Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved Halloween. It was her favourite holiday – even more than Christmas.

What she loved most about it was the air of nocturnal license, I think. Kage was thoroughly diurnal, and not usually given to running about in the dark. But there’s a remnant of childhood in most of us that persists in thinking that playing in the dark is the ultimate in fun. Combine that with free candy, dressing up and the world lit by live flames, and, well, Kage could not resist.

We trick or treated well into our 20’s. Oh, we gave up actually asking for candy – but with the unending stream of new babies in our family, there was always another little kid who needed escorting through the wild October night. By the time our youngest sibling was too old for it, there were nieces and nephews coming along – it was only moving North that finally kept us answering doorbells instead of ringing them.

Kage didn’t dress up – much – but she did go in for props. Most years, she would carve a single elegant crescent moon in a head-sized pumpkin, and carry it as we went along. That was the Lantern of the Weird (the Lamps of the Weird being my two Lava Lamps.) I got door duty, actually escorting our smaller relatives up to the Sacred Portal of Candy – so I know, from a thousand looks back down the front walks, that with that lit pumpkin in the crook of her arm and half-obscured by shadows, Kage looked like a headless phantom.

She’d wave silently, giving serious shocks to lots of house-holders …

Oh, what I would give if I could look down the front walk now and see her! Even with her face hidden in the shadows, I’d know her by that jack o’lantern and the solemn way she’d wave. And the way she’d inquire eagerly when we came back down to the sidewalk: “Anybody get a Snickers for your old Auntie?”

She could have all my Snickers if she just haunted me a little.

Nowadays, I’m at a low tide of available children. Which is all right, really, because the long walks around the neighborhood would be beyond me. And our house is liberally decorated, and all the kids at the nearby grammar school know about it and are already half-insane waiting to get here: so I can hand out candy to the expected ravening hordes and have a good time.

Then, at midnight, I’ll fire up the computer and make a symbolic start on my especial November mania – NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.  It’s a (hopefully) swift, ruthless road trip through a novel or 50,000 words of same – whichever happens first – and is largely an exercise in discipline. You just write – without revision, correction or editing – every day of November. At the end, you have some good new habits and (maybe) a book.

The last time I did this, I made my 50,000 words – but it turned out to be only 3/4 of the story. I mean to complete it this time, picking up where I left off. It’s an old, old, story idea – the first attempt was made when I was barely 25; Kage and I wrote a novel together, taking turns and braiding our ideas together. She ultimately mined her parts out and used them in other, better novels … but one core of the story is still there, and largely mine, and so tonight I will leap back into that river.

Maybe Kage will be waiting on the sidewalk, spuriously headless, enjoying her night out and jonesing for a Snickers. I’ll count on it; because if she’d haunt me for anything, it would be to bug me into finishing a book.

And into sharing the chocolate. And I will, too.

Kage Baker, while one of those people who could not read or follow a clock to save her soul, nonetheless had a weirdly accurate innate calender function. I think it was like the directions thing – she couldn’t tell left from right, but she always knew the directions of the compass.

So while she usually interpreted “10 minutes” as closer to half an hour, Kage always knew what day of the week it was (at which I have always been pretty bad …) She knew the seasons, and how long it was to the next major holiday, and how many weekend we had at liberty before some fair or other completely ate our free time. That was always pretty much a surprise to me.

So I am somewhat appalled to discover it’s October 30th. My personal sense of time passing tells me it’s, like, somewhere around the 18th – but no, it’s only one day before Halloween. Which means it’s only two days before it’s time to change the outside lights from orange to red and gold, and to replace the bat garland with the autumn leaves one.

In only three days, I’ll be leaving on the first of the North-bound  Dickens drives. In only four days, Dickens rehearsals start, and the long, tinselled mania of Extreme Christmas begins to build momentum. And in only five days, I’ll be making the first drive home through the night-bound dimension of I-5, and beginning the Season of Never Having Enough Sleep or Time To Do All My Laundry …

Also, in 4 days I am attending a wedding – huzzah! But … will the outfit I ordered arrive here in time? Will the wedding present arrive there in time? What vital portion of my gear will I forget to bring this first weekend? How soon will my dear and urgently clever Kelly be shipped off to New York in her role as insurance relief field agent? (She goes to all the big disasters … and we miss her dreadfully.)

