Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was fascinated by the Neanderthals.

Her initial introduction to them was via cartoons and comics. Walt Kelly dealt with “cave men” in several strips and books (notably Prehysterical Pogo), which featured lots of grunting, head scratching brutes with pronounced foreheads; and, in keeping with classic Edwardian adventure tropes, decidedly modern and intelligent wives. On the other hand, the comic strip exploits of  Alley Oop, which Kage also loved, featured a canny, brave, clever Neanderthal – despite his pronounced orbital bones and Popeye forearms, as well as the requisite lovely Homo sapiens wife.

So she was predisposed to like Neanderthals. Nothing endeared a topic more to Kage’s heart than well-drawn familiarity. When, in her late 20’s, she had to have a skull x-ray for a dreadful sinus abscess, she was somewhat horrified by her own skull. Gazing at its neotenic rounded brow, total lack of eyebrow ridges, almost rectangular eye sockets and pronounced chin, she exclaimed in mock horror: “Oh no, I have such a Cro-Magnon skull!”

And she did. But she may have gotten the red hair from some other, older Northern European ancestor. Or the left-handedness. Or the Asperger’s. Who knows?

What she got from me, in my pedantic anthropology mode, was a recap as to why the common perception of Neanderthals was wrong. After reading over the available literature,  looking through my books of skulls and tools, and hearing me rave about Hermann Schaaffhausen and Marcellin Boule, she gradually also came to the conclusion that they were far more human that popularly supposed. And as time went on and more research was done, we watched in fascinated approval as more and more paleo-anthropologists agreed with us.

It never occurred to either of us that we lacked any qualifications for holding an opinion. We were only studying for our own amusement. And Kage’s admiration for the underdogs.

All this led to Kage placing Homo sapiens neanderthalensis firmly on the human line. She made one of them Mendoza’s high school career counselor; she added them to the mix of the hybrid Enforcers, and even into the convoluted genetic inheritance of Nicholas/Edward/Alec. To her delight, she did live long enough to see these much belittled cousins rehabilitated in the press and the formal literature of anthropology: they finally became completely human.

To my own sorrow (for sooo many reasons!) she didn’t live long enough for the announcement that modern people do indeed share Neanderthal genes. Especially Northern European and Eurasian people. But Kage predicted it – not out of mere faith and affection, but because she thought she could see the markers in the bones of living men. And whether or not she really could – which would not surprise me – she was correct.

And the hits keep rolling in! The genetic material has been a huge triumph, of course, but one of the other things that kept dissenting scholars shaking their heads was the question of Art. Or ART, to put it greater emphasis; the intangible indications in representative ornamentation that abstract thought might be present in the makers’ minds.

Personally, we both felt that the Homo heidelbergensis  rose-quartz hand axe found at Atapuerca, Spain was as fair a candidate for being made for sheer aesthetics as anything we’d seen at MOCA.  Since Homo h. was the common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals, it seemed likely to us that the capacity for art and abstract thought was thereby already present when the two sibling strains split.

However, for decades people have been unable to get over or past the astonishing impact of the Paleolithic painted caves in France and Spain. They are truly superb art, with the great dancing herds stamping deathlessly through the darkness of Lascaux and Altamira. They were painted too late to be done by the Neanderthals, though, and so it was declared that the Neanderthals had no art … the staghorn pendants, the strung deer teeth, the shells with bored holes to accommodate necklace-cords found in their shelters: all  isolated flukes, or acquired somehow from “real” humans.  If you didn’t paint on cave walls, it was implied, it wasn’t real art.

Which at least proves that the urge to be an art critic is inherent in Homo sap.

Gradually, slowly, this prejudice has yielded to the evidence. No, Neanderthals did not paint on walls – not, at least, in the same heart-stopping way of Homo sapiens 20 or 30 or 40 thousand years after them. They painted outlined hands on the walls; they painted their dead, and probably themselves, too – they certainly used ochre, though they preferred black for their designs rather than the red favoured by the Aurignacians.  They made and wore jewellry. They sketched idly on surplus bones; squiggles and scratches known by their technical name: meanders. (Kage howled with laughter at that one.)

