The Things Are Also People

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker liked to acknowledge October as the season of monsters. She was fascinated by monsters.

Not gory, squelchy, slimy monsters -not modern monsters, really, at all. She preferred the older and more classic meanings of the word: a prodigy or marvel. Something of extraordinary excellence or value.  Of an unusual success or goodness. Even simply something large, or a combination of animal and human properties. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, which revels in definitions as all-encompassing as possible, rarely evokes evil in its definitions of monster; and even when it does, it leans more on the shock value of unusual deformity than of egregious malice.

Most modern monsters tend toward the blood, gore and evil side. Possibly it’s because most of them are visual creatures in stories meant to be viewed: the movies. Literary monsters have the 4th wall conveniently removed for their performance, and are more inclined to be presented as romantic, sexy, sympathetic or admirable. It’s hard to attribute deep spiritual feelings to a blank-eyed zombie chewing on a toddler’s leg – much easier to indulge a vampire or werewolf who looks like the dishy box boy at the Safeway.

The truly classic cinema monsters do succeed in touching our hearts and souls, though. After all, back in the good old days of Universal Studios masterpieces, they cast a lot of good, real actors as monsters. Karloff is heart-breaking as Frankenstein’s Monster, always projecting the supernal innocence of someone who really didn’t ask to be born. As the Mummy, his hooded eyes and drawn mouth speak volumes of the tragedy of too much knowledge and life. Claude Rains plays the Invisible Man as a manic sort of Puck. And Lugosi’s Dracula is a towering icon of tormented, corrupted nobility, someone who knows what he was and – horribly – what he has become.

A far cry from the modern versions; although Christopher Lee does his best. But then, he’s a real actor, too.

Anyway, these were the sorts of monsters Kage preferred. She had no objections to most science fiction creatures – which have always tended heavily toward giant bugs and blobs. There’s not much personality there, but at least the action rarely descends into the sort of despicable torture porn so common nowadays. And there are always flashes of genuinely scary brilliance – the Monsters of the Id from Forbidden Planet, or the implant-controlled adults in Invaders from Mars. The first two Aliens movies had it, too.

The television show Supernatural tries hard to give dimension to its monsters; and succeeds a lot of the time. It’s not all blood, gore and kinky sex; there are monsters who worry about their day jobs, and fuss with pizza coupons, and play bridge with their neighbors – they have weight and dimension, which is what Kage wanted from a good monster story. The show Grimm has made some good efforts, too; especially since they expanded the role of the horologist werewolf, and added in characters like the plump, fussy carpenter were-beaver.

These monsters are people. You can depend on them to carry their share of the plot. And probably buy your kid’s Girl Scout Cookies, too.

That’s what Kage liked in characters – that they be people. It’s actually pretty simple; the difficulty is divorcing the concept of “humanity” from shape and colour and degree of hairiness. Most humans are people. Most chimpanzees and gorillas are too; even lots of baboons. Most dogs. Some birds. Elephants. Cetaceans. Curiously, the species that seems to have the most difficulty recognizing that “people”is a state of mind rather than a shape is Homo sapiens – hell, all these other creatures recognize us, but we aren’t even any good at identifying our own species as people!

Kage thought that was a vast tragedy, that blind spot in human vision. Small wonder, she observed, that sympathetic monsters catch the audience’s heart. Humans are primed, like so many other clever animals, to recognize The Other by the light in their eyes. Or eye. Or radiation-sensitive thermal patch. But we’re so dumfounded by the looks of our actual con-specifics that we can’t quite figure the trick out. Kage thought that trick was one of the biggest tasks human beings had. Monsters, she said, were a good place to practice. We’re all monsters, after all.

Look at the people! And the … things, exclaims Arthur Dent on beholding The Restaurant at The End of The Universe. And Zaphod Beeblebrox tells him gently:

The … things …  are also people.

Kage knew that.

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Adventures

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker liked adventures.

No, I tell a lie. She liked talking about adventures; anything that made a good story delighted her. She enjoyed reading about them, if they were well-done and/or true: there is nothing so disappointing as a true-life adventure that was boring. She adored adventure movies, especially with special effects.

Living them, not so much.

