Holiday.

The Invisible Spirit Kraken of Writing may emerge from its cave under the desk and sieze me in its tentacles, but I will manage to escape. For one thing, I can plainly see that those tentacles are still adorned with confetti; the Invisible Kraken of Writing has a plastic fez slipped sideways on its head, sunglasses in the shape on “2011”, and is looking decidedly seedy … so I think I have a chance against it.

It’s simply that I need the time to cook today. Baked ham, Hoppin’ John, collard greens and cornbread don’t happen spontaneously.

To the kitchen!

Kage Baker really enjoyed New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t a big party night for her – but the glittery formality of the late-night celebration appealed to her. We were usually home by 8 or 9 at night, and often never left the house after dark. Nonetheless, it was an occasion of ritual and solemnity, and she liked it. She had lots of small traditions.

It was the last night of the Christmas Tree, for one thing, which would always be the subject of many grateful toasts during the evening – having shone for us gallantly for a fortnight or so. It was a night for a feast – usually steaks and latkes, that being the meal she settled on in her 20’s; I think it was because she learned how to make latkes in the first place, and was always pleased with the trick. She made good ones, too.

If a royalty check had come, we sometimes went out to an early dinner in a really good restaurant, long before the serious partiers showed up. We usually went so early we literally had the restaurant to ourselves, which gave a grand patina of exclusivity to the evening. Kage would solemnly affix the sparkly ceremonial headband that came with dinner into her hair, and we’d get silly over champagne cocktails.

We always ended up the same way: watching the ball drop in Times Square at midnight, champagne bottle poised. As soon as it hit the ground, Kage would pop the cork and we’d stand out on our front porch and toast the New Year. We always made the same resolution – to survive.

Last year … Kage was in the hospital, recovering slowly from brain surgery. Her balance was lousy, but improving; she refused to eat the hospital food, but as long as I brought her meals, she did at least eat. She wasn’t in pain, she was lucid, she was hopeful. She just wasn’t getting much better. Nonetheless, she was in a good mood and determined to get home for the holiday.

When it became obvious that she could not wheedle a release before the New Year, we made plans for our own celebration. Sister Anne and her daughters Katie and Annie promised to come up and see Kage on New Year’s Day. I brought coloured electric candles, confetti poppers, our red crystal champagne glasses and sparkling cider to the hospital; I brought steaks and latkes. And we settled down to wait for the Ball to drop, whiling away the time – as we usually did – watching old Twilight Zone episodes.

Kage ate a bite of steak, a bite of latke. She drank a lot of Martinelli’s cider. We reminisced, I read her the day’s batch of well-meaning fan letters (she got hundreds during her illness) and a few chapters of P.G. Wodehouse. And the Ball duly dropped, as that dapper zombie Dick Clark proclaimed a New Year was upon us. The nurses being out at the nursing station, I brought out the split of real champagne I had smuggled in, and filled our glasses.

“The usual resolution: to survive!” declared Kage.

We drank, and she added, “As long as we can, as well as we can.”

And so I knew that she knew, too.

She fell asleep not long after that. I drove home in the dark alone on New Year’s, for the first time in my life.

Tomorrow: New Year’s Day

Kage Baker hated the cold. No prevarications, no euphemisms – she outright hated the cold. It was her enemy; in her mind, a blue-faced anorexic glamor queen dripping diamonds and tacky furs, leaving windows open and being offensively skinny in large, drafty rooms.

“But look at the beautiful clear sky!” I might cry (winter is a lovely season in Southern California). “Look, the hills are green, the air is clear, the stars are visible at night and the wind is fresh and clean!”

“It’s freaking cold. Shut the window!” Kage would snarl, and wind another coverlet around herself.

“Would you rather it was hot and smoky?” I would ask (very reasonably, I always thought).

“Yes. I would. Bring on the fire storms!”

Kage could be extremely unreasonable on very little provocation. And once aroused to this state, she could go on for hours about the joys of living in in a landscape lit by volcanic fountains and watered by hot springs. She’d usually carry the argument by default – I would get so intrigued by her descriptions that I would stop pointing out the logic flaws and just want to know What Happens Then?

