Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was maybe the most modest person I have ever known. Despite 30-odd years spent in live theatre, she never, ever got used to changing clothes in public. To most of the rest of us raving exhibitionists, any area that does not actually have audience members in it is private – not so to blushing Kage, who preferred real walls around her. And when you are a redhead, blushing is a serious affair …

She did not, to her credit, make the rest of us comply with her own modesty – no screaming, pointing, laughing or otherwise objecting when some absent-minded compatriot started shedding clothes in the Parlour after Closing. (Though she might be startled if you walked in on her – sorry, Buffalo, she was embarrassed to the end of her days that she shrieked at you.) But she would wait to be the last person to change if it meant she had privacy. She also became inhumanly fast at getting out of one set of clothes and into another – a quick change artist who only worked backstage.

This modesty was one of the hardest things for her to relinquish as her illness grew worse. Everyone knows hospital gowns are inadequate as clothes. Not to mention ugly – why do all the adult ones have designs that resemble cheap watermarks from copier paper? What most people don’t know (until it is their turn), is that the sicker you are, the less you are allowed even those largely symbolic shreds of modesty. Medical personnel who are genuinely concerned with your living to the end of their shift would actually prefer it if you were just naked, so all the tubes and ports and incisions and implants are easily accessed.

You won’t find this mentioned in all those cheery books about facing serious illness with a brave smile – no one tells you that the smile is likely to be all you are wearing. Chicken Soup for the Seriously Ill and Unexpectedly Nude needs to be written. Unless you are a serious plastic and latex enthusiast, this is pretty inadequate. Kage was amused at the B&D nature of most of her hospital outfits, but she didn’t really like them, you know? I remember her mourning the fact that the great and glorious Stormy Leather in San Francisco does not have a purely medical line – really stylish blood pressure cuffs and trusses would be such a boon to patient moral!

One of my biggest jobs this time last year was helping Kage keep her clothes on and fastened. Nurses and doctors treat the fastenings like barn doors – you open it, you perform your admittedly vital job, you leave: but the damned door is still open! I closed them. I got to the point where I could also unfasten them when needed, fast as lightning, so no one complained – like a Noh stagehand, I just made things appear and disappear. I swear, some people never even knew I was there …

Kage never consented to dress down, either. As long as she was active in public, she wore real clothes – carefully selected for good colours and some style. Even when she had to resort to slip-on shoes, they were gleaming white boating loafers, thank you very much. Real nightgowns. A robe. Shawls and lap robes.

I knitted colourful cotton covers for the chemotherapy port in her arm. She wore her golden earrings, her ivory pendents, her hair in a braid as long as she could keep it – and when her hair was cropped for her brain surgery, she had our niece Katie come and trim it into a decent cut.

This has been on my mind since my unexpected sojourn in the CICU. Cardiac Care is definitely one of those places where the personnel want to be able to get at you, fast. Do not be fooled when they offer you two gowns to wear back-to-front: this courtesy is just to lull you into compliance before you get to learn your own Fan Dance with a dozen colour-coded monitor leads. And no one makes those horrid sticky leads patches large enough to do anyone any good. Also, they do not come in interesting colours.

So today, while I went slowly and creakily about on my way to doctors’ offices and pharmacists, I was grateful for the ability to wear jeans and T-shirt. Whole garments! That don’t have break-away fastenings!

Kage had standards. I feel I have to keep them up. Because even for an old trouper like me – who thinks nothing of wandering about the Parlour in my corset – those horrid wretched flapping gowns are too much. Or too little. You know what I mean.

Tomorrow: in London, they are going crazy …

Kage Baker bade me write every day once she was gone, and up until this last Sunday, I have fulfilled that contract. Even on the days when I was ill, tired or just plain lazy, I managed a few lines here to keep the channel open.

Alas, the last several days it’s been a carrier wave only. My apologies to those who wondered where the hell I was; my apologies also to those who knew and worried.

Sunday afternoon I finally admitted the pain in my chest and arm were likely not a pulled muscle and went to the ER. I was admitted to Glendale Memorial Cardiac Care Unit, and Monday a new stent was installed in my chest. (I had four already from two years ago – one of the great disappointments of my life is that they don’t glow like Iron Man’s.)

