Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved trick or treating. Not surprising, in someone who so liked Halloween and who never, ever forgot a moment of a cherished childhood. She contrived ways to keep trick or treating, too,  until nearly the year she died.

Being the eldest of many was a terrific help – we could go out quite legitimately until we were in our early 20’s, body-guarding our younger siblings.  Kage liked to pace genteely along the dark sidewalks with a single lit jack o’lantern in the crook of her arm like a severed head. While the littler ones ran up to the target door, Kage would pose motionless out in the shadows and turn slowly to display the glowing pumpkin to whoever opened the door … there was something about the silence and solemnity of it that really unnerved observers.

I only quit wearing a costume when I was 21, that being the year the baby, Genny, hit age 10 and was taller than me. It was distinctly embarrassing to have people hand me an Abba Zabba and ask the real kid if she wasn’t a little old for trick or treating … Kage and I still went out, though, even in civvies. By the time Genny was getting bored, the nieces and nephews started arriving and taking them out kept us going for almost the rest of Kage’s life.

When our travels took us odd places, we sometimes tried to get back to the Hollywood Hills for The Night. We once lived for a couple of years in a trailer in a Northern California oak wood, and trick or treaters were a little scarce. Well, children were scarce. Everyone else in the makeshift neighborhood was (like us) a Renaissance Faire actor, and trick or treating was wild and weird indeed. But it wasn’t all that different from any other nights in the woods, so we tried to get home for real trick or treating.

By the time we moved to Pismo, we had slowed down some. We spent our very first Halloweens completely at home, handing out candy … it was weird. And, living in a tourist beach town out of season, there were very few kids. We used to go walking down to the beach, though, when the fog was coming in and the last hot days had brought a red tide to bloom: livid green waves washing in, lines of unnatural light sweeping up the dark beach! All it needed was rotting pirates stumbling ashore. Kage danced between the incoming fluorescent waves and drank rum from a pocket flask, and we sang all the pirate songs we knew. (We knew quite a few.)

Within a year or so, though, our last niece was born, right there in Pismo Beach: Genny’s daughter, the exquisite Emma Rose, the inspiration for The Hotel Under the Sand. She was our passport to trick or treating in Pismo Beach, and a fine time was had by all for several years. When she did move back to Los Angeles, though, we settled back into handing out candy to our few visitors and looking for pirates on the nighttime beach: but we decorated like crazy women, and the neighborhood kids loved us.

We had became That House. The one with tons of lights, and half a dozen jack o’lanterns, and Beisel cutouts in all the windows, and a fog machine raining down mist from the balcony, and Jack Skellington (made by hand from real cornshocks, by the gods!) riding a skeletal stag in the garden …

That’s the way to survive, you see. When the really scary monsters begin to lurk around and make your knees creak and your eyes blur; when you no longer need the grey hair spray; when the crone in the mirror looks pretty good before you begin the makeup: that’s when you become That House and hand out candy to the ones who can still run around in the dark.

When the streets are clear, you can always walk down to the sea and drink some rum anyway. And dance, slowly and carefully, with the incoming glowing green tide.

Tomorrow: where we spent last Halloween

Kage Baker never forgot jokes. She never forgot anything.

She had two main laughs. The first, better known one, was a whispery snorted  “heh heh”; everyone who knew her heard her do that. The second, though – that was a huge, lyrical peal of laughter; it started in a giggle that sounded like she’d saved it from age 12 (because she had) and went on to helpless gales. It was a great laugh. You had to surprise her to get it out of her, though.

When she did laugh like that, she usually couldn’t stop. Something struck her as funny, and she’d laugh until she choked; and whatever really cracked her up would do it to her over and over. For years, sometimes. Once, refuting something I had said, Kage finished with a lofty, “So put that in your smipe and poke it!” A common enough malapropism, but forever after all I had to do was mutter “Smiiiiipe,” and she’d lose it.

I mention this because someone did it to me over the weekend, and I’ve been snickering on and off for days now.  A good (and tired) friend observed that he had read a line in this blog as “moomies and zombats.” I know not why, but that cracked me up and it just won’t let me go. Every time I think about the moomies – which happens more than you might imagine – I start giggling. I think about Kage talking about them, and I really start to laugh; she’d have loved them. Moomies and zombats … what are they?