Some of the culture of the Children of the Sun was born on winter days when Kage was trying to write with numb blue fingers. They are fond of flaming cocktails, for instance. Some of them can burst into flame (she always wanted to do that). Hot oil is a spa indulgence, not a war weapon. All of this is due to Kage hating the cold …

There was a constant problem of ambient temperature in our house: thermostat wars. I paid the gas bills, too, and would wax despairing when they quadrupled in January. But we managed. I just got used to sweating in the winter – Kage’s idea of a shirt-sleeve environment was about 80 degrees. Not that she would be in shirt sleeves. She responsibly wore extra sweaters and woolly socks and all the rest of the mountaineer gear one is advised to wear rather than turn up the thermostat. It just didn’t keep her warm enough.

Me, I go about in winter in T-shirts and barefooted, at least indoors. I kept a window open in my bedroom and the door firmly closed to spare Kage the Arctic wind blowing out of my room – and to give me a haven to retreat to where I was not risking heat prostration in December. This still occasioned screams of protest whenever I went in and out, and she flatly refused to go into my room to fetch anything. She said glaciers were forming in there.

Harry the parrot was firmly on Kage’s side. When the room was chilly, he would be perched on her shoulder, as far into her hair as he could insinuate himself, glaring at me. Many an evening the two of them would be folded into her armchair between the heater outlet and the fireplace, wrapped in lap robes, watching telly and giggling … and huddled together like orphans in a snow storm. Parrots like to cuddle, and Kage was the warmest thing in the house.

At the moment, it is very cold in Los Angeles. Oh, the rest of the country would laugh at us, I know – but when your wardrobes and wall insulation are not constructed for the 30’s and 40’s, the cold is pretty biting. The rain storms are briefly in abeyance and what we have now are enormous northern winds: power outages are flickering across the city like earthbound lightning, trees are falling, birds and squirrels are flying backwards through the air. Insane tourists are lining up in Pasadena, risking hypothermia to watch the Rose Parade tomorrow (we natives will watch from our living rooms, drinking cocoa).

My sister Kimberly is set to the same thermostat as Kage, and is wrapped up like a lost Arctic explorer under cats, blankets and a Corgi. Harry, having decided that nephew Michael is now the warmest person around, is snuggled under the corner of his jaw, trying to see how far he can get into Michael’s brand-new beard. I am sitting here (barefoot) on the wrong side of the windbreak: my huge oak desk stops the draft from the pet door in the kitchen from getting all the way into the living room, but it’s rather like having one’s feet in an icy stream …

That’s winter in Southern California, though. And it all has a comforting familiarity to it. I can hear Kage complaining about the draft, and demanding to know if I am sure bringing the barbecue in would pose a health hazard …

Tomorrow: New Year’s Day and memories

Kage Baker believed that how a place or time felt was more important, and more informative, than what or when it actually was. If a day felt like a weekend (or weekday), her responses were tuned to what it felt like, disregarding what the calendar said about it.

The general ambiance of a place was an even more Kage-specific indicator.  I’ve mentioned that she sometimes decided that wherever we were “looked funny”; or worse, the people there did: we would depart, while she spun me stories of just how the people were strange, and the probable fate of strangers who stayed there. (Sometimes justified, too – non-residents are not welcome in Ballena Bay.) There were times she could not bear to be traveling for too long in a given compass direction; or, conversely, felt that it was a good day to drive north for a few hours.

“Wake up,” she’d announce, striding into my bedroom, “we need to go north today!”

“Where? How far? How long?” I would mumble, groping for my glasses (I always hear better with my glasses on).

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you when we get there.” Then she’d go work out a travel route where we didn’t slip on to an eastbound road while we were also going north. Going east made her uncomfortable.

This is an interesting way to design road trips, and I usually enjoyed it enormously. One memorable occasion we started out from Pismo on a Friday morning, and went on through all the coastal towns between there and San Francisco. Nothing was planned, we just didn’t feel like stopping or turning around. It took us three days to get home, camping and staying in motels at random: the best one was the hilariously named Borg Motel in Monterey. Incredible sea view, and the best bacon on the coast in the restaurant next door – if you can avoid being assimilated.

