Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker, about a year before we found out she had cancer, asked me to stop alerting her whenever someone we knew died. We had reached that age (mid 50’s) when our peer group began exhibiting signs of mortality. And Kage wasn’t ready to hear it.

So I pretty much stopped the River Styx Sigalerts. When it was someone who had mattered to her very much – a close friend, a member of the “family” – she generally already knew they were failing, from other sources. Sometimes she would ask me to check on someone; other times, it was just that I decided she needed to know. But I stopped telling her about everything. It was getting all too frequent …

Naturally, when her own illness was discovered to be first serious, and then mortal – she didn’t want it broadcast. We kept the secret from Spring to the dark heart of Winter, with only a few people finding out. Even when Kage attended a World Fantasy Con in a wheelchair, she was obviously so cheery and having so much fun that most people believed her when she said it wasn’t an emergency yet. It’s hard to believe someone is dying when they spend a Con racing around on wheels with a bowl of candy on their lap, clipping doorways and tossing chocolate to the masses and laughing like a loon.

Heck, at that point even Kage didn’t believe it was that bad. I don’t think she gave in to the idea until that last doctor’s visit, when her oncologist gently told her it was time to relax to the inevitable. And even then, once he was gone, Kage commented that she still wouldn’t believe it – except that he had made a HOUSE CALL. She figured an actual house call meant she was, yes, dying.

But it still made her laugh.

We are come round to that season again, when the walls of the world are thin and the beloved dead rise to haunt at least our memories. I have lights lit every night. Candles, both faux and real – the twin Lamps of the Weird on my desk – a Halloween tree decked with flame lights and bats – a glass skull with a tea light in it. The porch light has been changed to a livid green, and orange lights are all over the railings and the tree.

And there is chocolate all over the house, as well the weird special candies that only show up at Halloween. Blood-orange flavoured Dots, which are magnificent. Licorice in all shapes and sizes, Smarties and Chicken Stix and Dum Dum suckers. We buy huge bags of goodies for the trick or treaters, and we buy them early and often: because all the teeny princesses and Iron Men at the door are gonna be getting the 3rd or 4th generation of the sweets. Kimberly and I ate all the earlier ones …

We made it through Kage’s last Halloween flying high on hope and theobromos – chocolate was something she could always eat, no matter how sick her treatments made her. “Is there nothing chocolate cannot do?” she would marvel, holding some exotic chocolate bar up to the autumn light from the window. Lavender, sea-salt, chile, coffee nibs, goat’s milk … she tried everything we could find, because what did she have to worry about? Weight was melting off her and everything but chocolate tasted nasty and strange: a touch of sage or a dusting of sweet corn meal could only improve it for her.

This Autumn has so far been a season of loss and flames for me. The heat has nearly killed me – it’s still 90 degrees here right now, and parts of the city are (as usual) on fire. And my oldest and dearest friends are dying on all sides, the playmates of the magical youth Kage and I shared under the oak trees. Holes in my heart, every death – too many and too close together, so that there’s no peace or resignation to be had. Not this year. There’s been no breathing space.

In future years, I’ll be more used to it. Pain will retreat, the fresh gall of the burns will fade to the ache of scar tissue; one can deal with that. And I can enjoy the lamps and the sweeties that I light and dispense, sharing illumination and sugar with whatever walks up in the warm breathing dark – because it might be someone I loved. Even if it’s not, it’s someone somebody loved; that’s why we light the lights and hand out the candy.

I give freely for the sake of my own honoured, beloved, much-missed dead. And so do we all, Dear Readers, this time of year – eh? We’ll stand in one another’s lights and share out the goodies, and take comfort.

It’s that season.

Kage Baker would be making sacrifices by now. She’d be filling glass vessels with ice and sea water and shards of blue glass, hoping for a weather change. The summer heat will not end.

I once suggested to her we should just enjoy such Indian summers. She replied, “This is not Indian summer. This is Aztec summer, and the sun god is out for blood!”

The weather people claim another high pressure system has settled over California. I say the dragons have overbred in the Sierra Nevadas, and we are all suffering from exaggerated brood heat. A plague of drangonlings will soon hatch out, and California will burn to a crisp.

I’d almost welcome the flames, if they were followed by rain.

We had one blessed, lying week of cooling down – fog, cold nights, actual tangible dew! Wet rose petals, little raccoon and cat prints on my car – and some freaking BIG cat prints in the rose bed, perhaps indicating lynxes or pumas come wandering down from Griffith Park in the suddenly hospitable dark.