It was undoubtedly because we had such messy adventures. Kage felt an adventure should be planned to some extent; one should at least consult Triple A, and preferably Conde Nast. Ideally, an adventure would move comfortably between good bars and elegant restaurants, each night ending in a very clean hotel room with a splendid view. There would always be flush toilets to hand, and Coke and iced tea with lemon would always be available. Exciting stuff – wild animals, haunted roads, Acts of God and extra-terrestrial incursions – would be at sufficient distance to keep one’s clothes tidy but close enough to see all the details.

She actually did pre-plan a lot of our adventures, which made the voyages of discovery and the hunts for rare objects much more comfortable. And she was easily enthused: every time we ventured onto a new road, she was bright-eyed and ready for wonders. Every new way was an adventure in the egg, and Kage loved that. She just didn’t like things getting dirty. Or too strange.

Late night auto repairs in Kettleman City, with the air so thick, heavy and hot it was like being a leaf in a deep layer of sediment, bound for an ultimate destiny as coal; and Kage sitting, cursing, on the hot asphalt, handing tools to me, also cursing, under the car. The sorts of gas stations  that sell dubious home-made sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper so old its wrinkles have rendered it opaque, and that feature a fresh,dripping rabbit’s head impaled on a pump handle. Encountering inexplicable hordes of moths, or crickets, or caterpillars, or finches. Finding giant grasshoppers on the windshield, or hissing cockroaches in the front seat. Sleeping in the ruins of an old hotel when you can’t find a room in one that still exists. Getting accosted by a drunken loonie reciting the Táin Bó Cúailnge  by moonlight on the pier, and then being introduced to him as the local Mayor next morning at a municipal breakfast.

Normalcy was a lost cause in our travels.

I must admit, I am developing a growing fondness for the comfortable sort of adventure myself. I mean, I’m getting older; I can still sleep comfortably on a floor, but I can’t get up off it again in the morning. Luckily, house-sitting in Berkeley is not usually an adventure.

Unless you get up in the morning and find the charger that fits both your Kindle and your phone has died in the night. All I intended to do was go grocery shopping down the street today – instead, I set out on an electronics hunt. Mind you, finding a Best Buy is not all that hard, but I’m map-impaired. And Emoryville isn’t easy to actually arrive at; though you can see it, like a magical floating island, from the freeway as you whizz by … I finally gave up and drove into Marin. I can find anything between San Quentin and Petaluma, and the 101 through that Summer Country is one of my favourite roads in the world.

So many warm mornings spent on the highway through those golden hills! So many midnights, too, and every hour in between – and none of them regretted, ever, because we were in a land we loved. On the way to or from Faire, or the three years we lived there, in a trailer beside a pond. The Best Buy in San Rafael is very close to an exceedingly well-stocked and cooperative BevMo; I know the streets there from countless frantic missions to find an extra keg or a Golden Gate tap head …

Once in the Best Buy, though, I found myself on yet another unexpected adventure: a visit to The Land Of Confused Old Farts. I haven’t gotten used yet to being consigned to this land by excessively youthful clerks, and their inability to understand that I might know what I’m talking about makes every conversation a journey into the Twilight Zone.

It’s apparently outside the realm of reality that a fat old lady leaning on a cane should know what a Kindle is. I’ll admit, I couldn’t find the display where the accessories like wall chargers were kept, but that turned out to be because it was locked up under a counter – Best Buy being understandably loathe to leave little bits of equipment out where they can be casually acquired. That still doesn’t excuse the clerk’s conviction that what I needed was an entire Kindle, and that I didn’t understand how they worked.

To silence his rambling explanation I finally hauled my actual Kindle – complete with its resplendent tooled Oberon Leather case – out of my purse and waved it in his face. Only then did this tender youth get the idea of what I wanted, and finally reveal to me the fabulous secret trove of completely concealed gods damned wall chargers. What I needed cost a whacking $9.99.

I decided that if I had to be in some Old Person Land, the Land of Old Hippies was a lot more fun.

So then I went to my favourite Safeway in the whole world, in Novato, and bought insane amounts of cheese and comestible accessories. Dinner was local Brie from the legendary fromagerie outside Petaluma, apples from Sebastopol, and Kalamata olives – all enjoyed while reading on my newly-charged Kindle.

Now that’s Kage’s kind of adventure.

