Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker only used the calendar loosely to establish the turning seasons. As she said, (tenting her fingers and looking pious):  “The air and earth have their own ideas, which are based on rhythms man cannot entirely fathom nor control at all.”

Also, she was likely to add, “All this stuff runs on rules of physics and chemistry, anyway. Humans can muck it up pretty well, but they can’t predict it very accurately or make it do what they want.”

Not that Kage really understood either potential set of causative agencies for weather and the seasons. Nor did she especially want to – it all worked, which didn’t need her approval or oversight. The breathing air didn’t fly off the surface of the earth like a bad toupee; the waters under the earth and in the Ocean-Sea might raven around now and then, but they t basically stayed put. No careless sublimation into the troposphere and out into the starry depths, like Mars. When she wanted to say a few words about why, she’d research it and quote some reliable person who understood thermoclines and the Celsius scale.

She claimed once that she always got both “Thermocline”  and “Celsius” confused with the  Muses. That was boasting, though. She knew all nine of  All-seeing Zeus’ arts and crafts girls perfectly well.  Kage pledged her primary allegiance to the goddess Athene Ergane, with ample side-shrines to the muses Clio and Thalia. At least, when she was feeling classically Greek. At other times, she offered beer to Thoth or Govannon the Smith; she kept a hand-drawn glyph for Papa Legba taped to her computer.

But all that kaleidoscope of deities was aimed at the writing.  She lit pink, rose-scented candles to the Virgin Mary, too, for personal matters. But while she could and did curse the weather for its eccentricities – as anyone involved with agriculture or outdoor theatre has motive to do – she never prayed over it. Weather, in Kage’s view, was like a damned cat. It did what it wanted, unless something else was more annoying; and then it did that.

In a way, this was a very soothing view. It freed Kage from a lot of bootless worrying over the weather; it’s not very satisfying to spend energy railing against foe that is an airmass 500 miles to a side. You can just clear your mind and curse it as you slog out of the dripping oak woods through ankle deep mud,  with all your gear on your back and ice water dripping from the feather in your hat. Or when you have to live in triple digit heat at sea-bottom air pressure, until sweat is squeeeezed out of you as much as sweated. No intellectual effort required.

So, here we are in California, in this damned drought. Due to the drought, we have suffered wind storms and hideous heat and an unnaturally extended fire season – like, things have been burning all over the place for the last 12 months. And though we’re in a drought (which is not actually an abnormal condition for California, if we’re to be honest), we have still enjoyed just enough rain to soak the bald, burned hills … which leads us to mud. Some years, mud is a formal season around here  – this looks like one of them.

At least the rain will be the saving of anything not already burnt to a crisp or buried in a slide. On many hills the faint green fog of wild flowers and oats is thickening now. The air is cool, the sky is high and white, so softened by haze that the evenings look deceptively clear as they darken to blue. Quite suddenly, trees are budding and putting out leaves. The wild poppies are sprouting. There are ruby leaves on the roses, amethyst bobbles on the wisteria, topaz and coral blossoms amid the chamomile and clover.

And the weather people are wildly proclaiming that rain is visible in the near future. Maybe by this weekend, and in the middle of next week, too! The middle of next week, let us never forget, is a metaphor for the never-never-reached: but it must be admitted that it looks like some rain is really on its way. Smells like it, too. If there is a sound associated with rain, it would be a faint, desperate sucking noise: and I think I can hear that as well.

So some ” … dishevelled dryad loveliness”, as Professor Tolkien said of Ithilian, will come to this Southern Garden as well. We will actually have a Spring. In honour of which, I mean to actually get up before noon tomorrow and head out to the Theodore Payne Native Plant Foundation nursery, in the aptly-named Sun Valley.

There I will get me some native California plants. Poppies, fuschia, ceanothus; diverse salvias and penstemons. Plants that will drink thriftily and spread like the wildfire on the parched hills, and colour the yard like bright glass tiles. These are the homegrown lovelies Kage taught me to love, the saloon girls and ladies of the canyons, dressed in  “rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters” . Hot colour and gaudy beauties, that’s what we need.

Spring is really coming, and that’s just the kind of lady she will be.