(I can see her very clearly, leaning back in her wing-back chair, eyes half closed, making slow orchestral motions with her hands as she talked this. Occasionally she’ll peek from under her lashes, gauging the reception of her tale and beginning to dimple …)

Moomies are a kind of land mollusk. They have internalized their shell, rather like an octopus, but it’s not a beak. It’s a crispy layer around their innards, a burrito full of goo. Surrounding the shell  is not tasty cephalopod but yet more goo – a slimy layer that turns their exoskeleton into a kind of endoskeleton: so when you step on them they squish, then crunch, then squish again. Like a multi-stage snail, but worse. The shell is fragile and the internal slime is caustic, so if you pick one up you are risking a goo hand grenade explosion.

They are about a foot long; scavengers and ambush hunters. They smell overpoweringly of stale pineapple. They have bulging pale green eyeballs on stalks, which they can partially withdraw into their shells – only the stalks, though, so the bulging pale green eyeballs stay on the surface, staring at you, daring you to squash them. While you dither, they creep up and dissolve your feet with acid spit-slime and dozens of rubbery teeth, eating you very slowly once your feet fall off …

Zombats, now: they do not fly, nor burrow. Bats fly, and wombats will undermine your house without a moment’s thought (assuming they are capable of any thought) but zombats are climbers only. Tree-dwelling insects, in fact. They hum soothingly  and are furry, probably a form of wingless apoid. They form brightly coloured globes about 2 inches in diameter, from a waxy natural substance.  They use these as hunting blinds; seen in tree branches, they can easily be mistaken for berries and consumed by the unwary.

Zombats are active predators and specialize in victims with hands and poor impulse control. Most animals are too instinctively clever to eat them, but they prey heavily on primates; they are also one of the main predators of Procyon lotor: the raccoon. While a swift and experienced raccoon or human can get the zombat-fruit in their mouth and crunch it up immediately (this can be a nice source of protein), the hidden predator usually emerges as it enters the mouth – where it immediately burrows through the soft palette and the sinuses and so into the brain. It eats only  small portions of the frontal lobes, so the victim may survive indefinitely – they are notable, however, by steadily decreasing intelligence and initiative, and are characterized by a nasal tone of voice caused by having a zombat up their nose.

Many zombat victims get into politics. Or your garbage.

Some natural history: Moomies pollinate molds, and zombats keep down the raccoon population. Moomies are hermaphrodites, while zombats form seasonal pair bonds. Most moomies are an off-white colour, but the Pacific Northwest variant comes in a tabby morph. Zombats are translucent greyish-pink, which assists in camouflage while they are eating your brain.

So there you have it. I snickered through all of this – except the 5 hours I spent waiting for the power to come back on, praying this blog had survived the electricity outage. The DWP is blaming it on the wind and a palm frond- but I am pretty sure it was the zombats. They can look like dates.

The moomies are probably waiting for full dark down under the utility trucks.

This entry is dedicated with gratitude and much giggling to Tom Barclay.

Kage Baker did not deal with machinery. She interfaced with it gingerly, tolerating moving parts and current as long as they did their jobs quietly and required no attention from her. At the first sign of rebellion, she’d abandon her computer for pen and ink. A steel-nibbed pen with a wooden staff, by preference And an ink bottle.

I’d fix the fiendish thingie.

Yestreday the printer began making strange grating noises – not when it was printing, which it steadfastly refused to do, but at odd intervals and random. Many unique forms of origami (reminiscent of the Jerome K. Jerome’s invulnerable pineapple tin) emerged from it, having been altered from simple text into shapes previously unknown to Mankind.

I did not fix the fiendish thingie. I spent most of today not fixing it, too.

Therefore, I am on my way to make the rounds of Best Buy, Fry’s, Staples, Target, Offices Depot and Max, and Harga’s House of Discount Printers. I hope to replace the zombie on my filing cabinet with a fresh djinn that will do my bidding.

Tomorrow: back to the NICE monsters.