And now it seems clear they also used feathers as well. Individually, possibly as jewels (as some MezoAmerican cultures did); and also in fairly complex headdresses and capelets made from entire, deboned vulture and eagle skins. Just as in their choice of which ocher to use, they chose dark and black feathers: vultures, hawks, ravens. It must have looked positively badass, to have their heavy shoulders draped with the black and pewter plumage of Bonelli’s  eagle and those lowering brows surmounted by the sabre beak; raven feathers stark against pale skin and red hair …

It appears the Neanderthals may have invented Goth culture. (And I’m looking at you,  Mr. Westlake!) Kage would be laughing her ass off.

http://tinyurl.com/8hecrz5

Kage Baker had a natural talent for close-in focus. She called it “having fun with your OCD”. She could (and did) turn the little wheels of her inner vision to a tight beam of attention on one problem or detail of an idea – she could force the light of her mind into spiritual coherency, and achieve a mental laser.

Of necessity, it was a narrow vision. But she knew it, and used it deliberately and carefully to achieve depth and clarity on an idea. When she had subjected the object of her study to a detailed analysis, then she could release the focus control and let it all expand again. That was the point where it could be integrated into the wider structure of her ideas, but with all its inner workings known and visible.

She said her mind was a factory, but all the machines and gears and tools were made of glass. And when she concentrated, she could see how they interacted and meshed and behaved all the way down to a molecular level. She could see everything, all the secrets under the surface.

Did any of you, Dear Readers, have those encyclopedias with the layered illustrations? You’d get a picture of a running horse or the Library of Alexandria or a nuclear reactor: but painted, layer by discreet layer, on several sheets of tissue or clear plastic. And you can could flip the tissue paper back and forth to view the picture at different levels.  Man, Kage adored those! That was how she wanted to see the world.

I think it was how she saw most of it, and more of it all the time as she got older. She worked at it. Then there would be those walks and drives and explorations where Kage was narrate all the things that used to be where we were walking or driving; she’d describe the layers under the surface: the fixtures and paint and graffiti and weather stains she knew had been there once, fresh and clear. That were still fresh and clear to her.

Kage’s friends and relations had a hard time, sometimes, believing she was paying attention to them. She’d gaze at you during a conversation with such an unfocussed expression that you simply couldn’t believe she was hearing you. The secret was when you realized that she did indeed hear and see you – today, and last year, and the way you looked when you graduated from college, or held your first child in your arms, or ran downstairs in your pajamas when you were 5 years old on Christmas morning. Kage saw it all, and all at once.

It was probably easier for me, because I lived in that weirdly focused gaze all the time. It didn’t unnerve me, though sometimes I had to stop her in mid-speech and inquire as to the year we were currently discussing. When she brainstormed on Company ideas – whether that was specific plot devices or her Unified Theory of Time Travel – she always fell into the present tense; it was happening right now. And what Kage did was describe out loud what she saw as it happened, even leaping up and acting it out as she paced back and forth across the living room. Wild times, Dear Readers, wild and marvelous times.

Literally.

Remembering this, Kage’s vision and method and ways – well, I sometimes despair of ever coming close to that kind of close focus. I don’t have the same kind of steel in me, maybe; or perhaps the same kind of impressionable wax. Part of Kage’s mind was lithographic limestone, cousin to the marble of which the immortal gods are carved – mine is pudding stone. I don’t think I have in my head all the tiny sparkling gears and levers she had, the thousand-gemmed movement installed behind her eyes by the Great Watchmaker.

But it’s not a vacuum in my head, either. There’s at least a moderately polished Fresnel lens up there, and at least a double-digit strength telescope function. Sure, the lens fogs up now and then and I can’t seem to crank it tight enough to make the passing light cohere and lase – but I can manage to try. The effort alone will improve the focus.

Or so I figure. I just have to keep cranking. With enough pressure, mud and ash can turn to slate, you know. And slate can take pictures, too.

Kage Baker was quite frightened of hurricanes and tornadoes. The annual weather reports from the Midwest and the East quite unnerved her, especially since they got better and more detailed all through her life.

When we travelled one summer week through Missouri, in the car of some friendly fans, she kept asking nervously “Is that a funnel cloud on the horizon?” And, as Fate would have it, naturally, at some point it really was a nascent tornado about 20 miles away. Our hosts drove on calm as cucumbers, listening to the storm reports and assuring us it would break up before it got near us … which it did. By that time, though, Kage was white as a lily, and the bones in my hand that she was clutching were beginning to creak.

To calm us down, our friends took us to see the Convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, outside St. Louis. It’s an amazing sight, those two great streams melding and pouring together; also impressive is the very tall pole on the banks there, showing how high various floods and inundations have gotten in record years. I thought Kage’s eyes would pop right out of her head and float away on the legendary flood …

The rest of the country seems to believe that in LA, we don’t have seasons. An alternate joke is that our seasons are heat, floods, fires and riots. This is the sheerest calumny – except for the fires. Those are real. There really is a fire season, with all the inevitability and ponderous weight of the snow in North Dakota. And it is now.