Anyway, my cardiac surgeon – a tall, stern Sikh in a blue turban – told me that one of my arteries was 100% occluded, and that I must not let this happen again … he was so tall and stern, and it was so much like being lectured by Captain Nemo, that I readily agreed to maintain this simple piece of personal hygiene.  (Besides, I simply cannot disagree with a man who can use a word like “occluded” during heart surgery, and generously expects his distracted patient to understand it. I felt that years of excessive vocabulary research was being honored.)  And I will  begin checking this daily, just as soon as someone send me a medical tricorder …

Apparently, sometime in the last year, some stress or other caused a slight shift in one of my existing stents. A gap developed in the section of artery it was meant to cover. That gap filled up – not with cholesterol (I have excellent and sparse cholesterol) but with a blood clot. Captain Nemo said there is no way to tell what made my heart bleed. As the only explanation I have for this is decidedly metaphysical, we shall leave it at that.

For those who are unaware of it, angioplasts are done under local anesthesia. This does not mean you do not feel anything. It means your sensations are right out of Alice In Wonderland, and very, very peculiar. During my first one, I exchanged many pleasant remarks with my anesthesiologist, who was (as far as I could tell) a giant raccoon. This time all I got was Captain Nemo; however, he was still Captain Nemo the next day, so I must assume he was real. The kid selling Swiss chocolate in the corner was, alas, apparently not.

Anyway, I am home now, with yet more disappointingly non-luminous platinum in my chest and many non-recreational drugs. Except that being not dead nor in pain is pretty much as fun as I can handle at the moment, and the drugs are sure helping that.

I am missing Dickens, however, but I will endeavour to post speculations, memories, and live reports from my many wonderful minions. If YOU have not yet gone to the Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco – go this week! It’s the last weekend! It’s beautiful, it’s unique, it’s Extreme Christmas and you need to see it!

Tomorrow: we resume our regularly scheduled dementia

Kage Baker had evolved an infallible way to get through the holidays, feel involved and not go crazy. She had a quite arbitrary but functional event calendar that covered the entire last third of the year. Such and such a thing was done on such a date; it was then undone on such and such a date, and so we went from point to point in a nicely orchestrated rising crescendo of holiday cheer.  Got things back in the boxes on time, too.

It was a soothing counterpoint to the Extreme Christmas that dominated December, where everything happens at once, simultaneously and repeatedly.

(I obviously still do things by this method, due to 1) habit and 2) it works. My sister Kimberly does too, the system having spread through the family as the only known antidote to leaving ALL the lights up ALL year  and trying to switch out the pertinent plugs in the right order … )

So, the holiday deco started on October 1st, with the initial autumnal lights. It graduated by strict date preference into creepy and through weirdness: bats and skulls, green and purple, pulsing things in the bushes I am almost sure we put there …  In November, the deco pupated into glorious lights that echoed and then outshone the deciduous trees; gold and orange and crimson and whole universes of pulsating embers in the dark. We could put up weirdness for that middle month – eager retailers make lights shaped like every single component of the Thanksgiving feast, for reasons of unknown insanity – but we choose instead to stick to glorious lights and the occasional  faux maple leaf.

On December 1st, the winter lights started: a few strings of blue white icicles (for that touch of frost that does not occur naturally in Los Angeles) but mostly COLOURS! We don’t go for animated set pieces and tableau – just clouds and cliffs and waterfalls of colours,. Lights in the darkness to hold back the winter night that always threatens to last forever, a beacon for the sun to remind it of summer and life.

There’s a little mulberry tree in the front yard, the result of runaway caterpillar fodder one year when Kimberly was raising silk worms for her kindergarten class ( she teaches the itty bitties). It has gone golden and is shedding about a thousand more leaves than it seemed to have grown over the summer. Now it’s lovely naked bones are wrapped in white fairy lights, and we have strung long graceful lines of green from the boughs: for this season, it is a willow tree. The coloured lights behind it suggest bright improbable fruit.

On the lawn is our one concession to whimsy – Lars the solstice moose (though Lars is a decent classical wicker-work himself) and a glowing little ice-tree. A few lights blink, a couple strobe: mostly we are just a steady bonfire of hope in the winter night. That’s what the lights are for, after all – to keep hope and life and the soul alive during the Longest Night.

In a few days, on the 15th, the tree and the indoor lights will go up. Then it will all stand in glory through the 6th of January, the ancient 12 Days of Christmas. Then the winter lights will come down and we will retreat to our usual small monthly display – a colour for each month, just a little reminder of the glory of December.

Kage would love it. I will walk out on the lawn tonight (in the unnatural 80 degree wind now blowing through Los Angeles) and stand under the Arabian Nights glow of our make-believe willow tree. And think of her.