Kage Baker was, as I have hinted, a monster snob. She had clear ideas of what constituted the classics, and scorned what she considered to be the etrange nouveau. Every now and then, the iron magnolia in her genetic heritage would bloom like a century plant; and whatever had incurred her ire would be consigned to the Outer Darkness where there was no social standing or good china.

A lot of the modern vampires ended up there. Lestat made the cut, at least until Anne Rice lost control of her writing. The Hammer films were not really respectable, but aristocratic Christopher Lee certainly was. She adored Gary Oldman in Coppola’s Dracula. (That film started Kage’s interest in absinthe, as a matter of fact; culminating in the absinthe kit she constructed the year before she died.)  But the dyslexic Count Alucard and all his ilk, all those lounge lizards in bad suits and fake diplomatic sashes: no way. And when the Twilight crowd sent in their calling cards, Kage was not receiving.

There was no acceptable Frankenstein’s Monster for Kage, post-Karloff: with the singular exception of Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein. That is such a brilliant and hilarious homage –  They shot it in black and white, for heaven’s sake! They used the original lab set! – that she could not resist. Besides, we attended the industry preview (I was working at the Press Club at the time), and so the film came with the proper introduction.

Mummies and zombies: well, let’s face it, until recently they were decidedly second-string.

Besides, mummies were also permanently eclipsed for Kage by dear old Grandpa Boris. He was such a compelling old corpse, and wore that cool fez besides – and the story was so romantic. She turned up her nose at lesser revenants, until 1999’s The Mummy … and what got her there was simple male pulchritude. Brendan Fraser! Oded Fehr! And the enchanting Arnold Vosloo, who was somehow dashing and handsome even while half-decomposed. Not to mention munching down a live scarab beetle with a panache that would have put James Bond to shame.

Zombies sort of fell off the radar, when we were kids. There were some zombie movies, but they were both inexplicable and pitiable – dark Caribbean settings full of rich white people drinking strange cocktails and murdering one another; and then, somewhere out in the darkness, black people walking aimlessly around with faces frozen in a horror we did not understand. And it usually turned out to be a fake, anyway. It was a while yet before George Romero integrated the zombies and made the Undead an open shop. By that time, Kage was older and more squeamish, and couldn’t take the gore.

Books like Jane Slayre and  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, movies like Zombieland, came along when Kage was just too tired and sick to get into them. I offered to read PP&Z to her – I read to her a lot, the last few months – but she said, “Naw, I’m too close to joining the cast,” and opted for P.G. Wodehouse instead. So she just about entirely missed the Zombie Renaissance. I think it would have amused her rather more in its present literary incarnation than it did from George Romero.

Werewolves? They just never did it for Kage. Even when interesting werewolves made it to the silver screen – things like  An American Werewolf in London, for instance – they didn’t catch her fancy. The Marin County hot-tub werewolves in The Howling were pretty funny, and Jack Nicholson was an all-too-convincing Wolf, but lycanthropes were just not her thing. They were forever the B team.

I don’t think the new crop of those would have changed her mind, either. Mere species ambiguity didn’t bother her, but (as she said) she never went out with a guy prettier than she was.

Tomorrow: more monsters – moomies and zombats

Kage Baker was a classicist in her monster preferences, as she was in so many areas of her life.

Mind you, we grew up just before the modern monsters began proliferating on the movie screen – no Freddie, no Jason, not even the elegant skeletal horror of the Aliens. Zombies were rarely represented and were usually tragic and obvious victims of evil slavemasters. Even the Teenaged Werewolf was a little declasse. (And anyway, he was far too similar to our babysitters’ boyfriends to be really scary. He was just gross. Eeewww.)

Ghosts, on the rare occasions they were not humourously pursuing Bob Hope or Abbot and Costello, didn’t scare us. Still don’t. (Should Kage wish to haunt, I would be delighted.) But they just couldn’t be taken very seriously back in the 50’s.

No, for us, it was Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Wolfman; it was the myriad classical witches and goblins of the darker Disney films; it was robots and giant brains from space. And there were the good old homophageous denizons of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson,  where every bad little boy or girl ended up on the menu. Wholesome, old-fashioned stuff!