September is, traditionally, when the heat gets worst. The heat rises, the crepe myrtles bloom, and the schools re-open. Kage used to go into agonies of despair when the red, pink and white crepe myrtles began to replace the red, pink and white bee balm, which we’d been using for wands, arrows, wreaths and confetti all summer – it meant that soon we’d be all be shopping for saddle shoes and have to don our school uniforms again. And since we were all Catholic school kids, those uniforms were usually plaid wool.

Man, nothing like plaid wool and knee socks when the temperature is 105 degrees! The “ancient dress” of Scotland would never have developed if the temperature ever got over 70 in the Isles, I assure you. Oh, it’s true that you can sweat through wool – but all that means is that you won’t mercifully die of heat prostration. You’ll just sweat and be miserable with 30 other pre-adolescents in a classroom with no air conditioning.

September was, by Kage’s standards, the very worst month of the school year.

However, it could always be enlivened with the fires in the Hills. Living as we did in the Hollywood Hills, with several of views of the immensity of Griffith Park, plumes of smoke and serpents of flame were a regular part of the landscape. We could also see right across the San Fernando Valley, where other and usually larger fires would bloom in the hills above Glendale and Burbank and Topanga. If Riverside and San Bernardino to the east also caught, then great rafts of smoke like thunderheads would come creeping round the bulwarks of the mountains.

Most people don’t realize that several National Forests share borders with urban Los Angeles – but they do. And this time of year, they burn. Pasadena, Altadena, Sierra Madre – lost of charming towns live on the edge of seasonal infernos, and sometimes the fire storms sweep right down through the Craftsman houses and swimming pools.

The Basin can fill with smoke, in fire season. The smog is almost gone, these days; the years of it hanging in stinking billows at street level are long gone – though we older folks remember it. But this place was called the Valley of the Smokes by the Gabrielanos and the Tongvas, long before cars arrived, and that still happens. When the traffic lights change colour, you know it’s one for the records books – instead of RED-YELLOW-GREEN, the lights are BROWN-ORANGE-TURQUOISE BLUE, while black snow-ash covers your car and lawn and roses.

Anyway, now it’s fire season. The Sepulveda Pass is expected to be out by tomorrow (burned all night) and Chavez Ravine behaved itself, too. No more underground explosions, but a refinery out in San Pedro is apparently on fire. There’s a brush fire in (dry) Hansen Dam; another, larger one in the camping territories in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Yawn. All normal, for us. Someday we’re gonna lose Pasadena or San Diego, but we haven’t yet. And at least, though the crepe myrtles are indeed in glorious bloom, I don’t have to go back to school.

Kage would count it a win.

Kage Baker, for all her love of heat, would have been hiding from our weather now. This is the sort of weather where errands were run at dawn and after sunset; we spent the day en deshabille in front of fans on at max, and lived on ice cream and gin and tonics.

Now the hot wind has risen, and keeps rising. It marks a weather change, which is good in that it is at least closer to normals. It’s still hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk – yes, it really is; generations of my family have done it – but the air is alive and dry. It’s almost nice, like talcum powder on the skin. You don’t need gills anymore.

The temperature here in Los Angeles has been flirting with 100 degrees all day. It goes a little up, it goes a little down – I’ve been watching the temperature display on my online weather program turn red and pulsate at regular intervals. That’s what it does to announce triple digit heat … it’s rather entertaining, as long as you know it’s happening outside and not on your auto dashboard. And it helps that the heat is, at least and at last, DRY. The humidity has been around 15% all day, which makes it all slightly easier to bear.

Although, of course, the rising wind brings to life the dragon that always sleep beneath our hills. Los Angeles is on fire in several places. Not large fires, mind you; but the little fires that break out all along the hill crests can sometimes grow. It’s a nervous time, a nervous season, when the heat rises and the humidity plummets and the afternoon winds begin to blow straight from the heart of the sun …

There’s a fire in the Sepulveda Pass, below the Getty Museum and above the ever-congested 405 Freeway. There’s been an underground explosion in Studio City, and appears to be a fire in a utilities vault under the street. There are various structure and car fires hither and yon, as barbecues and stoves and car engines get over-frisky in the hot afternoon, then decide to grow glowing leathern wings and dance on the wind. Our firefighters, though – men and women as determined as St. George – are beating the dragons back. This is an almost normal day, for them.