Kage Baker was all too familiar with holding patterns. And she hated them.

Waiting for anything, for any reason, was just not Kage’s forte. Patience, now: she had that, and could bring enormous patience to a task she had initiated herself. She would work her way carefully  through anything to accomplish a task: a story, a convoluted chain of research, a delicate piece of calligraphy. I’ve seen her hunched for hours over her home-made light box (an old window pane balanced on a wooden crate with a lamp in it) limning gold paint onto the curves of Celtic uncials with a sable paintbrush whittled  down to six tiny hairs. She’d shake out her hand every down and then, and gulp down Coke, that usually had a thin scum of gold on it from where she’d gotten absent-minded about where she dipped the brush.

She could be as patient as a stone. She just couldn’t wait for things.

Kage was a gibberer over Christmas and birthday presents; she didn’t peek, but she shook packages and danced around moaning for the moment of revelation. No one could ever drive fast enough to please her on our way to Disneyland. She counted down days obsessively to longed-for album and book releases. Once she knew a thing was coming – and that it was not in her control – she’d start to pace and whine and coax and bargain, trying to get it to somehow arrive sooner.

Airports were a particular hell for her.

For one thing, she hated flying. Having to wait to board a plane and get in the air was just an extra haul on the rack handle. Once on the plane, she could relax into a sort of resigned sight-seeing: but waiting for a flight was almost more than her nerves could stand.  And these days, it’s impossible to fly without waiting: a speedy departure is just not part of the norm anymore. Holding patterns – where one could find oneself circling an unready airport for an hour or more – were terrifying lacunae in space/time for Kage, dizzy non-existance 20,000 feet up in thing air … waiting on the ground was not much better, especially if the delay was post-touchdown and the weather was hot.

For some reason, nearly every trip we ever made had a layover in Phoenix, Arizona’s Sky Harbor. It’s brutally hot in Phoenix. And we never got through that place without a hold: never. Twice, the crew was pulled – once to replace a crew that had vanished from somewhere else, and once when our own crew inexplicably went missing. We never found out where they went, or why. That drove Kage nuts. She at least wanted to know why she was stuck there.

When a plane has to wait on the tarmac at Sky Harbor, they usually turn the A/C off to save power: it’s like a hot box in a bad chain gang movie, except you have far too much company in it. And the waiting areas there have walls of glass, so if you’re on hold inside, it’s like detention in an ant farm under a sun lamp. No one sits within 6 feet of the walls, because of the furnace heat radiating inward. And the place is full of neon cacti, and weirdly painted cayuses, and giant, pointless cowboy hats.

We got trapped in Las Vegas once, overnight – our plane was delayed over and over, an hour at a time, for 24 long weary hours. Kage only survived because a dear friend came and rescued us, letting us sleep in real beds at her house (thank you, Becky!) The next day I gave up and rented a car and drove us home. We were over the California border before sparks stopped flying out of Kage’s hair, and the red glow in her eyes died back.

So, anyway, Kage hated waiting.

I find myself in a definite holding pattern right now. I’m waiting for news from my agent – are newly submitted stories adequate? Is anyone interested? I’m waiting for a sleep study center to contact me, to find out why I stop breathing in my sleep. I’m waiting for the cardiologist to get that answer from the sleep center, to decide how to best regulate my absent-minded heart. I’m waiting for the rain – we are supposed to get some rain here, and God knows we need it. I can see it on the Doppler radar like a fall of gems along the coast, but it’s taking its damned time getting here.

I don’t fizz and spark, like Kage. I just sort of glow with a pale and sullen wrath, like an annoyed mushroom. I wish I were the sort of walking fireworks display she was! It would at least be entertaining.

But in the meanwhile – I wait.

Kage Baker was very fond of holidays. Her general feeling was, any excuse for a party was a good one. But she was really rather irritated by made-up modern ones.

Things like Executive Assistants Day, and National Puppy Day, and the Anniversary of the first Steam-Powered Reaper just annoyed her. I think they are at least anthropologically amusing, and often worth a bit of cheering, but for Kage this sort of thing just interrupted her writing. One of my personal favourites – March 15th, The Day The Buzzards Return to Hinckley, OH – especially ticked her off.