 

 

 

 

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Suddenly I’m Cool

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker had a favourite solution to intractable heat: go to the movies, and sit in the dark eating ice cream for 3 hours. As she was rarely actually too hot, and was always ready to eat ice cream and watch some handsome man or scenery, this was always a notable success. We even saw some movies we would not otherwise have dreamed of watching.

For this to work for me, though, I’d have to take up residence in the movie theatre. In the ice cream bin, probably. This idea has its charms, but isn’t really practical. Ice cream is so sticky …

Kage’s second most popular remedy was to drive North. Mind you, we never got farther North than Petaluma at our most adventurous – and the difference between the Bay Area and Los Angeles is not always noticeable in the summer. But Kage, despite having spent many summer days in 3-digit heat in Marin, was stubbornly convinced that going North equaled getting colder. Which it does, if you go far enough and at the right time of year … nonetheless, evacuating North seemed to cool her down.Maybe by direct heat convection, or the power of Kage’s mind to browbeat physics into doing what she wanted.

It worked often enough to maintain her faith in the technique, anyway. And it has been so unnaturally, damnably hot in LA this summer that I have been willing to try just about anything …

To my great good fortune, some wonderful friends of mine live in Berkeley and left on vacation this morning – and asked me to house-sit and entertain their lovely cat while they were gone. I’m not sure I’m actually needed, but they were kind enough to offer me shelter from the heat and some primo anchorite-style writing time: and I leaped at the opportunity. It’s quiet, I’m alone (except for the cat, who is very sympathetic) and when I got here this afternoon, it was nearly 30 degrees cooler than Los Angeles.

I am in bliss. They left me a red rose on the dining room table, and a raspberry tart in the kitchen. The cat is happily asleep in my shoes. I even remembered to pack my writing cap.

The drive up was easy and comfortable, inside my air-conditioned car; the heat on the I-5 hit 100 for most of the way up, though. There was only 1 small herd of cotton bale glaciers – not enough water this year for the usual crop. Many ordinarily green fields stand brown and fallow, or planted in some tough soil cover that doesn’t need irrigation. All the English walnut groves have been replaced with drought-tolerant pistachios, and the vineyards have covered their grapes with shade cloth in the hopes of producing wine instead of instant raisins. The hills are bleached bone-white; they are as covered with wild oats as ever, but they look like marble quarries from a distance – like nothing living.

A scary season, in the Salad Bowl of America.

Which is why I fled North this morning, and have been offering grateful prayers to all the gods of going as I journeyed. I could see fog beginning to evolve on the Marin Highlands as I came up the 580 through Oakland. It was like watching the ramparts of Elfland coming into focus. And it was cooooool.

Kage’s strangest ideas have this habit of turning out true …

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The Green Martyrdom

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was a devoted believer in running away.

She abhorred violent interaction of any kind. She was rendered tongue-tied and incoherent by arguments, and was terrified by any threat of physical roughness. “I go tharn,” she would say, comparing her own panic to the deep, paralytic terror experienced by the rabbits in Watership Down.

Was she brave? Well, I think she was – because I knew how angry words and deeds rendered her helpless, and yet she would try and get through them if she had to. And she would defend others. The only times, in fact, I ever saw her take up a quarrel, it was to defend someone who was even more badly stricken than she was herself. (On one or two memorable occasions, that was me. So I understood, and was always prepared to be her bodyguard.) Sometimes the bravest choice is to refrain from everything and scarper for the border.

It’s why Kage seldom watched the news, or read a newspaper; it’s why she never joined Facebook, where so much bad news and loud fights frame one’s daily nods and waves to friends … there is always someone posting disaster or scandal, gloating over someone else’s misery, calling people ugly names. There aren’t enough kittens and rainbows and good jokes to drown out the ghouls’ cackling. Sometimes you can’t keep them out at all, and then it’s time to Run Away! Run Away!

So tomorrow I shall rise early, turn widdershins in the face of the rising sun, and drive away. The Road of the Weird calls to me, and at its end – solitude and silence in a green garden, where the sea mist comes in of an evening and the late sunlight is a thousand years older than here in this stone city. The desert is breathing much too hard and hot over my shoulder. Fiery manias are festering across the aether. I need to  be someplace quieter for a little while.