I should have realized all this was on the way; even the hurricane, because it was obvious Sandy-cleanup was going to require our Kelly days ago. And I’d have been better prepared, if I’d known what day it was. The lack of Kage continues to blindside me at the oddest times.

On top of all this, midnight on October 31st marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo. This is a lovely stretch of insanity whereby one writes a novel (or 50,000 words, whichever happens first) during the month of November. Traditionally, one begins at the very first moment of November 1st – hence, one starts in a drift of Halloween candy, guttering candles, lit pumpkins and such like otherworldly accoutrements. It’s really a grand time, and I’ve done it before; this year, I have several friends doing it at the same time, and it should be wonderful. Last time, I made my 50,000 words but it turned out to be only 2/3 of a novel – this year, I am going to finish the last third.

But, man, it’s gonna be a busy November. By the first week or so I will be running on auto-pilot, and things will be easier to handle: you reach a certain pitch of creative dementia, and the sheer magnitude of 24/7 creativity carries you along for quite a ways. But these next 5 days are gonna be pretty wild.

Still: this is the time of year to get caught up in mania and celebratory madness; the season for phantoms and walking dreams, and the old, cold gods knocking at the front door and asking for a hot drink.One of the most dreadful lacks in my post-Kage life has been losing the rushing high tide of magic that kept pace with her. This time of year, it comes pouring back in and everything is brighter and darker, hotter and colder, larger and louder than the rest of the year.

And I can hardly wait.

Kage Baker would have rolled her eyes, flapped her hands and written off today. It’s been a bitch.

I have a head ache, a stomach ache, fever chills and cramps in all my arms and legs. I have no idea what the matter is, but I feel like road kill looks. Bizarre accidents have been plaguing me – the foam on my headphones shredded away in my hands like a bad special effect, I mixed up knit and pearl stitches in a stockinette pattern, I can’t write. The East Coast is washing away and the new broadcasts are horrific.

I want to sit quietly and craft prose like tiny little jewel-encrusted toys, but all I can produce is lumpy macaroni necklaces.

Tomorrow will be better. At least it will be different. The Halloween candy is in definite jeopardy …

Gonna go read a Stephen King novel, and take comfort in the fact that there are no vampires in my basement. See ya later, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker. And it’s her season – less than a week to Halloween, and the night is full of weird lights and crazed children. The winds are back and gusting, there are more lights on the porches every night, tombstones are sprouting on all the lawns, ghosts hang in the trees doing the Lindy Hop to the Santa Ana winds blowing down from the hills.

The moon is waxing, and will be full only 2 nights before Halloween. Small kids were out tonight, “practicing” in their pirate and princess and Ninja Turtle costumes, running shrieking with laughter between the Baptist Church 4 houses to our North and the grade school 3 houses to our South. They don’t demand candy yet, but they’re having a wonderful time frightening one another under the lashing boughs of the camphor trees, squealing at the graveyards in the neighbor’s gardens and the leering crocodile in the faux pond in our rose bed.

Raccoons are stalking out there too, between the tides of crazed little children – lean and scary shadows that melt down into fat furry clowns with silly masks: but until you see it’s just the neighborhood vermin, they have a hellhound look to them in the dark … owls are out, too, drifting silently between the streetlights. We have a lot of owls here. Every now and then, there is a hoot or some other whispered owlish sound – and then sometimes a despairing squeak as some mouse or rat or insomniac gopher meets its end on the warm pavement.

We even have bats!  But they prefer to stay in their territories – under the railway and freeway bridges; under the eves of the warehouses down by the tracks; amid the huge old sycamores in Griffith Park. Still, the mere suggestion of a flutter is enough to send the herds of kids skittering back to their mothers’ porches – even if it’s really only sleepy ravens disturbed by their noise.