And do not think we don’t have them here, either, Dear Readers. Lynxes or bobcats are frequent visitors in the fall and winter; I’m not sure which one, but some sort of giant kitties with tufted ears, enormous feet and no tails … one of my childhood pet cats was half wild cat, the unexpected result of her Persian mother’s shilly shallying with a beautiful stranger in the garden. I ended up with a 50 pound female cat with tufted ears, a tail coiled like a spring, and the temperament of Pirate Jenny.

And the puma in Griifith Park even has a name – P-22, which sounds like an English bobby, but stands for a cat the size of a couch, with eyes like opal cabochons. I don’t like it when they eat bike riders, but they sure do discourage the raccoons. And with the heat fading for a few days, the feline patrol had moved in right on schedule, which was sort of comforting if somewhat unnerving.

Thursday, I went North to San Francisco for a pre-Dickens Fair Directors meeting. We try to assemble before rehearsals begin, to exchange news, props and scripts; memorize the new changes to the layout and the sets, trade cast members (“I need three little kids to be Cratchitts; anyone want to trade for a spare Soiled Dove?”) and otherwise hob-nob with our fellow wizards. This year it was in a lovely Italian restaurant in the Castro, and we took over the back room for a riot of greetings, gossip and tears over our beloved dead.

It was great. And the weather was cool and misty, and the vineyards were all going red and copper. The cottonwoods had turned to gold tinsel; steam rose off the cows in the meadows off Highway 101 as I drove through Petaluma and Cotati. Pumpkins and haystacks everywhere; monolithic bales of cotton along the side of I-5, like migrating glaciers.

I was so ready for Autumn!

So what do I get? Another heat spell in the Los Angeles Basin. I drove down from exquisite fog on the Grapevine to super-heated dust in Simi Valley. It’s in the 90’s now – again – and due to remain so for this week. I am once more reduced to hiding from the daylight hours and trying to sleep through the ferocity of the tyrant sun.

Luckily, my room is on the North side of the house, where no direct sun hits. And my lace curtains filter the ambient light, and the overhead fan provides a breeze; and if I just stay here and concentrate, I may get some work done. I’ve had my runaway trips and my vacations in the Fabled North; I have cheese from the Cheese Factory in Novato, artisan olive oil, rare Faire coffee from the Teahouse of the Mullah Nasruddin’s Donkey, orange fondant wafers from See’s … everything I might need to wait out this last attack of heat.

If only the summer will end. Oh, let the harvest come soon!

Kage Baker used to have to wedge her research into the narrow spaces between her fits of active writing. Usually, in fact, she had to re-arrange her schedule to cram some research space in at all; she’d triage her information needs during a brainstorming session, assign some to me. She had a system. If it was technology or science, I got it; if it was liberal arts, she did.

In practice, that often meant she’d just sort of drift into her intuitive style of searches on the Net some evenings. She’d start out searching EBay and Google for old goodies from childhood she wanted to find again: had anyone released Crusader Rabbit yet? Did anyone still make Big Boy Punch? Did anyone remember when Sugar Babies were shaped like little brown infants, and had a rude name? Because she remembered that … though it might have happened before she was born …

Gradually, as the evening wore on, Kage would float away on the tide of information. Links would lead to new ideas, or old information; she’d draw connections and follow them anywhere. I’d look up from time to time and see strange things on the screen of her computer: patterns of peacock feathers, song lyrics that people always got wrong (except for Kage), brassica recipes. In German. Which she was translating with the help of the liner notes from her in-German version of Die Dreigroschenoper.

It helped her relax. It scratched her unending curiosity itch. She got the answers to things she really needed answers for – would a giant chicken look more like an ostrich or like LA landmark Chicken Boy? – but it also gave her ideas to be kept warm and gestational in the back of her mind until she had time to write them down.

And when she had the dreaded writer’s block – that Cold Robbies of the imagination – and it was too dark or wet or cold or hot or noisy or crowded or Tuesday to garden, it was also a way to put her brain in neutral and coast a while. As long as she was engaged in something  that might yield a nugget of interesting information, Kage could justify just about any activity.