Maybe because it made me laugh inordinately. I always made a point of leaping around the house praising the buzzards for a few minutes every March 15th, and trying to figure out a way to make a dinner that looked like road kill. Despite the undeniable fact that Kage, with her creative mind, could probably have come up with such a meal, she refused to help. I think Kage felt it was unpatriotic to diminish the California glory of the Swallows Returning To Capistrano.

Not that she celebrated that. Nor did she care for such fun festivals as Winston Churchill Day, Tweed Day or National Eraser Day. She was respectful of serious memorial months, like Black History and Breast Cancer; but Kage saved her holiday energy for classics like Extreme Christmas; which, for us, lasted 6 weekends …

A few of the silly culinary celebrations won Kage’s approval. She’d break down and eat a few cookies for National Oreo Day – especially since, in the years when we all worked at the same insurance companies, Kimberly (an enormous fan of outre holidays) would go about with a basket of Oreos, being the Oreo Fairy. She liked Psi Day, traditionally celebrated with (what else?) a pie. Doughnut Day – on June 6th, conveniently close to her birthday on the 10th – was always welcome.

Lately, my family has been enhancing the daily menu with a perusal of the available faux holidays. This has given us Chili Dog Day, Pancake Day, Artichoke Day, Homemade Soup Day … all ways to come up with dinner without using up too many brain cells, and still maintain variety. Calendar events  like Puppy Dog Day and Fairy Day are usually observed in the breech, since appropriate recipes are hard to come by. It’s an amusing and often delicious way to liven up the day’s meal, too. It’s hard to be grumpy at dinner when it’s Food Onna Stick Day.

Part of the point of this whole calendrical exercise is to fall in with the tenor of the day, so this morning I was manic.  I went out early and got tomato plants at the Tapia Brothers Farm in the San Fernando Valley – it’s TomatoMania Day, you see, when we traditionally acquire our summer vegetable stock. We’ve got Early Girl Cherry Tomatoes, several kinds of plum tomatoes (sovereign for sauces), many sandwich tomatoes with manly names like Brandywine and Beefheart. Exotics like Pineapple and Potato Leaf Red. We’ve also got one that is supposed to be hollow when it’s ripe, for the express purpose of being stuffed!

However, it’s also  Goof Off Day, or so the one source I have consulted says; I’ve been too lazy to check any other references. It’s been a soft, grey and lavender day, with clouds floating about sleepily; yarn winding seemed like a strenuous activity. Slicing strawberries for shortcake required a lot of thought and care. Actually making biscuits for shortcake proved too much to accomplish – so I think we’re going out for fried chicken and someone else’s biscuits.

That should cover the day just about right. Happy Goof Off Day, Dear Readers.

Or whatever.

Kage Baker once remarked, “We don’t have adventures. We have AB-ventures.” Meaning the things that happened to us were exciting, dangerous but most of all – weird.

I think we may have been stuck on a section of railroad track in Petaluma, Chicken Capitol of the World, at the time. In the rain, in the dark, in winter. After several frantic calls to the police – who never bothered to tell us there was no rail traffic on that stretch, and so we were not about to die – a couple of guys appeared out of the night with several lengths of two by four. They wedged them under the wheels of our car and pushed us off the rails. Then they vanished – just a couple of superheroes armed with lumber.

We never did see the police. And we thought we had narrowly escaped death until our host at our eventual destination – an ardent ferroequinologist – told us that section of track was disused. (Thank you again, Steve!)

Peculiar things just happened to us. Especially on the road. The road has traditionally been a place for weird things to happen, according to all the myths and fairy tales; but in these modern times, you’d think things would have settled down some. The Age of Legends, people are always saying, is past.

Not for us. Maybe it was Kage’s somewhat loose hold on what time she was in. Maybe it was her odd way of looking at the world. Maybe it was because we had both, when little girls, wished with all our hearts for a life that would be as exciting as the stories in our books. Or maybe we were just at one end of the statistical curve for Those Likely To Meet Adventures On the Road. I must assume that the people on the other end never hit a bump, a red light or a railroad track, and have cars that gas themselves up by osmosis.

If it could happen on the road, it did. Even if it seemed very unlikely to do so, it did. Some things I could have sworn were impossible were obviously not, because they happened. To us.