Also, 10 or 20 degrees cooler than here. The longer it stays hot, the more ill I become; so I need to escape somewhere where it’s just not quite as hot. That means heading North, and settling somewhere near the sea for a few days. I’m enormously fortunate in that I have some friends with a well-located little house and garden – they are off for a trip to somewhere even niftier for a few days, so I have volunteered to guard their house and keep their cat company.

It’s the most selfish act imaginable, my running off to a brief hermitage. The Irish, who took to Christianity with a notably manic enthusiasm, called hermiting The Green Martyrdom – you dedicated yourself to God’s service by going off and living alone with Him in some forested pied et terre. Their beehive cells of stone and lime always stood alone in the green silent woods, and there you gave your life to God as to a  lover … an idea that made Kage wistful and a little jealous.  It’s something she yearned for more and more as the years went on; I suspect she may have had to make a serious decision somewhere along the line, weighing a life of silence with God whispering in her ear against the joys of rum, writing and her Muse.

I don’t know what Kage would have chosen.  We used to talk about it, but she never figured out the choice, either. Both God and her Muse were kind, to take the decision out of her hands before it interfered with her work.

Me, I’ve got no such dichotomy of desires. I have a ton of stuff to do, and no time to be bored – there are stories to tell, and books to read, and textiles to craft; and what solitude I need – and I do! – is always available. I can either stay up later than everyone else in the house, or take off driving: and voila! I have my own pellucid bubble and can float away like Glinda over the noisy, busy hills of Munchkinland …

So I’m off to the Northern lands tomorrow, off to the Summer Country where frost always floats like a glassy oxymoron over the golden hills. I’ll toss a few pearly pebbles at Facebook from time to time, just to see if the quarrelsome murk will clear; and I’ll write. And write. And write.

It’s not God I am hoping to hear.

 

 

 

 

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Made In California

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was fiercely proud of being a Californian. She loved the place.

This rookery of wing nuts on the edge of the continent was her home. She was proud of its fertility, its enthusiastic extremism, its buffet-style environment – you could find just about anything the rest of the United States had, right here in California, she always maintained. Anything would grow here – politically, socially, and literally; especially literally, the place is the Garden of the Gods when provided with a bit of water and fertilizer.

That was probably what she loved best about it.

California is among the top producers in the country of rice, macadamias, cotton and barley – none of which are native crops. and are in fact associated legendarily with other places entirely. But we grow more of them here. The largest stand of eucalyptus trees outside of Australia grows in Central California out near Vandenberg Air Force Base. Grapes, of course, are the most famous of our great imported successes – fresh, dried or transformed into wine, we grow more than most entire countries.

The native Californian plants grow lush and thick, but they’re not the stars the imports have become. Heck, before the Europeans got here, the place didn’t even have ordinary grass; the native grasses all grow in erratic bunches like feather dusters, making smooth lawns impossible. Since then California has grown famous for another types of grass altogether, of course – the world can thank UC Davis, a sterling aggie college, for some of the splendid varieties of recreational cannabis now available. It’s one of the largest cash crops on the Pacific coast, and when California finally legalizes the stuff, we’re gonna dominate the market. Also, finally, balance the state budget …

California is sometimes called the Salad Bowl of the Nation. Kage was proud of that, and felt enormously privileged as well, to be living where it was so simple to get oranges, lettuce and grapes year round. A lot of the fruits and vegetables have even gone feral; lettuce, carrots, radishes, onions, and tomatoes spring up on every road verge. Mustard and spinach, too, in wet places in the spring; we picked them for spring suppers in our most impecunious youthful days. Oats – oats, man, a major cereal crop – grow wild and free on every empty lot and hillside, and are what makes California’s wild landscapes golden in the summer heat. Scotland based an economy on the things, and they grow wild literally everywhere in California: between the sidewalks, through the cracks in asphalt, in rain gutters and flower pots.

(If the event of society collapsing, Kage planned for us to plant a vegetable garden, put in as many acres as possible in wild grain, and run a tavern. Home-made beer and crudites, herbal tonics, and oatmeal for breakfast. Would probably have worked, too. Taverns, like black smithies, tend to become sacred ground … )

Anyway, Kage loved her home state, and its insane floral profligacy. Damn near anything will grow here, somewhere, and most things do. There was, for many years, a banana farm out on Highway 1 just North of Oxnard – dozens of varieties, unseen in stores because they were too small, too strangely coloured, too fragile to ship. That only went away when Southern California Gas took the land, the bastards – where we used to stop and buy Red Plaintains, Pink French bananas, Silver Bluggoes and Blue Javas, there is now an immense burn-off valve for the underwater gas plant just offshore. A blue flame 5 stories tall burns there most nights … but I haven’t tasted a Silk or Apple banana in 20 years.