Blood was scarce and often just implied. Body parts were seldom displayed, unless they were playing a leading role – a crawling eye or hand, the stitched-together chassis of the creature under the surgeon’s drape. There was romance galore, but sex was not evil and wouldn’t get you killed – that had to wait for the Evil Teenager films, where nothing guaranteed you were for the chop like making out in the back seat of a car. A vampire might display nobility, an animated corpse tenderness; the werewolf dressed like a racetrack tout, but he displayed a moving Everyman’s despair.

Despite the ghoulies lurking everywhere, the world portrayed was more elegant and more innocent than it would soon become. That’s where Kage chose the images of her monsters.

The man-sized and man-shaped did not frighten her too much – although, as she explained practically, you knew Godzilla could not be in the closet and Dracula might very well be.  (Not too much of a problem, though – sister Anne thought Lugosi was altogether dishy, in fact. Kage, who had a fondness for skinny Englishmen, preferred Karloff.) None of us were too very worried about werewolves, since their image then was still focused on Larry Talbot – and we all thought Lon Chaney Jr. was, frankly, a bit of a jerk.

Nothing that fits in your closet can be that bad, Kage reasoned. There’s a size limitation, at the very least. You can get away from something that at least has an arm’s reach, even if it’s reaching for you.

What scared Kage were uncontrollable monsters. Chaotic monsters. Big monsters with unsee-able edges or motives. Things like The Blob, and giant robots like Gort. Or the aliens in the sandpit in Invaders from Mars, who spend most of the movie as an inchoate light in the dark fields and transform the grownups into dead-eyed strangers. Later on, many scholarly articles would be written explaining the political metaphors behind all these films; but what Kage took away from them in her extreme childhood was that Huge Uncontrollable Things lived in the darkness and could come get you.

What scared her most of all … was King Kong. She’d run screaming from the room as a child when that  drum beat began, and the natives came to get Fay Wray. Even as a grownup she would shiver and gulp at her rum, snickering at her own panic but frightened nonetheless. It was the drums, you see.  Kong was scary, sure – but it was the drums and the implacable natives that were the very imbodiment of the relentless Thing in the darkness.

As it turned out, she may have been prescient in that fear, as she was in so much else. Not that a giant gorilla would come for her, or a mob of extras  with African spears and Polynesian canoes – horrifying as bad research can be. But that was the sort of the thing that killed her: a shapeless monster from another dimension, a giant inescapable thing. Not the figure in the closet, whom you can kick in the balls and run from, but the drumbeat in the night, bringing in God-knows-what on the tide.

Tomorrow: mummies and zombies. Second string or neglected?

Kage Baker had a heart murmur most of her life.

We always assumed it was a side effect from a memorable multi-stage measles attack in early childhood – which turned out some years later to have been and/or included rheumatic fever. But she turned so many colours and had so many rashes that year, she might have mutated into a leopard and no one would have noticed. She finished up the marathon with chicken pox; and then didn’t catch mumps until she was in her 20’s. And she did that twice. Kage always moved in her own time zone.

The heart murmur never did her the least bit of harm. It was, as they say, benign, and only served to unnerve doctors. No, her noisy heart worked fine until it got tired of trying to deal with the blitzkrieg of her rare and intransigent cancer, and just – stopped. Between two breaths, between two beats: tick and no tok, she was gone.

And though by that time it was a relief in many ways, it was also the scariest thing I have ever seen. Because Kage was there – slowed like light in a layered prism, slowed so you could see the hummingbird-wing beat of life beginning to flicker – but she was there and then she wasn’t. It was like a firework in reverse, climbing and climbing on a tail of impossible shadow and then exploding into – not nothing, but nothingness. A something that was not not. A void. An absence.

This all comes to mind because I went to the doctor’s today, and realized that over the last year the waiting room has become a Chambre of Horrors. (“Dumb and Dumber” was also playing on the waiting room DVR, but aside from that …) I’m not afraid of needles or other medical paraphernalia. I’m afraid of memories, memories of the Kage-shaped vacuum that she left behind her so suddenly.

The essential transaction did not happen where we could see. I presume that Death was even more a gentleman than usually portrayed, and so arranged their tryst somewhere more private than Kage’s bedroom.