We were once driving behind an 18-wheeler when a crazed Angus steer leaped the  wire fence by the freeway and was reduced to hamburger before our eyes. More accurately, he was expanded before our eyes, to coarsely shredded beef and a fine pink mist. The Highway Patrol was disbelieving when I called them – and even more so when they arrived and beheld the ex-steer.

We used to sometimes take the train between Pismo Beach and Los Angeles. It was a peaceful ride, except for the section through the Point Conception Peninsula. Vandenberg Air Force Base is out there, but we were never troubled by UFOs or mysterious lights. No, it was livestock again: more steers. Occasional pheasants. But most often, it was wild boars. Wild boars do not yield to train whistles (though they sure as hell do for actual trains) and they cover an amazing lot of ground when spread out in a thin layer …

And of course, I have written often and at length of the strange happenings on I-5, Road of Weirdness. Often, our luck was good and we just saw weirdness happening. Sometimes it happened to us; many friends and family members can tell tales of the bizarre adventures they encountered with us. Millions of metallic green beetles. Swarms of gold and purple butterflies. Furious truck drivers eager to beat our hacky-sack-playing companions into hacky-sack jam.

Several companions were with us the weekend we had two flat tires on I-5. The first was easily fixed; the other happened near midnight on the Grapevine; and we’d already used the spare 300 miles back. There were lots of small oddities: the long wait under the stars, the faint noises of movement from the enormous hillsides above us. Our friend Bob, who announced he had had enough, and sat down beside the road to sit zazen until the tow truck arrived. But nothing was a patch on the little town of Lebec, where we got a tire that was almost the right size, where the ladies room sink counter was covered with cat kibble, and where the hot chocolate was served with pickle relish scattered over the whipped cream.

And yes, truly weird things happened, too. Lit buildings that vanished when we approached. Hovering lights that illumined the ground all around us, and left Kage with a left-sided sunburn. Improbably dressed figures standing by the road – we actually slowed down once or twice, to see if the cloaked or armed traveller was a fellow Faire person, stranded. But they were never there when we looked back.

Probably just as well. We usually had a couple of kegs of beer, a parrot and assorted props from pikes to spinning wheels in the back of the truck. I don’t know where we would have put anyone.

But I do wonder – what would have happened if we had? Something to amaze and appall even an eldritch hitchhiker, I bet. Because, man – we had abventures.

Kage Baker, as I have often reported, did not drive. However, she liked car journeys, so she was driven everywhere she needed to go; usually by me, since we lived together for most of our lives. However, when given a choice of drivers, Kage still usually preferred to have me drive,

Some of our friends thought that was a little selfish, or at least unnecessarily habitual. But not so! Kage knew, and always considered, an unpleasant fact of my physiology: unless I’m the driver, I get car sick. Very carsick. Quickly and catastrophically carsick. I may hold a world record for vomiting in plastic bags. Did you even know it was possible to puke in a Big Gulp cup? It is.

However, in the last couple of years, I have had to drive a lot of places with Kimberly generously doing the honours; I’m not always up to driving. Yestreday, Kimberly kindly drove me out to Cedars Sinai over on the West Side for an appointment with my cardiologist, to get the results of various tests on details of my heart beat.

Now, we’ve done this a lot in the last 4 years. Kimberly has good air conditioning in her car. I’ve been fine. But my period of grace evidently ended yestreday – the farther we went, the sicker I began to feel. Soon we were edging down Beverly Boulevard in stop and go traffic, with me clutching a handy plastic bag (Kimberly travels prepared for a lot of disasters like me) like a life preserver. But the tragic and classic progression of events was not to be denied …

On the one hand, it was sort of nice to find out I haven’t lost any of my vomit-juggling skills. On the other hand, I was throwing up. Still, all was well enough until the notoriously decaying pavement on Beverly presented us with a bump just as I went into a final spasm.