Kage Baker liked the peculiar rhythms of dates like this. She loved the advent of digital clocks, too – she had always had trouble reading classical analogue faces – and happily watched all ours for the consecutive moments – 12:34. 1:11. 4:56. They all amused her, and held a kind of time-mocking magic in her cosmology

To make today’s entry title perfect, I should have gotten up and contrived to post it at 9. That would have taken the time magic to another decimal.

However, at 9 AM I was blissfully asleep, subliminally aware of coffee being ground in the kitchen – for me, but blessedly not by me. I am resting, taking my meds, checking my blood pressure, and in general heeding my body’s hints and being a fussy old woman. I feel dreradfully guilty … the coffee helps, though.

I ought to be at Dickens Fair; the magic of the date, though, permits me to know what it is like there right now. The rotating bars of the digital calender open like a garage door, much more efficient than the old pages just falling off the wall. No matter Kage preferred digital appliances …

In the Parlour, someone will have seated Mr. Charles Dickens for his first reading of the day. His cup of tea will be steaming on the table, and a dozen happy customers will be leaning forward to hear his wonderful initial description of London on Christmas Eve.

My bar staff will just have quieted down from whatever early morning riot has amused them, and will be eating chips (that’s fries to you pagan Americans) for breakfast. The saintly Neassa will have given Mr. Dickens his reading copy and now faded away  deftly into the kitchen; where she is, I hope, refreshing herself with peppermint bark and Hershey’s kisses. My “daughters” Meg and Caroline will have two lunches laid out waiting on the side board, and will now be sailing in swan-like tranquility around the Parlour, as decorative and smiling as angels on the Christmas tree.

The streets are thronged with happy crowds. The air smells of cookies, roast beef, gingerbread, mulled wine, roasted chestnuts, perfume, beeswax, popcorn, wet pavement and ancient cattle (lends us that air of London reality, you know).

The neighbors are out and about – Nancy still smiling and alive, her Bill still an ardent suitor; the telegraph kids swooping by on roller skates; the Crummels or the Cratchits or the Mad Tea Party wandering around noisily. Jacob Marley (having secretly sated himself on jelly beans in my kitchen) has slipped out into the street and is pacing about in chains and desperate melancholy, hoping to redeem Scrooge.

Becky from the Prince Edward Bar next door has wandered in with a washer, wondering if we need (or have) a replacement. Or my Adam has wandered over there to find out why the shared water is flowing at half-pressure. An electrician rushes by with a ladder on his shoulder, officially rendered invisible by the plaid lap robe thrown over it. Top hats are blooming on the hat stand. Three non-matching gloves have already been turned in. A small girl is contemplating toasting a teddy bear over the faux parlour fire.

Normal morning at Dickens Fair, like nothing else on earth. Wish I was there. Hope you are.

Kage Baker was always acutely aware that only one of us could drive. She was also always worried that I insisted on a stick shift, which most of our friends and all our family could not drive. She felt it was an unneeded affectation, and rather short-sighted of me.

I prefer to think it is my innate coolness, but … She may have been right. I have no backup driver, and have just discovered I cannot drive today. I have been benched by shortness of breath and some impudent left arm pain … so I am staying home.

On the other hand, since I made this uncharacteristically sensible decision, we’ve discovered that Mikey had forgotten to pack his dress shirts ( which would have caused hysteria at 6 AM tomorrow) and Kimberly had forgotten to pay the property tax (which would have blown up at midnight).  Neither of these would have been found out in time if I had not taken to my bed like the old crone I am increasingly becoming.

So I can still function as a bad example, I guess.

I shall receive reports of the goings on in the Cow Palace, and disseminate them here tomorrow. Gonna go eat high explosives now.

Kage Baker never worried about how long we would be on the road. She didn’t want to still be there in certain conditions – storms, the dark, UFO attack, seismic events, caterpillar migrations (ever been in one?) – but the duration of the journey was not one of her concerns. As she said, “We drive until we get there – what else is there to do? If we want to get there at all, we have to drive. There is no use complaining about it.”

Ah, a wise and mature statement. Surprising, for one who in childhood was the High Priestess of “Are We There Yet?” The older she got, though, the more interested Kage was in The Process, and that made our endless journeys a lot more interesting.