Me, I’ve been distracted all week: by family disturbances, various fevers and megrims making their way through the household, senior year disasters fetched home by the nephew for healing by the family council. Even as I write this, one cat has just fallen into the kitchen sink and other out the bathroom window; my new knitting project is showing signs of some prenatal deformity; the Corgi is making psychotic growling noises at the raccoons in the driveway.

However … I found my missing 50,000 words. Thank you, Neassa! We ate all the See’s chocolate orange wafers, but I remembered to score a bag of Milky Ways at the grocery. It’s the last free weekend before Dickens Fair rehearsals are kicked off with both a wedding and a wake, but it means that between now and New Year’s my days and nights will be filled with people I love: who needs sleep when one’s own faerie tribe is preparing to dance the winter nights away?

This is about as exciting as my Friday nights get, these days. But despite all the domestic static, sturm und drang, I’ve gotten in a late post, Dear Readers. I feel wonderfully competent. I shall go reward myself with early chocolates now, and listen for the wind chimes in the lemon tree.

Chimes at midnight have always been big with Kage and me …

Kage Baker loved the autumnal wind storms. We get such, in the coastal areas of California. They’re exciting, primal and fierce and threatening calamity.

Sometimes it’s the relentless breath of the desert, when hot winds flow out over the land like a boiling tide –  cats give out shocks from the static in their fur, and the humidity drops so fast your eyes start shrivelling, and (as Raymond Chandler wisely said),  “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and eye their husbands’ necks.”

Sometimes it’s the first blast of winter. The wind swings round and comes roaring down from the North so cold you can see the air turning a steely glacial blue. Time then to find your flannel nightclothes and the socks that have crawled to the back of the drawer over the last 6 months; time to find shoes with closed toes.

Either way, the leaves end up being blown sideways up the street. Our lawn is covered with the jacaranda leaves from the church four houses up the block; our mulberry leaves are skittering cross the schoolyard 4 houses down from us. Last night, the wind took most of the leaves and started on the Halloween decorations on all the lawns and porches hereabouts. Our lights are now dangling like glowing mutant Spanish moss, blown all akimbo. And the wind is rising to set them swaying again.

We kept losing power last night. When the wind started – with a literal BOOM as it blew out a nearby condenser – the power started trying to die, like a candle flame in a draft. For the first half hour it flickered on and off like lightning: dying, catching on again, dying again … the modem and all the lights were flashing on and off insanely as the electricity surged through them at intervals of only seconds. My computer had hysterics and started cycling my screen saver like a magic lantern show before I got to it and shut it down – the surge protector seemed to be the first casualty and nothing shut off automatically.

Which is pretty much why I did not get a blog entry up last night. Everything went nuts.

The power finally settled down, though not before there were a couple more condenser explosions and a low, monstrous groaning coming from the turbines at the DWP station three blocks away. We got lights and telly and some computer function back. But my machine had had a trauma, and there was no gallivanting round the internet for me last night. When I finally got brave enough to turn it back on, I got one of those interesting white-on-black screens that give you options on how to re-start. In SAFE mode, in Swahili, standing on one foot with an apple pie on your head … any way but the normal way, because that was no longer an option.

It took me until 3 AM to finish all the diagnostic tests and reboots and re-loading of drivers and ancillary crap. By that time, I was discovering that there were … holes … in some of the word processing files I had had open at the time. And 50,000 words of a novel, half done, were MIA.

The sound of the chimes still banging away like artillery fire in the backyard were suddenly a knell.

So I sent off a desperate email to the amazing Neassa, who was in possession of the URL for the off-site place where I had stored a copy of those 50,000 words. I couldn’t remember where it was. After nervously chomping my way through half a bag of Trader Joe’s Parmesan Pita Chips, I realized Neassa was unlikely to answer me at o’dark thirty. So I went to bed and brooded my way to sleep.

Luckily, she did indeed know where I’d put it. Now I can rebuild the document on my hard drive, and stash away another copy or two on separate thumb drives … one to be laid away in a desk drawer, wrapped in samite and holy herbs and only to be called forth in the event of the Last Days eating every other copy.