I’m not so lucky. These last couple of weeks, I have been mired in the Slough of Despond., and I couldn’t clamber my way out. I’ve been horribly depressed, which led to writer’s block, and none of the things I do in my spare time could distract me, either. I felt guilty reading, when I couldn’t write. My attention wandered too much to knit, at least to knit anything more interesting than a garter stitch dish cloth. It was too hot to garden. Hell, it was almost too hot to live, but my tiresome body persisted in lolling about in bad-tempered and sweaty sloth, unable to accomplish anything of any interest.

Running North helped, with the weather anyway. I went to a birthday party, and sat about chatting with old friends. But I still cried most of the hours I was on I-5, despite strange sights and the prisms in the sky, despite the perfumes rising up from fields of overheated melons and flowering thyme. I seem to have relapsed into a former stage of grief – according to the lists put about by well-intentioned therapists, I should be approaching accommodation now, in this third year since Kage died. But I’m not.

And just lately, I’ve been missing her more than ever. It’s a huge aching hollow in me, with no resignation or healing at all. I never even hit the Denial stage of grief (which would have been hard anyway, since Kage died in my arms) and now I’m right back to Staggering Around In A Daze of Pain. Or have been. Things have gotten better since the heat broke, and I’ve even had some dreams of her …

I woke up a few nights ago because someone punched me in the shoulder. At least it felt like it. No one was nearby, except for Harry grumpily squeaking under his plaid cage cover, and the little black cat rolling crazily in my shoes. Neither one of them would have socked me, anyway. That’s something a sibling does … And as I thought about it, I realized that the moon was shining in the window, full as a pearl; and the air was damp and cool; and I was actually cold.

So I found the coverlet (which had fallen off the end of the bed and crawled away) and I cried into my pillow until I finally felt better. They were the first tears to actually help in a month. And I fell asleep, and woke up on the other side of the relapse. I think. I hope. I’ve got an enormous backlog of weird facts and sights and sounds and dreams to process, and I finally feel that I might be able to do it.

Thanks for waiting, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker. Heat breaking, wind cooling, leaves turning and falling and lying like lace on the parts of the lawn that survived the summer onslaught. Swallows yielding place to the bats of an evening, fewer and slower crickets, rose hips and lemons so ripe they’re orange. Apples. Pumpkins. Corn.

One solitary cucumber that lived through the summer.

Having run in a large circle and come back to – mirabile dictu! – a new season that will let me breathe and walk simultaneously, I can now attack the wall of writer’s block with some hope of victory.

Normal broadcasting will resume tomorrow.

Kage Baker habitually ran North when things were difficult.

Not tangible things, things she could work on and solve; not the sorts of things that would yield to A Plan. She ran from the foggy things, that cheat and won’t come to grips with one. The unworthy adversaries, like writer’s block and depression and other people being nuts. She always said, “I’m not a terrier, I’m a gazelle. Time to scarper.”

I was the gazelle’s chauffeuse.

But the last week or two have been difficult. I seem to have slipped back to one of the earlier stages of grief, and have been floundering in the Slough of Despond. My dreams are bad. Nothing tastes good. I can’t write; I can barely read, and my nose in a book is usually the default state of existence for me.

So I’m running North. I have an excellent reason: the first birthday celebration of a friend, Alexander Kage Paladini. He is just about ready to become a Toddler of Terror, and there is nothing like some time with a happy baby to make one feel better.

The long drive through weirdness and myth will help, too. I-5 demands all one’s attention. I always cheer up when I’m on it, because there is just no room or time to brood. Autumn will be leaning lightly on the long fences out there; the floating islands of cotton will have begun to surface, and the newly harvested fields will smell of corn and melons.

So off I go. Hopefully, there will be dispatches from the road. But first and foremost, I must run.

Kage Baker loved autumn. So do I. And if it ever gets here, I will be a lot happier and more active.

But in the meantime … the heat came back, the humidity has risen to 35%, and I am hiding. Also heat-sick and now fighting the rising tide of air pressure in my sinuses. Or maybe the air pressure in my head is falling. I can’t tell which direction damned things are going, only that they seem to inflating and deflating at will. And random. My head must be pulsing like the veined melon-head of 1950’s movie mutant.

Time to resume estivation. Torpor and dormancy are my shield and buckler.

Kage Baker told me many times – usually while coaxing me to drive off in to the North on some fascinating new road – that sometimes you have to put off writing in order to live something amazing. Thus you recharge your batteries, and then can write more.