Why did I put up with this? Well, like I said, it was interesting. Stories got told, and we sought for and found fascinating things. We’ve explored most of the small graveyards on the California coast, for instance – a stone mausoleum in Arroyo Grande with a broken roof filled by an enormous honeycomb, honey dripping down its walls; the dappled deer that graze all fearless between the headstones in Pacific Grove; a cemetery almost abandoned in Port Arena, where ground squirrels have built a metropolis between the graves and the ground opens up most alarmingly under your feet.

We’ve found wonderful – and merely wonderfully strange – rest stops and parks, with plaques honoring pioneer wives, and merchant seamen. and the dead of 4 wars in a town so small the total was less than 20 names: none forgotten, though. Commemorations of Freemasons and dry stone masons and some family named Mason who introduced a special variety of grape to a valley up North. Signs extolling the Rare Santa Clarita Valley Prune (all in proud caps on the sign), or fruit stands with two dozen unlikely flavours of pistachio nuts, like jelly beans. Farms that bred miniature horses, sheep, cattle, poodles; someplace called The Pork Palace that had a huge sign proclaiming itself OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, but with no indication of what it was open for – we figured it was either a temple to bacon or a brothel.

Today, as the year has nearly run out, is loose in time in just this way. I got out of bed at a sane hour, but it feels like a Saturday today, not a mundane Wednesday. Can’t tell the time, either, because Los Angeles is once more pent under a rainstorm. So we went to the movies – The Deathly Hallows, which is long and dark and weird and so does nothing for one’s sense of temporal stability. Good movie, though; good way to spend a Saturday.

And I think it’s a good day to have breakfast for dinner, too. Kage would agree it just feels that way.

Kage Baker believed that how a place or time felt was more important, and more informative, than what or when it actually was. If a day felt like a weekend (or weekday), her responses were tuned to what it felt like, disregarding what the calendar said about it.

The general ambiance of a place was an even more Kage-specific indicator.  I’ve mentioned that she sometimes decided that wherever we were “looked funny”; or worse, the people there did: we would depart, while she spun me stories of just how the people were strange, and the probable fate of strangers who stayed there. (Sometimes justified, too – non-residents are not welcome in Ballena Bay.) There were times she could not bear to be traveling for too long in a given compass direction; or, conversely, felt that it was a good day to drive north for a few hours.

“Wake up,” she’d announce, striding into my bedroom, “we need to go north today!”

“Where? How far? How long?” I would mumble, groping for my glasses (I always hear better with my glasses on).

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you when we get there.” Then she’d go work out a travel route where we didn’t slip on to an eastbound road while we were also going north. Going east made her uncomfortable.

This is an interesting way to design road trips, and I usually enjoyed it enormously. One memorable occasion we started out from Pismo on a Friday morning, and went on through all the coastal towns between there and San Francisco. Nothing was planned, we just didn’t feel like stopping or turning around. It took us three days to get home, camping and staying in motels at random: the best one was the hilariously named Borg Motel in Monterey. Incredible sea view, and the best bacon on the coast in the restaurant next door – if you can avoid being assimilated.

Why did I put up with this? Well, like I said, it was interesting. Stories got told, and we sought for and found fascinating things. We’ve explored most of the small graveyards on the California coast, for instance – a stone mausoleum in Arroyo Grande with a broken roof filled by an enormous honeycomb, honey dripping down its walls; the dappled deer that graze all fearless between the headstones in Pacific Grove; a cemetery almost abandoned in Port Arena, where ground squirrels have built a metropolis between the graves and the ground opens up most alarmingly under your feet.

We’ve found wonderful – and merely wonderfully strange – rest stops and parks, with plaques honoring pioneer wives, and merchant seamen. and the dead of 4 wars in a town so small the total was less than 20 names: none forgotten, though. Commemorations of Freemasons and dry stone masons and some family named Mason who introduced a special variety of grape to a valley up North. Signs extolling the Rare Santa Clarita Valley Prune (all in proud caps on the sign), or fruit stands with two dozen unlikely flavours of pistachio nuts, like jelly beans. Farms that bred miniature horses, sheep, cattle, poodles; someplace called The Pork Palace that had a huge sign proclaiming itself OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, but with no indication of what it was open for – we figured it was either a temple to bacon or a brothel.