Nonetheless, there was not a moment’s doubt when it happened. If someone ever finds an accurate way to show that on a movie screen, it will the scariest monster ever. Audience members will turn to the vampires  beside them, and bury their faces for comfort in the bosom  of the Undead. Werewolves will pat people’s heads reassuringly.

Well, there you go, kids. Just a meditation on the vagaries of mortality, as we count down to Halloween and practice earthquake drills all over Los Angeles. We’re courting monsters and practicing for disaster today. And we have no idea what it will be like, but we’re sure – pretty sure – we’ll know it when we see it.

Yep.

Tomorrow:The Acme Catalog of Monsters

Kage Baker loved Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. I mean really, in a familial, beloved-elder-relative sort of way.They permeated part of our childhood. Especially Kage’s, giving her a life-long affection for conflicted villains and noble anti-heroes. Decades later, her version of The Hero’s Journey (The House of the Stag) would cast the evil Dark Lord as the hero.

Though both gentlemen played many more parts than their iconic monster roles, they will always be best remembered as Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature. We watched them in everything they did, though, as pleased to find a “new” old film as if we were finding home movie reels.

Mr. Karloff, of course, succesfully mutated over the years of his illustrious career until he was the ultimate slightly scary Grandfather – Granddad Boris, Kage called him affectionately – and even to people too young or too deprived to know him as Frankestein’s Creature, he is THE Voice of the Grinch. (Accept no substitutes.) And he survived to play disarmingly dotty roles in television shows, notably The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Wild, Wild West.

Mr. Lugosi was always more the slightly distant, inhumanly elegant uncle; the one you wished would teach your Dad how to pick a tie, and would quiz you on Latin declensions. He had been a romantic lead in Europe, before he found his tormented fate and fame in Hollywood. I always thought he was perfectly believable as a mad (but well-dressed) doctor, or a suave and civilized vampire – it was when he played the unshaven Igor that my willing suspension of disbelief slipped. He was so sinister and poised.

Being industry brats as we were,  we kids were always taught never to bother famous people – don’t stare, don’t ask for autographs, don’t make comments when you meet then in Hughes Market picking up a gallon of milk. And we took a perverse pride in not gawking at the famous faces: we were in the know, we got backstage, we heard the stories.

Kage and I had and heard family stories about lots of stars, including Mssrs. Lugosi and Karloff. They both lived in Hollywood, back when even big stars lived near the ordinary people in their trade. Bela Lugosi, for instance, once made a very admiring and reverent remark in praise of Mama’s, mmm, derrriere as she posed on a ladder for a lighting check. It made her laugh to the end of her days. And Kage delighted in the story, which helped permanently humanize the monsters for her.

I often wondered, anyway, just how securely Kage was fastened into her own time-frame. For her, that story may well have been a memory, not just the tale of one. She talked about both Karloff and Lugosi as if she had seen them clearly, sometimes. She might as well have seen Karloff walking his terrier along the narrow streets above Highland Avenue. Or  seen Lugosi returning to his bungalow courtyard in the eredawn, still in evening clothes and cape after playing Dracula on stage, frightening a neighbor half to death with a bow and a flourish and a drawled, “Good morning, neighbor.”

And today we are not only smackdab in the middle of monster season,  it is Bela Lugosi’s birthday – Happy Natal Day, my very dear sir! Many happy returns of the day! Or something …

Tomorrow: Miss Muffin, Mr. Singh and shambling neighbors

Kage Baker was fond of monsters. There are 7 definitions of “monster” that  I can think of off-hand, ranging from  the ancient “omen” to  the rather vulgarly modern “highly successful”; undoubtedly more when one starts peering into the darkened halls of the sciences. Kage found something interesting in all of them. And now, of course, it is their season once again.

The world of fantasy is replete, awash and in fact bursting with monsters these days. Kage had achieved a certain ennui in recent years – vampires had begun to rank right next to elves in the ranks of Self-Involved Annoying Prats. Anyway, Kage’s absolute favourites  were always the monsters she grew up with. The neighbors. The ones who made good. The stars.

We grew up in Hollywood, and the Monsters of the Silver Screen lived where we lived. Especially the Universal Studios monsters – for one thing, Mama’s house was literally just across the Cahuenga Pass from Universal and you could see the sound stages from the roof.