But the dry wind is rising. We all feel it, we all watch the branches of the trees move and are uneasy – we scan the edges of the sky, to see where smoke might begin to rise. I remember, beginning as a child, watching the red borders of wild fires creep across the faces of the hills in Griffith Park, wondering if the flames could leap the freeway … you always wonder if this time the Great Worm might get away and come to visit your house.

If the fires were distant, Kage liked to go to the movies – a couple of hours in a cool dark theatre was always good. But the urge to keep an eye on the hills makes that an uncomfortable option right now: Kage would want to be at home, too, watching the sky and flipping through banks of web cams. She had an instinct on where to find free, open webcams; she would assemble all her palantiri and watch the flames from all angles available.

We’ll all hope all night that it stays at small brush fires here and there: a spark through a bit of broken glass, a lawn mower blade against a stone, a BMW or old Ford emulating the Phoenix on a verge thick with wild oats and blessed thistle. Little brush fires are all right. If there aren’t too many. If they stay small …

And the wind is rising

Kage Baker loathed entropy. And she fought it remorselessly. Yeats’ dire and despairing poem, The Second Coming, was the epitome of everything Kage would not accept, and fought all her life.

The idea that everything eventually winds down was personally insulting to her. She believed (or, in her dark moments, at least wanted to believe) that perpetual motion of some sort was possible, somewhere. If mere flesh couldn’t support it, then spiritual energy would have to keep things going. Kage would not, could not, accept that things – just -end.

She was quite distressed when – in the course of a casual conversation – I explained the theory of the heat-death of the Universe. The image of the entire spangled wheel of the Universe slowly spreading out and slowing down to a thin cold soup one atom thick everywhere: for Kage, that was more horrifying than King Kong taking the roof off to look at her while she slept. (A picture that deeply troubled her childhood …).

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” she said then, fixing me with her basilisk glare.  “How am I gonna get that out of my head now?”

It was notoriously difficult to get things out of Kage’s head. Even for her. Guilt-stricken, I went researching further, looking deeper into the ideas of How and Why and When it all began; not to mention when it was scheduled to end. Bearing uneasily in mind that I had gotten the idea originally from a science fiction novel, I sought further enlightenment in, like, actual science books … which ultimately yielded theories that comforted both of us.

Kage loved the idea of the Big Bang. It was the ultimate explosion, and she adored explosions; she didn’t view them as wicked cool destruction, but as creative outbursts: lights! Colour! Action! I am absolutely positive she envisioned the birth of the Universe as the Fourth of July over Pismo Pier: just writ very, very large.  When I found, and passed on, the idea that the Universe breathes – that velocity tears it apart and dark energy and dark matter pull it back together – that the Big Bang occurs over and over, a regenerative BOOM! that births a new Universe – Kage saw it immediately as THE story that made sense to her.

She took it as given that somewhere, someone with a better brain than either of ours had considered this and found it logical. And that was enough for her. It made sense to her, on the visceral level that was always her last arbiter of truth: it felt right. And after that, she not only stopped worrying, she was able to absorb all the ever-increasing information and theories and outright mad guesses about the life and death of the Universe with complete calm and considerable interest.

It was personal to Kage, you see.

String theory, though, she rejected with some energy. No theory that requires 7 invisible pocket dimensions to explain this one we’re in could possible be right, she said. That’s Universe-building with your fingers crossed, and Jacks wild on every second Tuesday. God may well play dice with the Universe, Kage proclaimed, but He sure as hell doesn’t play Fizzbin!

When we reached our half-centuries, she and I, we told one another we could see the edge of the Universe up ahead. Kage said it was a T-intersection: we’d have to go right or left, but our forward road would end there. When I queried – as I had so many, many times before – which way to go, she told me to be patient.

I’ll know when we get there, she said.

And I guess she did know. Alas, I failed to make the turn when Kage did, and have been coasting through Uncharted Lands ever since, praying for landmarks and racking my memory for directions she left me. Some times have been easy. Some others have found me on no roads at all, but making my way over rocks and chasms, empty pizza boxes and broken beer bottles everywhere.

Because things DO fall apart. It’s a shame and a sorrow and an enduring pain; also, a damned difficult thing to get over. But eventually, gravity begins to win and all the sparks and lights begin to fall back to the center to ignite and live again.