Change happens. We cope or we don’t. Right now, California is in a quite serious drought – maybe the kind that killed the Anasazi a state or so over to the East, maybe only the sort that changes our annual crops. Already, there are victims here: the almond crop was poor, the peaches and plums faltered badly. Pumpkins are smaller and fewer this year. These are all fruits that need lots of water, and we may not be growing them in another 20 years.

We’ll grow something else, of course. California is, at its literal heart, an agricultural state. Maybe winter wheat will replace the rice; tough sorghum and sugar beets are already outpacing delicate corn. Red wines will win out over the white varietals, and plain old raisins over both. The climate these days is ideal for concentrating your sugars … and other crops will become possible.

Someone may finally persuade cocoanut palms and mangoes to grow in a hotter California. Maybe even cacao! Tropical yams in place of Russet potatoes; miner’s lettuce, moringa and quail grass instead of Iceberg lettuce. The Silk Floss Tree, which is planted all over Southern California, is suddenly setting fruit in the last two years – it’s drought resistant, native to Brazil and Argentina, and has grown here, well but mostly sterile, for years. Suddenly, in our 99 degree heat and 5% humidity, it’s setting its strange fruit …

Who knows? Maybe the bananas will come back to La Conchita.

 

 

 

 

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September Going, Going …

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker always sort of shrugged off September.

In our day, of course, it began with the last precious days of summer vacation – then, across the yawning and demon-haunted abyss of Labour Day, school began. That pretty much soured the entire month for Kage. No amount of new lunch pails, pencil boxes or coloured pens could ever reconcile her to the return to school. Especially since we wore wool uniforms, and saddle oxfords as heavily confining as shackles; we always went back in a heat wave, too.

Kage shambled back like a zombie. And she stayed that way for the duration of September.

But September does finally wear away, and by its end it’s usually recognizably Autumn. Leaves are turning, the air is  clear, the heat is being defeated, and …AND! October is next!

Kage loved October. It’s the month of bonfires and Halloween, chocolates and monsters. The seasonal candy alone could have sent her over the edge in delighted delirium – candy corn! Wax bottles and oranges and skulls full of deadly sweet sugar syrup! Chocolate-shelled pumpkins with orange-flavoured marshmallow fillings! As October finally hove on the horizon, hull down and warping for land, Kage emerged from her September ennui and went straight into a sugar-fueled frenzy.

I’m remembering her full face-about particularly today, because my September has been pretty much a dead loss. The heat has kept me pent indoors most days, until after dark: and even when I revived after sunset, I’ve been a wrung-out rag as far as energy goes. I’ve read a lot, I’ve slept a lot but at weird hours out of synch with my household, I’ve discovered that the real reason for 700 TV channels is to improve your chances of finding something to watch at 3 in the morning.

(It’s no guarantee, mind you. We’ve got 700 channels but 699 of them are usually showing crap. Half of those are all showing the same crap. Shows on Nazis, aliens and deadly animals predominate. If something interesting is broadcast, it turns out ultimately to have been destroyed by Nazis, accomplished by space aliens, or eaten by something from Australia. Endless footage of tanks. Or trenches. Or tanks in trenches… on fire. DIY  Mothballs. The History of Granite.)

But back to my point, such as it is. September, which I usually enjoy, has instead lived up to all Kage’s worst expectations. It’s been too hot. I am not adapting to humidity. Most of the news from the world has been vile. I have been writing at a glacial pace, on days when I can write at all – mostly, I’ve been reading. I thought a new Steven King would be out this month, but I screwed up the date and it won’t be out until November! I am a desperate addict …

So to assuage my reading jones, I’ve been re-reading King novels. It’s effective, because it takes even me a couple of days to get through one of those humungous tomes – on the other hand, it is not conducive to peaceful sleep. On the other other hand, Mr. King’s stories do offset the everyday horrors of the world capering and gibbering on the news –  as I have observed before, things may be bad but at least there are no vampires in my cellar. The zombie apocalypse has not downloaded on to my cell phone. My car is not possessed.

