Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker used to say she wanted to go “all of a piece”, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.

If you, Dear Readers, are unfamiliar with the famed 19th century American jurist and poet Holmes. it would do you all good to get to know him. Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica or any poetry anthology worth its ampersand will give you information on him. His career on the Supreme Court is especially interesting; he remains one of the few Supreme Court Judges known for his scholarship. As a poet, he displays a rather dated voice, often hilariously so by modern standards. But he is a decidedly American poet, sometimes excruciatingly folksy but also heroic and emotional in a manly way. Kage liked him.

(When we went aboard the U.S.S. Constitution on a trip to Boston, Kage stood on the deck and recited Holmes’ Old Ironsides. The crew was unperturbed; they are are used to it. In fact, though there was no tour then scheduled, they invited her below decks for one anyway.)

The point here is that the carriage in the title doesn’t wear out: it is logically designed so that no one part is any stronger than another – so it continues on and on, not subject to decay because it all ages at the same rate, and thus no part can fail.

This struck Kage as a good way to age, personally. Her goal was to have all major bodily systems quit at the same moment, allowing her to fall gracefully dead or at least into a pile of dust. That, you see, was the eventual fate of the Wonderful Shay – at precisely 100 years to the day from its completion, it gave a dreadful lurch and was reduced to a pile of shavings and splinters.

This was also the day and moment, historically, of the Great Lisbon Earthquake in Portugal. This is an event rarely remembered to day, except in Portugal, and associated islands like Majorca and the Azores – this despite the fact that it was a humdinger of a 7.7 complete with fires, gaping fissures and a tsunami. But it was recent history for Holmes, and a disaster of such astonishing magnitude that he considered it appropriate as a death-knell for the Wonderful Shay.

Anyway, that was what Kage wanted to do when she died. I wished it had been that way, too, instead of the relentless months-long deterioration of her last months. Though she bore it with astounding courage and cheerfulness, it was hard. But that last day, at least, it did happen almost as she wanted. She fell peacefully asleep in the literal arms of her family, in her own bed, with the sound of the sea in her ears. By the time her poor tired body stopped, she was long gone into the West, and there was nothing else for her to do. It was as close to a quiet crumbling as she could manage.

I, too,wish to go like the One-Hoss Shay – and for decades, as I bounced evidently unharmed from disaster to disaster, it seemed that I might succeed. I healed with inhuman speed; I either recovered from diseases with insouciant ease, or never caught at all plagues that felled everyone around me. I entered my 60’s confident, content, and probably fairly arrogant.

Well. I fell from grace and health with a speed and thoroughness more suited to some classical Greek king bad-mouthing the gods. Whole systems failed en masse, or in chorus-line sequence; things went wrong I had never even heard of in a lifetime of care-giving at other peoples’ beds. I did not know, for instance, that you could break two valves at once in your heart; or that a hole could then be torn in your heart by the valves acting up like pistons in a cartoon. I never knew that after heart surgery, it was common to have all your hair fall out. (That alone made me almost reconsider the benefits of surviving, for a little while.) I had somehow never learned that going on a ventilator was considered a permanent disability – but when I woke up 3 weeks after heart surgery, I was not expected to walk, talk or breathe on my own again. I was expected to stay in a nursing facility, like a good little turnip …

Wonderful Shays are not consigned to the back of the stable and left to rot. I was having none of it, and with my family’s support, and by being both stubborn and a really bad patient, I made it home. Since then. I have been working at returning to something approaching normalcy. It’s been ridiculously hard, Dear Readers, which is why these blogs have become few and far between. It’s like climbing a cinder-cone: climb 13 inches and slide back 12. Days go by with small but definite improvements – then some minor thing exhausts me or trips me up, and I sleep for days. I want to be part of my household again, but all too often I am merely a piece of furniture.

I am neither drivable, nor a pile of dust. It’s freaking depressing.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bad patch – fell down 3 times in as many days, one of of them a nose-first bash into the living room floor. Not only did I scare my poor sister, I bruised most of myself, and then wrenched the rest by the contortions required to get me upright again. It’s still difficult to type, after scrunching my hands.

Then today, I encountered a new problem. While dining on leftover Chinese food – s one does; the only thing better is leftover pizza – I realized that my mouthful of barbecued pork was simply not going down. I had chewed it thoroughly, swallowed it properly, I had not inhaled it: but apparently my throat is now narrower by some tiny but crucial amount, undoubtedly due to unsuspected scar tissue. It was bizarre, surreal – I couldn’t talk or make a sound, had (somehow) nothing to throw to get attention … and it was suddenly getting harder to breathe …

So I Heimliched myself. I had no idea if it would work, but no one had ever told me it wouldn’t, which is always enough for me … I clenched my fists together and punched myself as hard as I could just below my sternum. That moved things enough for me to croak “Help!”, and then explosively vomit everything I’d eaten that morning. I hadn’t eaten much, but I couldn’t stop. It was disgusting and messy, but it worked! I could breathe again!

I fear I scared my family half to death, but it worked! Within 20 minutes, I was pretty much fine – clean, in fresh clothes, breathing easily. Shaking like an aspen and really wobbly, but it was a vast improvement. Kimberly made me some lentil soup when I was up to it, which was warm and wonderful – one is always so hungry after throwing up, once one finally stops.

Anyway, Dear Readers, I Heimliched myself successfully. I am inordinately proud of this. I am also exhausted and vow to eat soft food slowly for the next several days. And it was really good Chinese food, too … sigh. Kimberly observed what an interesting blog post this would make; what occurred to me was how Kage would have yelled at me for the entire silly incident.