The glove box popped open, I was jerked forward, and I puked into the open glove box as tidily as could be imagined. If you have a really horrid imagination. Luckily, I hit the stack of extra paper napkins Kimberly also always carries. Unluckily, the entire stack then rolled down the open glove box lid and into my lap …

We managed to get things cleaned up before handing the car over to the parking valet. We managed to get me cleaned up before we went into the cardiology clinic. We made careful plans to take a different route home so we wouldn’t get stuck in bad traffic on the way home; since we had to go pick up Michael at Cal State LA, we decided to access the 10 freeway off La Cienega, and head straight out to the campus.  I have a map app on my phone, so when we left Cedars I was accessing a way to the 10.

However … it was not our day. Looking at the app made me carsick again. I had to put the phone down, and while I was clutching a new plastic bag and praying to die before I puked again, my directions to Kimberly became somewhat – confused. We had just crossed into Venice, I believe, when we realized we’d somehow missed the entire damned freeway.

We never did find it. I cannot imagine how we managed that, but we drove all around Pico, La Cienega and San Vicente without a sign of the 10. We finally managed to find Rimpau – of all things – and found our way back to Hancock Park and hence to Hollywood; where we found our way to Highland, Lankershim and eventually the ever-faithful 5 …

I cannot help but feel that these mishaps and bad luck are somehow due to the failure of Cedars Sinai to install fish tanks in the Cardiology Tower. The feng shui of the place is totally screwed. Certainly, neither the luck of Kage nor the protective fishies were with us yestreday.

But we made it. Kimberly displayed the sang froid of a Rebel pilot, even with her navigator puking on the flight equipment.

Oh – and the latest report from my doctor shows I have added tachycardia to my heart glitches. This may cause vertigo, and probably contributed to my puking in the glove box. Also, I apparently have sleep apnea. So now I get to have a sleep study done, to find out what kind of apnea I have and what to do about it.

I hope the sleep lab has a fish tank.

Kage Baker wasn’t that fond of St. Patrick’s Day. It’s an American riot, at heart, and wearied her, despite the family’s putative Irish blood.

She did celebrate St. Patrick’s Day – with a restrained roll of the eye, a shrug and a rueful smile. She’d raise a glass of Guinness without hesitation to the martyrs on all sides; hell, she’d have toasted the snakes if Guinness was making the rounds.

But she wore neither green nor orange for the day, claiming her red hair gave her an indulgence for the custom, and so did her name. Me being named Kathleen, I claimed that exemption too – when other kids on the schoolyard tried to pinch us, we’d punch ’em, and the entire brawl would be eventually adjudicated by the nuns. Very Irish, really.

What Kage honoured was the food and drink – too little of the one and too much of the other, most of the time; the history, the myths, the incomparable and almost inexplicable scholarship. In a land that legendarily kept destroying itself, at one time reduced to 7 pregnant women in a cave, Irish scholars have always kept the flames of knowledge burning at bonfire level.  She loved the music, the dance, the mathematically drunken art; the enamels and coloured inks and braided metals.

Had she not been handicapped by gender and the inconvenient flow of Time, I think she would have been happy illustrating manuscripts in some Irish religious house. The Green Martyrdom, as the Irish called the habit of religious hermitude, would have been right up her alley. Just what religion was involved was irrelevant – Kage had a lover’s relationship with God, individual and unique. A lot of the Irish in their beehive cells were like that.

As for St. Patrick – he wasn’t Irish anyway. He may have been Italian, he may have been Welsh: but he wasn’t an Irishman, and he was no hero over snakes. They were never there. Kage detested snakes and was glad Ireland had none: but she was necessarily hip-deep in biological facts by the time she was a published author and she knew the snakes were a myth.

But the fact is that there aren’t even any fossil snakes in the place; it’s an island, after all, and the snakes never made it through the cold Irish Sea. They presumably slithered over the Paleolithic land bridge from Brittainy to make it to England, but they just never found a way to Ireland. Actually, she’d have loved it if there had been some hint of snakes in Ireland’s distant past. It would have been worthy of a Company story for sure.

There are a few notes … the snakes are the protagonists, though, and Patrick is an eco-terrorist. I think we were drinking Guinness and Harp that night. Kage mixed an expert black and tan. Had the spoon and everything.