So I’ve reclaimed that, at least, from the winds of the season. They’ve been cruelly busy this year, sweeping away friends and memories and dreams – I’m clinging to whatever I can. The wind is rising again, now, and is supposed to be every bit as fierce tonight as it was last night.

This time, though, I’m turning off the computer as soon as the chimes in the lemon tree start. I can knit in the dark or read by Kindle light, without risking losing my words to the wind again.

It’s taken too much this year.

Kage Baker told me, in that last bizarre, crowded week of her life, that she was grateful to be going before any more of her friends died. She hadn’t like reaching that age where friends and relations were moving on – while she appreciated the advice of the wise man (Thank you, Mr. Gillan) who told her, “This part of life demonstrates how we handle loss”, Kage did not, herself, intend to handle any more of it that she absolutely had to.

And Kage Baker had, as we all know, a whim of iron.

I wish I did. This year has been cruel hard on my surviving friends. There are a lot of them – you spend your adulthood with a thousand costumes performers, and the reunions are more like circuses than anybody else’s. But even so, the holes are beginning to show alarmingly. Some of our folks have begun a memorial list called The Sky Faire – where, as of this writing, the shows are amazing, the music kicks major ass, and the dancers outshine the falling stars.

And now another one has gone. That’s the second dancer in a month – the first was John Compton, a dancer with the legendary Hahbi ‘Ru Belly Dance Troupe. I only knew John from the distance of the audience, but he was one of the best. Now he dances with the immortals.

And now, the second: Martin Harris, a Morris dancer and exemplary Morris Fool. Martin’s time goes back to Agoura and Blackpoint, where he was a part of the magical youth of the Faire. He was that rarity, a real Englishman, and God! that man could caper, and bang a tambor on his knee like, as Charles Dickens said, a “real sylph …”  Martin was also, for the last dozen years, Scrooge at the Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco. He has died on the very edge of Autumn becoming Winter, and only weeks from the start of rehearsals. We knew he was ill and an alternate had already been cast – but though that actor will, I am sure, be formidable, a lot of tear-blurred eyes are going to be seeing Martin ghosting beside him in the streets of our London.

“He wore the chains he forged in life,” wrote Dickens of Jacob Marley. So do we all; but may we all find them to be wrought of love as all our recent and honoured dead have done.

However, I have had enough. Every death is a blade in my heart, and  there have been far too many deaths of late. As a group, we Faire people have just generally been ridden hard and put away wet – but we’re not that fragile, by th’Powers! Too many of us are dying, a lot of them younger than me – and I’m slowly mutating into an apple crone, so no-one younger than me has any right to die.

So stop it! Right now! No one gets to die this winter until after I do. And I have no intention of going, so you’re all condemned to immortality for the time being.

I mean it, now.

Kage Baker, like most writers, carefully constructed an optimum place and method to keep herself isolated enough to write.

As a teenager, she moved into the topmost point of Momma’s house: a semi-cupola known as The Tower. Kage dwelt up there like Saruman in Orthanc, free and silent above the world. As an adult, the Sanctuary came to be the Wall of Silence that surrounded the half of the living room that was her office: a semi-eldritch force field that contained Kage, her desk and her computer.

Nothing penetrated it without her permission. She could usually turn off her hearing and peripheral vision like a Tibetan monk in a trance: she literally did not hear me, the phone, the parrot, street noises … when her control was not so perfect, there were many basilisk glares and growled complaints about the noise Harry made cracking nuts. Did I have to turn pages so loudly? Could I please stop making so much clicking with my knitting needles?

I now knit exclusively with wooden needles. Kage’s hearing and writing are why.

Writers’ families get used to this kind of behaviour (or not), because a lot of that time and space comes out of family time and territory. The boundaries are both precise and guarded; there is no meeting ground. Some writers try to be considerate of their families – others are infamous for tyrannical isolationism. But all writers, at some point or another, retreat to their fortresses and ignore the world.