But, you know, I just have to resign myself that the elegant fate of the One-Hoss Shay is not to be mine. Probably I won’t even manage Kage’s dignified departure. I am just more the pratfall type, the person who stands under the falling safe, steps on the banana peel, is mistaken for fresh salmon by a hungry bear … decapitated by a nutjob with a thrift-shop katana. Badly. Kage was the One-Hoss Shay, but I am the unfortunate city of Lisbon.

It’s going to take an earthquake hour to make my end. And in consideration of the last two years, I think that is how I really want it.

*https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm

Kage Baker had a tremendous emotional dependence on the steady progression of the seasons. She wasn’t afraid of their not progressing -she liked the beat, man; she heard, and loved, the heartbeats of the year. Don’t roll your eyes and say white women don’t hear the beat; she’d roll her eyes right back (and, oh, could she roll her eyes!) and tell you that a white woman certainly could hear the beat; she just heard a different beat.

But she heard it all the time.

Some it it, I am sure, was a sensitivity to rhythm that was unique to Kage herself. A sort of internal metronome; an instrument, incidentally, that fascinated Kage. I offered frequently to get her one, just for amusement’s sake. But she demurred, saying she didn’t want anyone to know that she could be entertained by just sitting around listening to a metronome tick. I thought she could use it as a meditation aid, but she said, No, that’s what the Who turned up loud was for …

The rest of her hearing the annular beat was just – listening. Listening with extreme sensitivity to vibration, as many animals do; developing an intensely delicate aural palette, that could hear the grass growing and tell the difference between the fall of mist and the fall of star dust. About 14 tons of stardust falls to Earth every day, you know; that’s a freaking lot more dust that falls than water, here in Southern California. Maybe the difference helped.

Kage claimed she could hear the music of the spheres, and loved our years in the oak forests and in Pismo Beach – the emptiness of where we lived allowed any noise to translate into the subtle ringing of crystal spheres and glass gears. For Kage, these were sounds most prevalent on windy spring and breathless hot summer nights. But they were background noise to all the seasonal sounds – for Kage, waves of chilled or heated air sweeping over us from the deserts and the seas, the constant straining and sighing of plants, even the sounds of particular animals prowling at night.

Living in the empty places exposes you to an amazing lot of feral noise …

Vixens are both paranoid and opportunistic; they will hide their babies from you until one evening you hear a yipping at the front door, and open it to find a tired mamma fox and three kits half her size inquiring after possible leftovers? Deer will come 24/7; you learn when the soughing noise is the wind, and when it is a doe eating your cotton and linen clothes off the line. And it gets exciting when something hits the side your house or trailer in the middle of the night, and you need to wait until daylight to find out if it’s a bear or a stag. And even if is a stag, it is not very calming, because it left hoof prints the size of dinner platters, and Kage keeps reciting the story of the Ceryneian hind sotto voce (it had golden antlers and breathed fire and was twice the size of non-inflammatory deer). Badgers, though, are nearly perfect neighbors: quiet, handsome, uninterested in the garbage.

Here on the edges of the LA River and Griffith Park, I have learned how much amazing bird noise persists in such an urban setting. I can tell the difference between a crow and a raven; crows seldom sound like parrots or thumb pianos, and ravens do. Hawks are good at marking out the seasons – in spring they shriek their desire from high in the air, and scream while they plummet together in ecstasy; in fall, the year’s fledglings sit amid the thinning leaves and cry for their moms to come feed them. (Which they seldom do.) Mockingbirds sing all summer and all night, so if you hear a song sparrow or a finch or Jethro Tull at midnight, it’s probably a mockingbird. Peacocks sound like cats being murdered, and mark summer. Geese not only trumpet, their wings beat strongly enough to hear them in the cold autumn air.

In fall, rain and leaves fall. You learn to tell if the whispering patter is falling leaves or rain across the porch. After years of sleeping at Faires in buildings held together with duct tape and dried beer, I have become ridiculously anxious about both sounds, and now have to get up and pace through the house to make sure everyone is under a roof and the roof isn’t leaking. And if you’re sleepy enough, you can get awfully confused as to what season it really is – while mostly what it does in LA is not rain, what it alternately does is rain whenever the hell it feels like it.

Kage tried to keep time with all of it. While this sometimes necessitated changing in mid-stride from a burgomasque to a pavane, that didn’t faze her. She could dance to the counter-beat if it struck her. She was a genius at harmony. But you could see the physical delight in her steps and movements when she fit them, half-unconsciously, to the beat of a woodpecker or a blacksmith’s hammer, dancers’ bells, or a drum, or a thousand hands thundering in applause.

Now it’s nearly winter. The mornings are cold and silent, except for the distant chorus of the geese, which tempts me to leap out of my warm bed go haring off after them down the frosted street. (I would fall over, turn blue and ascend to fly with the geese within half a block … but one does remember one’s youth at times like that.) The stars have begun to sing; the owls have begun to chant. And now the faint sweet chiming of the holiday lights has begun.

Have you never noticed that, Dear Readers? As the strings of lights go on and off, each small bulb gives a tiny, delicate ting! as it switches back and forth. You must lie very still to hear it – but if you do, then all the blinking lights on the tree, the mantel, around the windows and railings of the porch give a constant song as soft and clear as a baby’s breathing. All night; all winter.

It is the sleeping heartbeat of the world, transmitted through the coloured fire we light to mark the winter darkness. Listen for it this season, Dear Readers. The planets and the sweet darkness between them all sing to us, assuring us of rest and quiet sleep.