St. Patrick’s Day came to mean more to both of us, as we aged. We’d tried pubbing when we were young and lithe; but frankly, it’s hard to meet a respectable class of person doing that. It evolved into one of the family-album view of history events that Kage favoured; a chance to eat and drink traditional viands and think about part of our genome.  Maybe watch “The Quiet Man”, as schmaltzy an “Irish” film as was ever made. But the Abbey Theatre Player Sean McClory, who played Owen Glynn (a weirdly Welsh name, BTW) , one of the IRA laddies, followed the film to Amerikee –  and ended up introducing Daddy to Momma … so that really locked the Irish history into our own.

As long as one was disregarding schmaltz and Irish stereotypes, Kage had rather have watched Darby O’Gill and the Little People, anyway. It’s got a ban sidhe that scared us both into fits when we were kids, and a young Sean Connery that appealed to us when we got older … no end of fun.

Nonetheless, tonight I’ll watch The Quiet Man, of which I know every line and the inflection in which it should be recited; the family and I will be chanting them like sacred writ. Somewhat muffledly,  as we feast on salt beef, cabbage and tatties. No green beer; not even any normal beer for me, now being in a alcohol-free chapter of my life. But I’ll raise my glass of plain, monastic water; and, for a little while, my heart will be in Innisfree.

Slainte, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker loved See’s Irish Potatoes.

If you have somehow overlooked these most peculiar confections, they are a short-term novelty sweetie produced by See’s Candies to honour St. Patrick’s Day. They are a fist-sized ( a lady’s smallish fist, anyway) hunk of nougat. The nougat is appropriately formed into a suitable tuber shape – doubtless by some cunning machine related to the one that stamps out Chicken McNuggets – and then rolled in cocoa powder and studded with blanched almond slivers*. It’s packaged in one of See’s cunningly made holiday boxes, which makes it the only fancy boxed potato in the world …

It actually does look rather like a Russet potato. One that’s a little long in the tooth, because it has eyes sprouting. That’s what the almond slivers represent. You get cocoa powder all over your fingers and face and shirt front when you eat them; if you are a parrot, as well, you glue your beak shut with nougat. This makes your candy-eating partner laugh helplessly and spout cocoa powder everywhere.

Or it did, during Kage’s career of eating them. I don’t like the phoney tatties, myself, so I would just watch her and Harry fall on the annual single potato and get cocoa all over. See’s only makes a limited number of them every year, and you have to get them early to be guaranteed a taste: Kage mourned when she missed the chance. So I did drive around a lot looking for the things.

Kimberly and Michael love them, so Harry still gets his yearly treat. Luckily, what the household avidly prefers is corned beef, cabbage and real potatoes, all boiled to within an inch of their lives. We’ll eat up several meals of this noble menu over the next week or so, celebrating Spring in an historically relevant Celtic manner: rarely eaten meat, lots of starch, fat and dairy, and enough of it on your plate to send you into a buttery coma. Mmmm, festival food!

No teeny nougat potatoes, though. As they are always scarce, the aficianadoes in this house ate theirs earlier in the month.  We have chocolate Guinness cupcakes instead. Not even silly green sprinkles can dim the glory of chocolate Guinness cupcakes.

Stay away from the green beer, though. That stuff’ll kill ye.

* I have just been informed by Kimberly, Dear Readers, that they are not blanched almond slivers. They are pine nuts.  Well, see, I don’t eat the things …

Kage Baker had no compunctions about declaring a day off. Especially when it was “off” like a bad egg or elderly milk – and some days are like that, you know, they just stink; and they make you ill if you foolishly indulge in them.

So Kage would toss them out and, usually, take off. Driving out somewhere was her favourite solution to such days.

My solution is to read. Mind you, if I still had the opportunity, I would choose driving out with Kage Baker – there was a wider choice of worlds in a day trip with her than in the fiction section of The Doctor’s Library. So my Kindle is a feeble candle indeed compared to the fire in Kage’s brain.

On the other hand, it is a light in a dark place. And I just downloaded a brand new book on the decoding of the Neanderthal genome, Neanderthal Man, by Svante Paabo, which will be perfect for a slow, dim, spring afternoon. And I have Girl Scout cookies.

So – class dismissed, Dear Readers. Whatever your personal class is today. I advise you to grab a companion – bound or unbound – and vanish into another dimension for a while. No one will mind. I promise.