My problems have been small, really. There were 73 (!!!) pieces of spam on this blog this morning –  all of which questioned either the length of my penis or my marketing strategy on this blog. Having no stake in either of these problems, the spam was easy to dismiss.

The story I submitted to F&SF was, alas, rejected yestreday – but I got a personal note from the editor telling me why, which is the best kind of rejection notice to get. I was able to make some changes and send it out again to another magazine today – back on the horse!

And I also learned that “Pareidolia” will appear in the March 2015 issue of Asimov’s. So there’s that, Dear Readers: I know when it is coming. I got the contract, and everything.

And tomorrow is, at last, October, decked with coloured lights and blazing leaves,  sanctified with the incense of burnt sugar and pumpkins. The month of spirits and candy overload. Not to mention the run up to National Novel Writing Month beginning at midnight on November 1st, which will give me something to do with those nights when I can’t sleep. I need to prepare.

I need candy corn and Halloween Peeps. I need Russell Stover marshmallow pumpkins. I need to get  my notes together and ready. It’s all right to feel sorry for yourself in September, but – October is another month entirely. Time to get back to work.

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The Light, The Light

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker loved the light of autumn.

She loved light in general, being a thoroughly solar person. But all seasons have their own palettes, of course. Her favourite season was Summer, but her favourite seasonal light was Fall’s.

Northern light, she called it; because, in her opinion, the light always looked like that in Northern California – it had a visual chill, a sharpness and a formality that reminded her of the aging year. Kage theorized it might be a perpetual thin layer of ice crystals, refracting all the light between Point Conception and Mount Shasta.  Or maybe magic. Even if it was the middle of Summer and we were running around Northern Faire in 15 pounds of wool each, the light was chill. The air was hot, but the light was cool and crystalline. It was the light of the Summer Country.

That was what she liked about it. It made all the colours of the world more intense, and Kage lived for colour. Everything had an associated colour for her, which she usually experienced directly in one form or another. Home decorating or synesthesia, it didn’t matter to Kage as long as she was accessorized properly.  If she hadn’t been so thoroughly  in love with words, nothing would ever have pried her from the visual arts. But I think those visual arts she tried – water colours, murals, enameling, illuminating, DIY fireworks – all sent the wrong kind of Muse to tempt her. Classically draped ladies with archaic smiles were not Kage’s thing.

The other thing Kage especially liked about the light of Fall was that it usually happened smack on the Equinox. BOOM! And the light of the day, especially the early mornings and late afternoons, was altered. It was dependable and cooperative. Los Angeles is such a freaky place, climate-wise, that it can produce the illumination of any season at all on any day; it all depends on how much and what particulate matter is floating around.

Autumn, though, didn’t play such tricks. The Equinox appeared, doing its fouetté en tournant, and the change was made right on schedule.  Even before the leaves changed (and even in Los Angeles, we have a lot of leaves that do) the angle of the sun wrought a magical change on the landscape. It was harvest light, Halloween light.

Not that this has much to do with the temperature. The Equinox was a hint that eventually the nights would cool as well as lengthen, but we still get heat waves right up through Halloween – I remember lots of Halloweens where  makeup melted right off everyone’s faces. Made the candy taste funny … As a matter of fact, we’re still bouncing around in slowly cooling heat waves right now; from triple digit Venusian heat, we’re now down to a mere seasonal warmth. The nights begin to lengthen in earnest now, and will soon cool down properly.

But the light will stay, that harvest light, making the world look like ripe fields even if it’s just warm dusty concrete. By the time October ends, it will look warm in comparison to the lead and iron skies of a Southern Winter; and it will still evoke the hills that frame San Francisco Bay, long gilded slopes of wild barley and grass. Here, as soon as we get a first rain – if we get a rain at all – our own hills will go dun-grey and everything on them will be slicked down like a cheap rug. But the light on them will still be Harvest Home for a while.

And that was the light Kage loved best of all. She said it was the light for which stained glass was invented; the light that inspired beer. You can keep your snows of yestreyear, wherever it is they get to. Immortality was in the light of Autumn.