The writer takes over the spare bedroom or the corner of the dining room or the phone nook, and crouches in there like a spider in a dictionary: webs of words gradually darken all the approaches, piling up along the stairs like the walls of a badly-maintained tunnel. This is often literal: stacks of notes and manuscripts can become a threat to life and limb in the writer’s redoubt. The great Harlan Ellison was nearly killed during an earthquake, when manuscripts stored along a second story railing took flight and swooped down on him … this happens all the time in writers’ houses, although usually without seismic involvement …

In extreme cases, Kage would require to be driven off into the wilds of somewhere. We’d take a room without a phone (small motels on Highway 1 are great for this); if the room had a phone, we’d unplug it and confine it to the closet. Occasionally the phones were hard-wired and I had to surgically remove the ringer or the handset … I only forgot to put it back once, which was rather amazing. Anyway, it was all in the service of Kage’s privacy.

I now need the Zone of Silence myself. I do my work at the desk, which is situated at the foot of my bed – so I have some windows to look out, and I am near the heart of the family life but tucked away in a corner. Sound is not the problem with me it was for Kage; I can fold my writing around me as I learned to fold my reading – the same road into other worlds, although I have to work harder to walk uphill. When you’re writing the road you’re walking, it’s a lot more tiring than just skimming along happily in someone else’s wake. But the acoustic baffles between the world imagined and the world real are just the same, thank goodness.

All that can really disturb me here are outright screams of panic (they do happen, even in the most well-regulated of households) and the little black cat. As far as she is concerned, my bed, desk and person are all hers; she springs from the bed, vaults from the floor, or comes delicately picking her way through all the juju on the desktop to visit me. I think she gets to the desktop by flying off the top of her cat condo … but she is always happy to see me, and makes of every visit a state occasion. Writing stops when she comes by. My business then is soley with silky ears, velvety cheeks and tiny licorice paws.

Oh, well. Even Kage had to stop for parrot frolics across her desk. At least the little black cat doesn’t chew on my pens.

And now I must stop for an interruption of the screams of panic type. The last Presidential debate is coming on soon. I cannot miss that! It has been suggested to me that bureaucracy will always be an evil stalking the surface of Mars, and so Marswife needs some. I’m studying politicians for some templates.

All is grist, they say, for the writer’s mill. Even predigested pap.

Kage Baker did not bow gracefully to the inevitable. She fought and connived like crazy to get what she wanted, and no effort was too great if if there was chance of success. And in Kage’s mind, there was always a chance.

True, sometimes these deeply calculated and convoluted plots were over such earthshaking goals as the sugar-water filled wax oranges once sold at a candy store in Cayucos: but not when we found our way back there 30 years later. No, no matter how often I quartered the town nor how many old storekeepers Kage desperately questioned. I  got a headache from the glare of sun on the sea at the end of every street. Finally Kage went into a Rite Aid while I waited tiredly in the car, returning finally with a giant bottle of Excedrin and a can of Hawaiian Punch.

“Here,” she said, handing me the enormous bottle. “I decided to splurge.”

Which cracked me up. But as we slowly left the environs of Cayucos, she pointed to one faded storefront, and said sadly, “It was right there, I tell you. I’m sure.”

It was one of her few failures.

But she did learn to cope with those rare moments where even her memory and dimension-altering powers failed. It was easier, she always averred, the the weather was grey – the entire world changed when you couldn’t see the sun. That was Kage’s theory.The places where the worlds touched got harder to find, and all the doors stuck when you tried to open them …

It was deliciously grey and cool  here today in Los Angeles. It’s supposed to be grey and cool for days and days; we even have a chance of rain. I slept until noon and had a three hour nap at three o’clock. As far as I am concerned, there is no world to worry about today – just drowses and dreams, memories and left-over Chinese food from last night. No sudden urges or prodigious hunts. Even Kage would leave the heroes in her head to their own devices on a day like this.

And so have I. And will I. Gonna go read and watch bad monster movies before an early night claims me.

I am resolute in this resolve, I tell you.