She never worried about getting on the road in time to arrive at a given destination ON time, either. For her, time was fluid and she moved through it like a pearl through Prell – stately, unconcerned, uninvolved. Slowly. I used to keep all the clocks in the car and the house 10 minutes fast, because otherwise we never got anywhere on time. Kage knew I did it, too, but her grasp of time was so amorphous she never worried about it – she took all clocks at face value. It was why the trick worked at all …

But I worry about all these things. I can’t blame Kage, though I did spend the last 25 years making sure The Author got places on time. No, I just have this picky, paranoid attitude.

This is the third weekend of performance for Dickens Fair, which means the 6th weekend driving North. This is the weekend when I begin wondering if it isn’t time I took up cross-country skiing, or some other less stressful hobbies. When the sight of my corset makes my ribs whine. When I realize my main goal for the New Year is to sleep until the flowers bloom and little singing bunnies appear outside my snow-cave with hot coffee in a pretty cup …

It won’t be until next week that I look around the Parlour and contemplate domestic arson.

But today I have to pack (make sure I have clean linen for three days! Pack some real underwear this week!) get the beef roasts in the cooler and the tea in a box, fill the gas tank, go to the bank, replenish the bird’s travel cage. Get a long stick and poke my nephew-copilot awake.

Then drive for 6 hours to lovely Vallejo and the incredibly hospitable Rettinhouses, and brave the dog storm that is Curly … no one is quite sure what Curly is, except he’s shiny jet black, has curly fur everywhere but his long hound nose, is larger than a coffee table and can fly. I think aliens left him. Aliens who did poor research on how to make a dog. He has feet like a Clydesdale horse, feathers and all. He saw his toes  for the first time last week and was surprised. He’s wonderful.

Anyway – I am off. Who knows what wonders await me on the Kessel Run through the San Joaquin Sea?

Tomorrow: one of those entries with adrenalin depletion and Whomp Rolls.

Kage Baker hated arguments. They made her physically ill. Despite our shared (and somewhat eccentric) pan-Celt and Iriquois heritage – and all of those are fractious peoples, let me assure you – Kage did not relish a quarrel. She barely stood for loud discussions. They made her stomach hurt, and she retreated. Consequently,if someone did not like something she said, she rarely tried for further explanation. She didn’t want to win: she just wanted peace.

I am not as lady-like, nor as sensitive, nor as delicate. But I don’t like to fight, either. On the other hand, I do recognize the need to explain myself when I have committed a gaucherie (which I have done a lot of, and so am experienced at). And it appears yesterday’s blog struck some folks as shallow and fannish. Not that anyone said that! My friends are much nicer than that. But I can sometimes read between the lines – even my own – and see where something has been poorly handled.

So allow me to explain why the death of John Lennon mattered to me. It’s not due to late-blooming teen-age hormones. Nor am I unaware that, in the roster of great members of the human race, John was … well, a pop singer. Still, in context, so was Mozart. Nonetheless …

The 1980’s largely sucked. The sheer atmosphere of disaster and death in which we moved every freaking day was overwhelming. Perhaps it’s why we remember specific tragedies, attempting to personalize something in that time when Death seemed to be on every guest list.

As I attempted to explain to someone else, John Lennon’s death was not in the same league as the deaths of John or Robert Kennedy. But I wasn’t trying to say it was. I was trying to describe my own, personal, intimate pain at the death of someone I knew. What made the situation unique was that John was a public person and at the same time  just  this guy, you know? Therefore millions of people felt that same personal, intimate pain. Therefore it was – different.

It is sacriligious and horrifying when a man like Ghandi is assassinated. It is shocking when someone shoots a President of the United States (although it seems to be becoming a common job risk). There is always a suicide bomber, a disgruntled government employee, a man with a rifle and a lunch of fried chicken in a tower somewhere, waiting for just the right profile to come into his rifle scope. And, God help us, there are always wars and plagues. It’s just that Americans didn’t used to notice them as much. We do now, though.

It’s true that the death of any man diminishes us all. I think, though, that most of the time we don’t notice it any more than we notice the millions of our own body cells that die every day. You notice the wound that bleeds. You remember the freak accident, the unexpected tumor, the assault by the statistically unlikely maniac. The plagues and genocides … are so huge it takes a while to sink in on most of us. But when it does, we cannot UN-see what we have seen, and that wound, too, becomes permanent.

The deliberate murder of a poet, a singer, a bard – is a freak occurrence.  Once kings might silence a smart-ass singer – back when the guy with a lute was the Main Stream Media. But who, in the latter half of the 20th century, assassinates a rock and roll singer? One who might even have already embarked on Washed Up?