And I guess it still is. The season of spirits is coming. In the light of the Summer Country, I see their long shadows cast from the West, growing long and longer under the bronze oak trees. I know each one by their silhouettes. Even though we can no longer see one another’s eyes, they wave and I wave back; we salute, and the extended hands cover acres to meet mine. And I know who they are.

I know them by the shape of their shadows, in the late, cool, pure light.

 

 

 

 

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SOMETHING Is With Us Always

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker loved the past. She loved it so much that she could never forget it, never let it go – what she had once had and loved, she had and loved forever. Once something found its way into her heart, it never left.

We’ve all heard the (much over-done) adage: If you love something, let it go. Well, Kage tried.  It didn’t work. Her heart was a pavilion with no doors, only decorated arches; she always insisted her mind was, too. They were set with painted tiles and stained glass, festooned with grandiflora rose vines, and decorated by some madman with a fretsaw into arabesques and bas-reliefs and cavorting little creatures of dubious species. But they were wide open to the elements, and she claimed that other people and their memories were constantly wandering in and out. And they never left. She might even have preferred it if some of the ages of legend and remembrance she carried had packed up and gone, but they wouldn’t do it.

I’ve don’t know what inventory she took along with her when she died. But I do know that whatever she left behind has been settling down in my head ever since, through jimmied windows and lock-picked doors, and those hidden vents where the screening fails and you don’t notice until the attic is full of squirrels. Things run races in the ceiling in the middle of the night, giggling and muttering, sometimes shrieking when they slip off a stud and fall between the uprights. When I can grab ’em and hold them still long enough, a story results.

In the meantime, the candle carousel behind my eyes circles round the spark Kage lit in my head, and the shadows change endlessly. Plato didn’t know the half of it: the shadows we watch in the mouth of the cave aren’t just cast from momentous beings and acts outside. The biggest ones flow out from the darkness behind us, from the heart of the cave we never turn to see – at least, until it’s time to find the EXIT. Only then, for most of us, do we grin or shriek or goggle like morons, and wander off into the Lands we not only Do Not Know but seldom suspected were There at all.

Kage, however, must have walked on quietly, politely shouldering her way through the crowd with murmured excuses and little side-slips. She was good as easing her way through a crowd; good at being barely visible. If anything caught at her shoulder as she made her way out, she must have turned and pointed and told it: No, sorry, I’m just coming off shift, but see that lady there? The short one with the glasses? She’s the one you want.

And, since the past would never leave her, Kage sensibly left the past where it stood. Off she went into the Uttermost West, leaving me with all her pasts – and futures , too – and an ache like badly-poured concrete under my breastbone.

Another friend died yestreday. The Autumnal Equinox is in two days, so I’m guessing he left early to catch the outgoing tide and will soon be setting his sail by the westering stars. Being at the age where a lot more of my friends are dying than being born, I keep expecting to get used to this. No luck, so far … Right now, the past we shared is foremost in the shadow-play of my memories.

It’s not a dance, though, so much as a measured march, which is my clearest vision of him. Sometimes he’s dressed as a Landsknect, sometimes in the black leather of Night Security. Most often, though, he’s wearing a Centurian’s kit – something he never did, I think, but which he wears in my mind because of all the times he was on guard over us all. World-weary, amused, a little cynical, very wise; on duty in Darkest Britannia, watching the crazy natives leap through bonfires and sing about the Past …

Which Past, though all our loved ones  slip inevitably away into the West, stays with us always, for sweet love’s sake.

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Heated Excuses

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker would likely be disappointed in me. But the heat has just been too much for me lately.

Los Angeles  has just completed a week of temperatures in the 90’s. It’s about to embark on one of temperatures in the 100’s, with a hearty helping on non-rain humidity along the way. San Diego County is on fire, and everywhere else is at risk of it. And I am hidden away in climactic purdah, sheltering from the heat.

I’m mostly asleep; or sitting in the dimness indoors with copious cold water and my Kindle to hand – which I can read in the dark, thanks to its glowing screen. It’s too hot to write.

Normal function will return as soon as my melted brain re-solidifies from the pool of candle wax which it currently resembles.

Stay cool, Dear Readers.

 

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Rain

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was mildly obsessed with rain. We both were; and had to be.