It’s not the same center, not exactly. But it remembers the old one, and there are plaques and statues and old buildings here and there to memorialize it. You just have to wait, and then find them.

Yeats didn’t quite figure that out. But Kage did. And she told me. And I believe her.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Kage Baker would have characterized my last week as a cluster f***.

Complete with asterisks. She was one of those rare people who can actually pronounce asterisks. I think it had something to do with her descent from real Southern ladies.

Anyway, I offer abject apologies to all my Dear Readers. I was much rejuvenated by my week in misty Seattle – but came back to a week of revolving plagues. I’ve monopolized the bathroom, narrowly avoided strep throat, almost drowned in my own mucus and am now just getting over coughing up my lungs. And the overlap has been hell …

Anyway, the heat is continuing in Los Angeles, but definitely beginning to waver. It’s finally becoming believable that someday it will be cool enough here for human life again. I will survive the tag end of summer, and fall will be my salvation. And in the meantime, I can once again expect to spend some time upright and conscious and not wishing I would just die in my infrequent sleep.

Thank you for your patience! It’s kind of you all to follow a blogger who keeps coming down with weird diseases It’s  darned good thing that real viruses cannot be transmitted over the aether.

Tomorrow, we will return to our normal broadcasting. Virtual roses and chocolates to you all!

Kage Baker was  prone to tonsillitis, as well as colds:  but only as an adult.

As a child, she was free of the problem; sore throats and inflamed tonsils were my speciality . Kage ran more to fevers and rashes, sometimes more than one at a time.  Kim and I, on the other hand,  had our tonsils yanked in a job lost when we were 11 and 12, after losing probably an entire year of school over the first 5 grades. Since then, I’ve been sore throat free and my current paucity of colds started then, too.

But Kage started getting tonsillitis in her 20’s and finally had hers yanked in an emergency procedure when she was 31 years old. It was hellacious, as adult tonsillectomies tend to be; but it did reduce her inevitable colds. And she never got as many sore throats again. So we were both pretty happy, throat-wise, for the rest of our lives.

What this has left me with is a middle-aged legacy of being a total wuss where a sore throat if concerned. Mine has hurt for two whole days now, and I reached the whinging and whimpering stage hours ago. Oh, poor me! It hurts when I swallow. It’s not nearly as bad as childhood, but I am decades out of practice. Nowadays, I am a wretched weenie about unfamiliar pains.

My head is unstopped and I am breathing fine. But my throat still feels like grated hamburger, and I think I have a kabob skewer in my ears. I am very, very sorry for myself, too … wah. Kimberly says my throat isn’t even that red, but let me tell you, Dear Readers – from my side of the mucous membrane, it’s hell.

God, I’m pitiful. Luckily for me, Kimberly keeps chicken broth and noodles around the house like survivalists keep apocalypse supplies. Cup O’Soup, Ramen, Swanson’s and Campbell’s: there’s anything my whiny self might desire. And I can add garlic and other goodies from the pantry and so whip up something magical.

Nothing works on a sore throat like hot chicken broth. Except maybe hot toddies. Or  hot gin and lemonade.

Kage would understand perfectly, as this was one of her chief crosses in her time. So until my head stops spinning and my throat stops burning, I’m going to live on hot broth and curl up with my Kindle.

Croak to you all tomorrow …

Kage Baker hated cold. And having colds. Upper respiratory tract infections incurred her deep personal hatred, directed with as much specificity as she could summon toward viral particles romping through her own cells.

If there were any truth to the theory of the evil eye, she’d have eliminated entire species of microscopic lifeforms with her scowl alone. Only the fact that she kept catching them – thus illustrating that she hadn’t excoriated them from her cells like Cyclops – convinces me that the evil eye is fictitious; because if anyone could kill with their glare, it would have been Kage.

So she took all sorts of precautions: never went out with wet hair, took Vitamin C and echinacea and zinc, washed her hands a lot. Nothing worked, not chemistry, folk lore or alchemy. Kage caught colds in every season.

And she caught them easily, unfortunately, and usually rode them right into bronchitis. She caught them in the winter, when it made some sense – performing in unheated warehouses in the midst of huge crowds is a great vector system. But she caught them in the summer, as well, and those were, I think, the ones she hated the most. For one thing, you can’t get warm and cozy when it’s 98 degrees outside. Nor are hot toddies any comfort when all you crave are gin and tonics or egg creams.