Today, as the year has nearly run out, is loose in time in just this way. I got out of bed at a sane hour, but it feels like a Saturday today, not a mundane Wednesday. Can’t tell the time, either, because Los Angeles is once more pent under a rainstorm. So we went to the movies – The Deathly Hallows, which is long and dark and weird and so does nothing for one’s sense of temporal stability. Good movie, though; good way to spend a Saturday.

And I think it’s a good day to have breakfast for dinner, too. Kage would agree it just feels that way.

Kage Baker relied upon her mind. A lot of people do not – as it were – ever think about it, hur hur hur:  the miracles of self, perception and intellect go on with the same casual  ease as digestion, and are only considered when they malfunction.

Not Kage. She lived in her mind. Of course, there was a lot more room in hers than in most – it went on in several non-standard directions and through unusual dimensions. Time zones were apparently a matter of daily choice. I think sometimes even who was in charge was arbitrary. Kage always maintained that while she had no doubts at all of who she was, other people nonetheless used her brain for storage – she was always tripping over someone else’s memories. Her favourite analogies were an attic with an open window, where winds and squirrels and nesting birds made free; and a roulette wheel – spin it and see whose past comes up on top today!

She maintained, therefore, that she was actually lucky when the brain tumor was diagnosed. It wasn’t in the front of her brain, nor the delicate middle – not the seats of intellect or ratiocination or creativity. Not the halls of memory, which in her case were enormous and involved as a chambered nautilus. It was only her cerebellum, a plain little working class neighborhood just above her brain stem.

“Hey, I don’t use that much, do I?” she said airily. “What’s it for, anyway?”

“Walking. Balance. Fine motor control. A little further down controls your breathing. Don’t you know what’s in your head?” I asked in disbelief.

“I know that parts that count,” she replied.”Everything that matters is in the front.”

Right.

By this time last year … she had had the brain surgery to remove the tumor in her cerebellum. Her balance was shot to hell by this, but the hideous headache of Christmas Eve was gone. So was her long red braid, but at her direction I saved it; in the meantime, her hair curled all around her face the way it had in high school. With all the weight she had lost, she looked like she was in her early 20’s again. She was unabashedly delighted.

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s going back and forth between our apartment and the hospital, twice a day. I brought Kage battery-operated candles as a night light; I cooked all her meals, since she refused to eat the hospital food (she had a point, there …). I bathed her; I bullied her on to her feet and made her walk; I kept track of her meds. It was not that she didn’t have competent nursing care – her nurses were great. But they had lots of other patients, and I had only Kage to look after. I could pay more attentio.n And I found that the nurses were so grateful for some help, they tried to keep an even closer eye on her. So everybody won.

I read P.G. Wodehouse to Kage. I brought her printouts of her daily emails and read them aloud – during the course of her illness, hundreds of people wrote to her. If any of you, Dear Readers, were among them: please be assured Kage got your message. I read every single one of them to her.

I also nursed the fallen heroes trapped at my house. Kimberly and nephew Michael had sped up to Pismo as soon as they could after the horrid revelations of Christmas Eve: they took me shopping, helped me clean house, made me eat and sleep – and were promptly stricken with whatever gastrointestinal horror had gotten me a few days beforehand. What was intended as a lightning aid mission turned into a prison sentence for them: they couldn’t leave until they stopped throwing up and could escape the bathroom.

Kimberly nonetheless rallied a few hours every day to make sure I survived: how she did it, I do not know. Michael just rolled into a ball and went into suspended animation. I think it was the sickest the kid had been in his entire 18 years. The Emergency Room was not even an option; the local hospitals had so much of this virus they were doing triage in tents in the parking lot. My poor family lived on Gatorade for three days before they could manage the 3-hour drive back home.

But they had set me up well before the Plague got them. Kimberly helped me set up the schedule that would get us through that last month; the round-the-clock nursing, the steady tide of comforts and amusements that let both Kage and I pretend for hours at a time that we were not just marking time. Hope is not always necessary, so long as despair can be avoided.

And we steadfastly did not despair.