Kage Baker loved the autumn. Especially the beginning of it – Harvest Home, still warm in the days but with an edge growing to the nights. Reefs of pumpkins, sheafs of corn, and every garden, park and produce market filling with seasonal floral bounty of every sort. Not to mention the expanding candy aisles …

It’s also time to feel the urge to wander. As the season heads toward winter, the desire to fort up and live off your stores gets stronger and stronger – we always did our biggest shopping trips this time of year, filling the freezer and the pantry with goodies for weeks to come. We ‘d go to CostCo, and Kage would hold up her arms in salute as we got out of the car: “Ah, the Paradise of squirrels!” she’d announce. “Come on, let’s gather nuts!”

And she’d revert to four years old, when she had made tea sets from eucalyptus nuts and ground the yellow calyxes of canna lilies into piles of faux corn. For those trips, she’d be Missy Squirrel as we ran up and down the aisles, squeaking with delight and ferocity as we plundered the cornucopia all around. I’d be laughing so hard I could barely walk, as her OCD squirrel-voice narrated our daring raids on Farmer Brown’s fields. Those punks Peter Rabbit and his gang never had a chance …

The walls between the worlds get thin this time of year. When out with Kage, they turned to freakin’ cheesecloth.

We’d drive up into the hills behind Avila Bay, to the best fruit stand in the world – they had dozens of species of apples, each growing in tiny half-acre orchards carved out of the walls of See Canyon. Kage adored them; we’d buy apples 5 and 10 pounds at a time, and use them in every meal for months. Down in Avila Canyon itself was Avila Barn – which had a candy section, and a honey section, and a jams and chutney section, and its own bakery: run, I think, by some lesser fae like brownies, so amazing were the pies and crumbles and crisps and cobbler that came out of there … the best, this time of year, were hand-sized pumpkin pies, sugar-glazed. Do you like Hostess pies? The ones at Avila Barn would make you weep for the realized ideal of the hand-pie.

The stacks of pumpkins there were every colour of the rainbow, and piled higher than Kage’s head. There were turban squash in vermillion and scarlet, Humboldt squash in green and turquoise, pumpkins in every permutation of white and yellow and orange: especially where different strains had been planted too close together, and produced gorgeous monsters of hybrid wonder. And the range of size! From tennis balls to Cinderella coaches, something in every size to allow kids to stagger up to their parents holding as much pumpkin as was physically possible. Pumpkins with little legs and eclipsed faces were always wandering blindly all over the place, pleading with horrified parents to be bought.

And the Barn sold mystery cider, the best in the world: no telling what apples went into it, it was whatever didn’t pass muster for the bins or the bakery. The flavour changed subtly every week. And there were whole apples sliced into wedges and covered in hot caramel sauce. And fresh ears of corn roasted in rock salt and butter. And coffee, and good cold  milk …

We’d stock up on everything, and then eat all the way home. It took four or 5 trips to get everything upstairs, and the rest of the afternoon to get it put away. Ah, the joys of excess!

This is why there are bags of apples and pears from the Farmers Market all over the kitchen right now. Also, bags and bags of Halloween candy, which are already being raided for their choicer bits. Fresh eggs from a dear friend being methodically devoured.  Pickles and chutneys and olives and jellies and compotes like jars of coloured glass. You can’t walk a straight line on the kitchen floor until we get it all stored for the dark months ahead.

It was grand. It’s still grand.  Kage loved that safety, that old-fashioned surety that the winter could come down now and you wouldn’t have to eat the seed corn, or Grandma.

Be safe, Dear Readers. Gather your harvests and your loved ones near, and we’ll all live on apples and corn bread until spring.

Kage Baker would not have called herself a feminist. In fact, she wrinkled her nose in aristocratic distaste at many of the louder species of same, and preferred not to be associated with ’em. She felt that the attitude was unevolved and embarassingly partisan.

So what did she say when interrogated on the life of a freelance writer, an unmarried, no kids, professional aunt, a woman who kept her own house and habitually brought men home to her place instead of vice versa? Kage simply said she was a humanist.