It’s like shooting a mockingbird, Dear Readers.

He was just this guy – walking home with his wife on a winter evening, remnants of his day’s work in his pocket, his kid asleep in the apartment upstairs. But even as just that, he was a marvel of humanity, like any guy; a microcosm, a pair of eyes that looked at the stars and the mucky depths of his own soul, and saw the similarities there. But he sang about them, loud enough for the world to hear.

Maybe there are a million men with eyes and minds and voices like that, and John Lennon was just the one whose voice rang out. The point of his life is that it did. The point of his death is that a common monster stepped out of the shadows and killed him for it. That can happen to any of us. That’s what underlies the horror.

And, I loved him. That’s my hang-up, not yours, Dear Readers. Just ignore it if it bothers you. I’m not claiming that his death was pivotal to the 20th century, or that he was a saint or a world leader or even an especially slick public speaker (“a man appeared on a flaming pie and said ‘You are Beatles with an A’? ” I ask you …). I’m just saying that 30 years ago yesterday a man died unnecessarily and it hurt the entire world and it still hurts a few hearts with good memories. That’s all.

But a thousand people are dying to day. And it hurts the world, and it always will: more than the death of a Ghandi or a Sadat or a Kennedy.Maybe we ought to recall a few more of those kinds of deaths, you know? And not decide whose life deserves to be memorialized, because – really – they all do.

But I am still sorry I came off so clumsy and shallow. I’ll try for better tomorrow.

Kage Baker always said, she would rather remember people’s birthdays than the days they died. Certainly, it’s more cheerful. And she adamantly stuck to that, as much as she could; even as the years went by and round and down the drain, and more and more of our loved ones got that second date on their resumes.

Me, I can’t help it. I rejoice at beloved birthdays, but I also honor my dead on the days I lost them. For one thing, I often can’t remember what I was doing the day they were born. But the day I lost them … ah, that one is permanent.

Today is the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I have no idea what I was doing on the day he was born, because I myself would not be born for another 13 years. My father was 10 and my mother was 5, and had in fact only met that year – neither one of them could have had even an inkling of Me. (I have it on the best of authority that my mom’s main squeeze that year was a black and white bunny named Mignonette.)

But I do remember December 8, 1980. It was a work day, which meant Kage and I had spent the day untangling crazy disability insurance claims (we worked for insurance companies for years) – I think it was one of the days we had to call our star nutcase, a self-styled Emperor of the Americas, Grand Maya and Chief of the Cherokee Nation named, I think, McDowell … We had pasta with butter and garlic for dinner. And we were watching Don Giovanni on PBS when  sister Kimberly called in tears to tell us that someone had shot and killed John Lennon.

Kage loved opera but she never watched one again. She said it was bad luck.

We cried for days. Millions of people did; a few even killed themselves, and I shudder to think what John Lennon would have said to them had the matter come to his attention. The whole world shared our loss, of course, and mourned. I don’t think a bard had been mourned by so much of the western world since that world itself consisted of a few coasts around the Mediterranean, and no one was sure where the man had been born.

People knew about John. They knew him. His was not a stranger’s death. And so we all remember, those who felt not just the guilty thrill of “Dead Famous Person!” but the real pain of “Oh, my friend is dead” …

Kage was right, of course, and it’s better to remember that someone lived in the first place. But it’s hard not to remember their death too, because the deaths of those we love leave such huge holes in the world. Thirty years has not filled the void left by John’s departure. And really – would you want it to? I wouldn’t.

Rock on, Johnny. I love you.

Kage Baker had a very strange relationship with the events of WWII. To her, they were more like memories than historical accounts. Mind you, as an enthusiastic historian later in life, she learned that invaluable trick of personal immersion in the past – nonetheless, nothing was ever as real and immediate to her in other eras as was WWII.

Some intimate memory of the blood, perhaps, preserved in the flesh of the man who ultimately fathered her. If corners of the world are forever England due to the valiant men who sleep there, then some significant portion of Burma is also Hamtramck, Michigan – bedewed from the air as from a descending warrior-angel, by a bleeding paratrooper named George Henry Baker … his first-born child was subsequently a little girl who saw the entire world like a map spread out below her, and had a compass in her head.