I rarely catch colds at all. Years pass between my colds. This earned me a lot of weak snarls from Kage, usually as I tucked her in and brought her new boxes of tissue. I’ve got to admit, it’s got to be freaking maddening when you catch colds three times a year despite all manner of precautions, while your idiot sister – who goes barefoot all year – skips blithely along in happy immunity.

But that old wheel turns … I woke up this morning coughing and hacking and trying to catch my running nose. I was apparently glued to my pillow in the night. And when I swallow, there are twin daggers in my ears – the dreaded sign that infection has invaded my Eustachian tube and I, yes, have a damned cold.

Kimberly says its because I left the state last week – the foreign shores of Washington have infected me. Or maybe it’s a psychosomatic reaction to the start of the school year. If it has anything to do with school, I think it’s because Kim spends her days with 23 little plague mice and brings home who knows what exotic pathogens … all I know is, I feel like road kill. And it’s unfair. And I am most disinclined to be polite about it.

Oh, well. If I’m not running around, then I have more time to write. Right? There am I happy, as that fool Father Lawrence says … excuse me, Dear Readers, as I now go off and gargle some soup.

Kage Baker once told me (blearily clutching her coffee cup), “A trip’s not over until you’ve slept it off.”

She was good at bon mots like that.

After an epically wretched flight home – 10 hours to get from SeaTac to Bob Hope Airport, a new personal best! – I am spending today mostly sleeping. In between times I am petting all the household animals, who have evidently been starved and neglected during the week or so I was in Washington. That’s what they all claim, anyway. I got my doubts, I gotta tell ya, but the furry little fibbers are fun to cuddle.

Details tomorrow, Dear Reader, and how my unwanted adventures in the airport contributed to various story ideas. Now I am going to go pet corgi ears and doze again.

There’s no place like home!

Kage Baker absolutely loved staying in hotels. The whole convention thing – a necessity for a writer to observe, from time to time – got a thousand times more fun for her when she realized it meant more weekends in hotels.

Cushy beds, clean bathrooms, tidy rooms – none of which she had to care for herself. Restaurants on the premises, and the lure of late-night room service.  The inevitable jewelled glow of city lights, strange city lights, outside the windows; the fevered blue glow of the swimming pools floors below; the glow of the late light in wood-panelled bars … a separate Universe of delight, in Kage’s eyes.

Hotel Space, she called it: like L-space in Sir Terry Pratchett’s novels, or hyper-space in everbody else’s. Hotels are all built in pocket Universes where slightly different laws apply – laws of interesting people, fascinating local foods, amiable bartenders. Leather banquets and deep pile rugs and wooden panelling. She loved it.

She always wrote in hotels, because it was private and quiet (except for the Con noises in the halls; you learn to tune those out, like lions roaring on the Serengeti.) She felt … protected. Cosseted. Also, rather wild and unfettered, out loose in the world as she was with a change of underwear and a magic notebook – so her mind relaxed and went off on its own tangents, and she wrote and wrote and wrote.

Kage also tried the Kansas City Cut steak in everyplace we went, sampling the country for the best beef. Kansas City, not surprisingly, won on steak; Texas won on beef simple of itself. And she drank her beloved musical comedy cocktails – Planters Punch. Singapore Slings. Manhanttans. She taught barmen coast to coast how to mix a proper Sidecar, years before retro cocktails were popularized again by Mad Men.

And we ate in restaurants where the tables had cloth napery, and two forks per plate, and the condiments were all in glass. If we were too full for dessert, she was actually delighted: that meant we could order something scandalously chocolate later on from Room Service. Kage couldn’t calculate a tip to save her life, but she always reminded me to tip at least 20% – she abhorred poor tippers, thought it was unforgivably declasse.

I am presently in a Radisson across the street from SeaTac Airport. I have an early flight tomorrow, and the fact that all I have to do is drive across the street is going to assure I make the plane. My room is quiet and comfy, and there’s a feather comforter on the bed. I’ve had an extraordinary dinner of fresh halibut and elegant trimmings, and a shower with soap that smelled like marzipan. I could hear Kage exclaiming, “Oh, man, I would so have eaten this when I was 4!”

I don’t think she would have. But she might have licked it …

Outside the lights of the airport and the city are coming on. The last light of the day is a line of embers behind them in the West. Planes are stitching light through the darkening sky. The last flights of swallows are rolling home in huge, ever-changing amoebic flocks, like fireworks seen in black and white.

And I can feel Kage so very near! So this is where her spirit likes to manifest? In good hotel rooms?

I should have known.