For another, the Universal monsters were the uncontested Lords of the Monster World in the 50’s and 60’s: there could be no argument, unless about whether Dracula or the Frankestein creature or dear old Imhotep the Mummy was coolest. Poor Wolfman Larry Talbot just didn’t have the chops of the first three, and always had that look on his face like a guilty dog, anyway.

As for the “Giant Monsters” like Godzilla, Mothra, Garuda and Rodan – strictly parvenus.

But the Big Three were gods of our childhood. Kage, of course, the constant researcher and manic collector, bought Famous Monsters of Filmland. We’d all hang about the windows of hobby stores and the huge Hollywood Toy and Magic Shop, too, wistfully eyeing the Aurora model kits – but those cost money and were usually beyond us. I mean, some of them glowed in the dark!

God knows where all those magazines ended up, but we also all sought out real books about the films as well. Books about how the films were made, books about mythology and folklore, books about “real” monsters in history. Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker and the histories of the Pharaohs; before we realized it, all of us girls were deep into (gasp!) educating ourselves and it was too late to go back: the Curse of Information had us.

This is one of the ways people end up doing historical recreation, by the way. A lot of us were monster fans and grew up critiquing, say, the weird mixtures of modern and medieval dress in  films like Bride of Frankestein. A fondness for monster movies leads a certain kind of kid straight into research, and ultimately she is dying wool with iron filings, woad and salt. (Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Believe me, it smells worse.) Or – as one of our brilliant friends did while still a beardless youth – embalming his sadly deceased parakeet and burying it in two or three gorgeously polychromed nesting sarcophagi …

These are some of the people who ended up as operatives, too. Many a beloved friend was gifted with immortality by Kage. She couldn’t bear to let them go. Lots of grieving artists or scientists have made their creatures for similar reasons … and “monster”, after all, has so many meanings. So I guess some of us are now deathless monsters, thanks to Kage.

At least she didn’t sew Rosie Greer’s head to anyone.

Tomorrow: more Scary Monsters. I think we are entering a Monster Marathon …

Kage Baker was my sister and my friend. Probably my best friend, at least from the ages of 14 and 15 – that was high school. That’s where she realized she was funny, in a way that would haunt her later in life.

(A note, Dear Reader – sisters are not always friends, but they can become friends at any stage of life. If you have a sister of whom you currently despair,  take heart – one or the other of you may yet evolve into a human being. I used to chase my younger sister Kimberly around the house with utterly deadly intent, which was only foiled because I was a half-blind klutz and kept running into doorways and major appliances. But she’s been my friend for a long time now, and in fact I currently live with her. What, I should go to a stranger?)

Anyway, sisters are useful. In high school, I used some of Kage’s textbooks, of course. Immaculate Heart High School was known more for academic excellence than for anyone actually having any money, and most girls sold their used books or donated them willy nilly them to their own younger sisters.  Like any cliched Catholic school, we tended to also run in family packs, so there was always someone who already had your last name anyway, waiting to take your books.

Kage drew  odd things in all the margins. Many of the odd things ended up in her Anvil Universe.  One pen and ink sketch – a complex, beautiful one-line figure like a wire sculpture – of a Child of the Sun brandishing a trident actually sold at a student art show; Kage bought a fancy fountain pen and was in chocolate money for weeks. Some foreshadowing of Smith would have approved of the practicality.

In the Health Class text (noted already for general hilarity amongst the all-girl student body) Kage had written amusing little foot notes everywhere. Medieval prescriptions of the eye-of-newt variety were frequent, and usually ended  in: ” – and then you DIE!”  And I  recall the recipe for The Universal Antidote, which recommended imbibing several pounds of charcoal and bread crumbs in the apparently common event of strychnine attack; after which I found her familiar hand had noted, “I, personally, would rather be poisoned.”

Miss Jasmine, the Physical Education teacher, was not amused.

But those notes were the beginning of what reviewer after reviewer would call “her trademark wry wit.” This phrase came to drive Kage mad. Not that she didn’t want to be known as witty – she did, and reliable comedy is much harder to write than drama. (It’s especially rare in science fiction, too, where the genre sense of humour seems to have been pretty much used up entirely by Douglas Adams.) But the reviewers always said the exact same thing.