Lamarckism is nonsense, but there are prenatal chemical changes that effect offspring. Maybe we don’t pay enough attention to the environment of the, as it were, smelters where the ore of our construction is purified. The forges of our mothers’ wombs, we know, are subject to all the shocks, delights and soundtracks of the world around them – what about the bodies of the men who refine the pure metal that goes into us? What chemical tide swept through George Henry Baker, sharpshooter and explosives expert, when he floated above the Burmese jungle and discovered he suddenly had two navels?

I dunno. He never talked about it. But his daughter thought Europe was on fire until she was 7, and was astounded when she first saw the beautiful white temple that stands above Pearl Harbor now: in her mind’s eye, she saw the smoking, twisted metal that originally marked this day, the black pearls of oil and blood that floated on the water then.

Iron runs in all of us. No more of it runs in soldiers than in any one else, but it does run closer to the surface – and all too often, right out on to the merciful, mourning earth. What soldiers do feel more often is the greater heat of the Maker, the Smith God who forms men and women from clay, the hammer blows that take a shapeless mass and straighten into a shining soul. Some of the iron in them is thereby beaten into steel. It is purified by the sleeping forests in them, pressed into coal and burning like the sun.

Some of them pass that metal to their children. And Kage was one of those, who was made of steel even before the womb.

Remember their fathers.

Kage Baker always felt that if you missed a deadline, you should try to catch it at once – even while it bounced away, as it were. The main thing was to catch up, not wait for the next deadline. This often played havoc with her medication schedules … however, it helped her make many a writing deadline that would otherwise have sunk without a trace.

Empress of Mars was one of those. Originally a novella, she planned (and promised) to expand it into a novel. Somehow, though, she scheduled it as having a June due date – it actually had a January due date, which she discovered during a Dickens Fair two or three years ago. She begged 60 days to fix the error and complete the book; as she had a reputation for inhuman speed (and because they are basically nice folks) Tor Books agreed.

I think Tor Books thought she would produce something rather like Anvil of the World; which is a triptych of three stories tied together with an overlaid uber-plot. It’s what Kage called a “mosaic novel”. But she had done that, you see, so she rather automatically did something else when she threw herself into completing Empress. What she ultimately did was create two or three entirely new plot lines, and literally weave them through the existing story.

A paragraph here, a page there; a back story deftly inserted into an otherwise dull conversation … there were plot lines and story arcs in four different colours of Post-it notes, all stuck to the wall beside her desk. As a selection was used, it was plucked and discarded like an autumn leaf. There were occasional  lapses – Harry liked to join in the discarding process, but had no real sense of what was ready to go – but overall it worked. Kage thought his method might have contributed to the finished plot once or twice …

Her editor was gratified and amazed. It wasn’t what he had expected. It was better. Kage had caught the lost chance on the bounce.

I mention this because, technically, I missed Sunday’s blog entry. I didn’t hit the PUBLISH button until after midnight, due to the exhausted state of elation I was in on realizing I had made it home alive. But the narrative ball is still bouncing, and so here is the second entry for December 6th – that first one early this morning was actually for the 5th. I just fell asleep somewhere between recounting the phantom cities and the prehistoric sea, and woke up much, much later slumped over on my desk.

It was a wild ride both up and down. Coming home, of course, we drove through a storm the whole length of the Bay Area and the San Joaquin valley. Going up on Friday, we drove into the burgeoning edges of that storm – just before sunset, we could see the dreaded tule fog beginning to form, rising from the wet ground like legions of ghosts. Down all the long dark aisles of the walnut and apricot and pistachio orchards, penumbrous figures were gathering and rising in the dying light. One could almost see the eyes forming in the fog as we sped past.

But the eyes were not under the trees. As we drove on through the twilight, we commented (one to another) that the cloud cover had prevented any sunset – just dove-coloured shadows spreading over the hills. Then, suddenly, the entire western sky was ablaze – the sun must have found a final rift somewhere below the horizon, though we couldn’t see where. What we could see were beaches and continents and oceans of scarlet and gold, bright as tinsel, spreading out sourcelessly over the Uttermost West,

And clearly formed in the masses of red clouds, in metallic gold: an open eye and a drooping Celtic moustache, from a vast solemn face regarding us. The old Sun, wearied out by the winter day? Cernunnos looking out for the helpless and benighted? I don’t know, but it was amazing. And slowly, the eye shut, until the face was asleep there; and then it vanished with the very last light.

“The sunset never watched me before,” said Kimberly thoughtfully. And we drove on.

Tomorrow: more Dickens reminiscence. With champagne and sabres and oranges.