I spent this morning waiting with my family and neighbors in a growing crowd of excited Shuttle watchers. I leaped around, chased the sight of the wonder in the sky, screamed and yelled and had a wonderful time. Then I went shopping,  had amusing adventures with wheelie suitcases, and finally collapsed in exhaustion for the rest of the afternoon.

Now I’m gonna go eat See’s licorice (best in America!) and continue exchanging intermittent big goofy grins with my family and exclaiming, “Damn, that was cool!”

When my charge lights are green again tomorrow morning, I will resume broadcasting. But in the meantime …

Damn, that was SO COOL!!!!!

Kage Baker was a devoted researcher. Obsessive is not too strong a word to use when describing her devotion to topics that interested her.

Some of these topics were short-term, the sources and results of research for stories. When Kage decided she needed to know something about something else, she wanted to know everything. The wisdom there, is that by learning everything she could, she often discovered new and yet more fascinating aspects of the topic. Sometimes it gave more depth to her writing; sometimes it altered altogether, and she ended up ditching the original idea to pursue something even better.

A lot of the ideas she left me in her notes were things that popped up while she was researching other stories, stories that got finished and published. Other times, the entire thrust of certain plots was re-routed by one of her topic-to-topic odysseys through Googlespace – skipping blithely from cyber stone to stone, somehow never falling into the roaring river but coming home with pockets full of gems, polished glass and caddis-fly shells.

A note to all, Dear Readers: never neglect to pick up the shinies chance-come-by in your travels. It’ll make doing the laundry hell for whoever has that job in your household – chalk in your pockets, for example, really adds excitement to the final rinse even if  it is fossilized clam shells you dug out of the seaside cliffs with a pocket knife … likewise razor blades, dross from the nail forge, or bits of finishing hardware you salvaged to decorate knife hilts.

On the other hand, the mere fact that I can fondly cite all these examples now proves how really memorable the habits of the determined and acquisitive researcher are. How much they add to life; how they ornament both recollection and art as the years go by.

The contents of other people’s pockets and notes have always enriched my life. It is one of my goals to pass the favour on. Hence the obsessive topics of many of these entries – but I watched Kage weave such huge and enduring tapestries out of dryer lint and fallen leaves, that I can never forget to go through my metaphysical pockets every time I do some mental laundry.

Kage was fascinated with art, for instance: not too surprising in the daughter of a classically trained portraitist and landscape painter, and herself a competent water colourist. But it wasn’t so much art appreciation that drew her, but the odd bits: the forced medieval perspective in  films like Henry V or The Cabinet of Dr, Caligari; the proportions of icons; Vermeer’s use of camera obscurae.

BTW, how those really work (icons, that is) is partially written; it will be a Joseph story, set in Constantinople. And it really is no one’s business but the Turks – but only because they stole a secret from ancient Persia.

Anyway: never quit researching is one of the commandments of my life. Also, always pick up the shinies on the road. Consequently, I was recently hilariously surprised to find fresh news about the Lord Howe’s Island Stick Insect! I am sure you remember those, Dear Readers, even the furious young (presumably) human resident of the Island who blasted me for implying that the place has too many rats.

Well, apparently it does. It also has people very interested in keeping the population of Boobook Owls extant. And other people probably even more interested in finding a home for the 41,000 + juvenile Stick Insects now hatching out in their Australian nursery. The rats have been targeted for extermination or export. (There is no shortage of Rattus rattus in the world.) In the meanwhile, special enclosed pens are being built on Lord Howe’s Island to house the insects while they get re-acclimated to their native isle. And somewhere, a relieved Company Operative can soon look forward to no longer being godparent to a horde of foot-long bugs.

I simply had to keep up with this story, and share it. For one thing, stories of a successful recovery from extinction were one of Kage’s favourite things. For another, her own method was to keep track of these strange and fascinating stories. And besides – how often does one find stories about giant stick insects? This kind of thing should simply be shared.

So below, for your delectation, is a link to the story of the triumphant return of the Lord Howe’s Island Stick Insect. For those who found them creepy, I’ve also included a baby picture of one of the new hatchlings! Isn’t it cute? Such a tender shade of apple green –  there is a certain Cthulu-oid air to it, but really, those aren’t tentacles. They are adorable floppy baby antennae.

Though I must admit, they’re apparently bigger than I thought. Who knew they hatched out of cantaloupes?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2012/08/22/lord-howe-island-stick-insects-are-going-home/?WT_mc_id=SA_DD_20120822

Hatching Lord Howe Island Stick Insect