“It’s a little like being a feminist,” she explained once to a fervid femfan demanding why Mendoza had male lovers as obnoxious as Edward, “but more mature, and encompassing all varieties of human beings.”

People who scolded her for her portraiture of the Ephesians got the same response. And people did scold her – she was always polite, although implacable in her stand on those over-zealous Goddess worshippers. She pointed out that if ladies wanted to be treated equally, then they had to let the arts cast them as villains now and then. Not slinky, sexy, couture-draped Dragon Ladies, either: but as nasty prim Puritan Republican types. Ogresses in grim grey suits. Bureaucrats.

Anything else, Kage said, demeaned the heroism of the women who became explorers, healers, good rulers, bad asses; bread winners and fighters and scientists. If you didn’t portray characters as complete human beings, you were a wretched writer. And that meant you couldn’t make all women saints or all men sinners. Because, said Kage, everybody is actually pretty much the same kind of idiot.

Or hero. And Kage revered the lady heroes of the world. Today was a holiday she always observed – Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the achievements of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths – which are legion, and need to be closer to the tip of the tongue than they usually are. It hasn’t been easy going for most women in the sciences.

Ada Lovelace was actually Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, nee Byron. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and Anne Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth. She clearly inherited her father’s breadth of intellect, but neither his taste for sensuality nor his short attention span; the lady more or less invented computer programming, not only devising several programs intended for use with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, but composing what is now known to be the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Happily, she left copious notes – which, with the eventual production of a machine that could actually use her programs, have since proved to work admirably.

Nor let us forget Sir William Herschel, Astronomer Royal of England and famous composer. Let us not forget him, because ‘s the lifeline to remembering  his sister Caroline, with whom he worked hand in glove – including in the composition of music. Caroline was said to be the better mathematician, and a better hand at polishing lenses for their home-made telescopes. They both earned pensions from the Crown; but Carolyn’s was only half the amount of  William’s.

Rosalind Franklin took the first X-ray difraction pictures of the helical structure of DNA, and mentioned (somewhat unwisely) to a pair of stymied lab mates that she thought the structure was actually turning out to be – how strange! – a double helix. (They thought it was a triple, but couldn’t make the model work.) Watson and Crick “borrowed” her photographic plates without her permission, and saw that she was correct. They promptly published and were  awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in 1962, along with Maurice Wilkins – Rosalind’s research partner. Watson has denigrated her work and research for years (and in fact still does, in his current dotage), describing her contemptuously as a lesbian and mocking her moods as due to “female problems”. Since the Nobel Committee will not award a medal posthumously, and Rosalind had died of cancer in 1958, she could never have been honoured with the Nobel accolade in any event – which has apparently never occurred to Watson.

And then there is the Magna Mater of modern science, Marie Skłodowska: Madame Curie. Working in France during one of its periods of lucidity, she was able to achieve acclaim and two Nobel Prizes;  her first was shared with her husband, Pierre, for their discoveries among the radioactive elements. Her second, in Chemistry, was awarded to her alone. (Oddly, Madame Curie’s  elder daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, also won a Nobel Prize, and shared that one with her husband.) Madame Curie is also the only woman to be entombed in the Pantheon in Paris.

Of course, she is said to be entombed in a lead coffin. And her notes, her microscope and other lab equipment – practically religious icons of modern science – must be examined behind lead-glass shields, with robotic gloves, for strictly limited times. This is because the notes, the lab gear and the bones of Marie Curie herself are virulently radioactive …

There are lots more, both dead and forgotten, and still alive and kicking. They get better press these days. Still, science is a hard, hard row to hoe for women. But they have never shirked the call or the challenge. Hence Ada Lovelace Day.

Praise them with great praise!

PS: One of Kage’s own grandmother’s, Kate (we recycle names a lot …) was the first woman in North Carolina to earn a PhD. But it was not awarded to her. Her adviser thought PhDs were inappropriate for women.

PPS: In college, my adviser pre-emptively changed my major from “pre-med” to “biology”, when I told him I was not interested in pediatrics or gynecology, but wanted to pursue emergency room medicine. He thought it was too traumatic for a woman.