Dedicated urbanite though Kage was, rain was extremely important to her. For one thing, the urb in which she lived most of her life was Los Angeles – a city that loses its mind when the rains come, even the ordinary wimpy ones that accompany a normal winter. Most of the drivers on the roads immediately forget how to drive at all in wet weather; accidents multiply everywhere, as the oil on the highway surfaces goes liquid and makes slicks, and the drivers regress to grade-school bumper car level.

Also, in many parts of Los Angeles, the streets flood. The drainage system – in those areas that have drainage systems – tend to get blocked with months of soda cans, dead foliage, discarded clothing, expired rats and pigeons … the first reaction to a good rain is that all the drains on city streets back up and create ponds, all afloat with unsavoury relics. Of course, where there are no drains, the rain simply seeks the lowest point in the streets and begins to form a lake. Intersections, in particular, become maelstroms. You can – and hundreds do – drive in and immediately flood your engine and your interior.

When Angelinos are not stampeding into frothing rivers like maddened cattle, they are usually in the grip of a drought. They have no idea what to do when it therefore, eventually, finally rains. All over the city, you can see automatic sprinklers gushing away in the rain. No native ever carries an umbrella, so people run around with whatever they can grab on their heads, blind.  Rain here can be so infrequent that kids can be in grammar school before they see some – then kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grade teachers get playgrounds full of astonished little people licking the miraculous water off the swings, and eating worms.

Besides being subject to all these rigours of a semi-desert climate, Kage spent the 1st 40 years of her life in the Hollywood Hills. All the problems of ordinary streets are multiplied up there; the streets are goat trails to start with, often undrained, sometimes unpaved, and lined with flat-roofed stucco houses built out of re-used sets … leaks are a way of life. In El Nino winters, we kept our wellies by the front door, like Yorkshire farm wives: because there was no way to even get to the car except by wading through a waterfall or a young river.

Also, the hobby of Renaissance Faires makes one insanely sensitive to the weather. The relationship that outdoor performers have with weather is deep, complicated and essentially psychotic. Not everyone sleeping on Faire site will be in shelter; and if it rains too long, the parking lots and lanes turn to mud and Faire gets cancelled. To this day, if rain begins at night, I wake in terror and cannot sleep until I have checked the entire house to make sure no portion of the roof is leaking, all, vehicles are off-site, and all members of the household are indoors and have a bed …

Right now, of course, in Los Angeles, we’re beginning to explore the idea of sacrificing City Council members in attempt to placate the rain gods. It would be the best work some of them have done in decades. However, the same climate changes that are super-charging our summer heat are also disrupting the Pacific currents – the great storms out of the deep Pacific Ocean have begun to reach us. “Monsoonal moisture” is no longer a euphemism for summer fog.

I expect the actual hurricanes to reach us in my lifetime. As it is, the last two have brushed us firmly enough to raise the waves to unheard-of heights – 15 and 20 foots combers, on fat, flat, placid beaches like Will Rogers and Zuma and Malibu! In Summer! Rain in the high desert, thunderstorms in the mountains, floods in Riverside and Orange counties! Tropical downpours! Water spouts and rainbows and lightning strikes!

Man, we’re getting real weather around here. It’s not weather anyone is used to, but it is the most vehement we’ve seen in years. And in the meantime, we’re still in the claws of a major drought … because 4 inches of rain in 2 hours may nicely flood the lowlands of Irvine, but it does nothing for the dying fields in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys. Most of the rain is falling to the east and south of the L.A. Basin anyway, and does no good to us here under the tinder-dry yellow hills.

Still, early this morning – it rained. Here by the River, where the stones show in the shallows and the roots of the cotton woods are bare and thirsty; at dawn, it rained. Not much, not heavily, but for a while. The air was the breath of Paradise: wet stone, grass, roses, camphor trees. Eucalyptus, orange blossoms, the muskiness of sycamores and oaks. It rained enough to get me wet as I stood out in the driveway like a loon, face up to the water-colour grey clouds. And while it’s nearly 90 degrees now, it was cool until nearly noon in the rain’s aftermath – the sweetest day all summer.

Let the rains come! We’ll put up with the flooded streets, the clumsy drivers, the kindergarteners eating worms; I don’t mind getting up and checking the house for the ghosts of old leaking roofs. I’ll get a new pair of wellies.

Oh, let the rains come!

 

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