Kage complained  it was like the traditional description of Hyracotherium (Eohippus, the dawn horse, when it was at home), which is nearly always said to be “about the size of a fox terrier.”  When this description was written in Victorian England, a lot more people were familiar with fox terriers and their relative size; now it means less and less to the modern reader. Additionally, the description gets confused and is sometimes abbreviated to “about the size of a fox“. Kage said it was obvious that as time went on, fewer and fewer people had seen a fox, a fox terrier or a Hyracotherium, and were just repeating the last thing someone had said.

Nonetheless, Kage did have a wry wit. Her humour was dry and sharp and observant of human foibles. Prat falls and dick jokes were not her usual style – she was both more subtle and more ruthless than that.  Kage had a talent for tidily seeing the flaws in a matter, and then taking them just that critical step over the edge into insanity – that’s how she designed her future world, where chocolate is an illegal drug and you can be jailed for life for playing D&D. Kage saw to the heart of the ridiculous and succinctly  announced it. Not only was the Emperor wearing no clothes, he had a really bad tattoo left over from his sailor days …

It’s what she did. She did it when she was 14 and scribbled in the margins of her school books, and she did it when she was 50-odd and wrote all those wry witty things in her books.

So, how large is a fox terrier? Large enough to remembered, apparently.The description does the job.

Tomorrow: monsters. Really.

Kage Baker liked anticipation. She liked run-ups to events, the count-down to the The Day, the pre-celebration rituals to be observed. No holiday was a one-off with her.

She said it made any given holiday last longer – which it does, of course, and that is all to the best. Kage really hated to get all worked up for a given event and then have it vanish within a few hours. You wait a month or more for Christmas! It shouldn’t disappear at 9 AM December 25th; whether you are religious or secular, there is too much invested in that morning to just let it go once the wrapping is off the presents. That’s why we always celebrated until  12th Night, the traditional 12 days of Christmas. By January 6th, you’re a lot more ready to pack up the tinsel.

Kage had a real aversion to the modern habit of beginning celebration too early, though. Anticipation, yes; pre-game festivities, yes. Heck, there is a celebratory Sunday even in the middle of Advent! But Christmas is not supposed to start before Halloween is even off the stage.  We went looking for some extra Halloween deco yestreday, and found Christmas wreathes and freakin’ elves in the aisles beside the decent hard-working bats and witches.

Kage used to complain, in these later decadent years, that poor Thanksgiving hardly had a chance, crunched in between Halloween and Christmas as it was – so she went out of her way to decorate for that All-American holiday: we’d take the bones and learing faces out of the Halloween wreath, leaving the bright ears of corn; we’d take down the pumpkin lights and replace them with glowing grapes and autumn leaves. Kage would bring out her carefully preserved Beistle paper cornucopies and turkeys and put them up in the windows.

Mind you, we had Beistle’s up for Halloween, too – extraordinary polychrome witches and skeletons and moons and scratch cats, flawlessly preserved and rescued from the dustbins of the past. She hadn’t gotten them when we were kids. (Though she wanted them then, and begged endlessly but futilely for the kits in the Five and Dime.) She found them decades later and ferociously hunted and  acquired them on EBay and Amazon. God, she was fierce!

She resurrected all manner of deco and tradition from our childhoods like that. Sometimes it was stuff we’d actually had, like those fold-out honeycomb pumpkins. Sometimes it was stuff we hadn’t had but she had wanted (and still wanted, and would have): like the Beistle cutouts. Or Glass Wax! Someone still makes a formula very like Glass Wax, and Kage tracked down original stencils for extravagant amounts; and the last 3 years of her life, we had Christmas Glass Wax tableaux on the windows.

Kage came to the conclusion that EBay for sure, and maybe Amazon as well, were branches of Dr. Zeus Inc. What a perfect way to get treasures out into the world again! There are few questions asked if you sell your Kentish great-granny’s bone knitting needles for a few pounds to a textile nut in California. You will be well out of the paper trail in 15 years, when the faint Greek inscriptions are found on her #10’s and analysis shows the needles were carved from fresh aurochs’ bones …

Tomorrow: scary movies?