Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker has been flitting through my dreams of late.

By of late I mean the last week, when I have been sleeping in strange beds, in strange places. And by flitting, I mean I wake up knowing she was there, in my dreams – but I can’t recall much of the dreams themselves.

Tiny brightly coloured bits remain – my sleeping brain seems to be assembling mille fleur pieces, preparatory to setting them in a cool, solid globe. Somewhere along the production process, though, my mind loses control – all the wedges and petals and slices of coloured glass go flying up like Alice’s playing cards, and settle down into a polychrome delirium instead of the prim tableau originally intended. What was conceived as a nice study of the Tuilleries comes out as a Dali-esque landscape, festooned with boneless cats and melting clocks.

Ordinarily, I remember my dreams. I count on it, in fact, since a part of my mind also apparently keeps on writing while I’m asleep. On especially fortunate mornings, all I have to do to start writing is sit down and transcribe whatever storyline evolved in my sleep. But this week, only fragments have been remaining – those eddies of glass shards, inarguably brightly coloured but basically nonsensical.

I have, for instance, the clearest image of Kage – in an ancient, red-sleeved baseball jersey she wore to death somewhere around her 14th year – seated on a gold granite boulder on the edge of Highway 1 in Big Sur, watching fancy cars race by. It’s very precise and is utterly without provenance or explanation. What I would like, of course, is to sit there and have a chat with her; ask her how she’s doing, is she happy, what do I do with the corner into which I have written the heroine of “The Fog King” … maybe she knows where I packed the portable DVD player when I cleaned out her desk.

Maybe she can tell me how much longer I have to hang about here. Should I start that two-volume novel Linn wants me to try? She has this theory that two-volume stories sell more easily than singletons or trilogies. Of course, after agenting Kage through her 8-volume Company series, Linn may be just a little gun-shy …

Anyway, Kage is not deigning to bestow Wisdom from Beyond on me. I just remember her presence quite clearly each morning, surrounded by beautifully coloured pieces of craziness.

As is my wont when I spend enough time away from my own bed, I’ve been waking up not knowing where I am. I open my eyes and am in complete confusion as to my location; my head is facing the wrong direction, and all the doors and windows have moved around while I slept. This very morning as was, for instance, I was quite convinced (in that interminable time between one’s brain booting up and one’s eyes opening) that I was in the bedroom I shared with Kimberly when we were 7 and 8 – the specific wallpaper, with its ribboned bouquets of roses and hydrangea; the specific shadow of the bathroom door. The specific frame of the upper bunk bed in which I slept then, which unfortunately was not where I was sleeping now: so that when I slid my 8-year-old legs over the edge of the 5-foot drop, I crunched both my 59-year-old feet into the floor 18 inches below me …

And sat there stunned a few moments on the rug, staring out at the redwood beyond the window. And at the image of Kage, 14 years old and timing Lamborghinis as they rushed by.

It makes for weird wakings.

Maybe it’s just being a thousand miles from home. Or a surfeit of Earl Grey lattes before bedtime. Or maybe the endless woods that begin 20 feet beyond Linn’s patio railing are somehow drinking in and scrambling my dreams. Everything is being absorbed, altered and reflected by parabolic redwoods and poplars and broad-leafed maples. By the time the trees toss back the glass globes of my dreams, they’ve lost a firm hold on them – the dreams fall and break on the floor on my mind, into the drifts and dunes of coloured glass that wake me.

I don’t mind too much. A glimpse of Kage is always comforting. And the sports cars weren’t too bad either.

Kage Baker always felt that the best way to learn a new city was to drive around it. Aimlessly, if possible. Especially the edges and the old places; where the city’s identity was earliest formed and latest maintained.

She loved Old Towns and City Centres and Central Parks. She also loved the roads that ran out and around, with tell-tale names like Survey Point and Milestone and Baseline. Those names were evocative of city hopes sketched out on a blue print, and someone proudly surveying the view from an empty hilltop.

Kenmore, WA is rich in roads like that. It also has a really startling amount of numbered roads, most of them in the high 70’s and 80’s, and the low 100’s. Nothing in between … and they all have double compass headings appended to them, like NE and SW. I am informed by Linn-the-agent that there were two founders of the town, and they quarreled while laying out the streets – so they each named their half of town with no regard for what the other guy was doing.

Consequently, roads run wild and feral all over the place, intersecting (or not) with no regard for sense, reason or traffic flow. There are an unusual number of dead-ends, where evidently partisan streets refused to meet with roads from The Other Side. Plus, railway tracks run through the town, half the north-west border is water, and redwoods and blackberries are infiltrating every yard on the edge of town. There are Huorn woods up here …

Kenmore is a very interesting place in which to drive for the first time.

Luckily, I have decades of experience in identifying logos from the highway: I have successfully found a branch of my bank, a Safeway grocery store, and a drive-through Starbucks. AND found my way back to Linn’s condo again, aided by the fact that if you drive west until you hit swamp, you’re pretty much on her street … Her really very nice condo, which houses her, her darling dog and her office, is evidently built on the last solid ground between Lake Washington and the cement plant.

But, you see, this is the kind of residents’ view of a town that Kage loved best. She would be delighted if she were with me, skimming blackberry thickets as we rocket down narrow roads, admiring old houses and fascinating hovels on the lake’s edge. What she liked best was learning a town the way its children did – wandering, no agenda or plan, finding wonders by accident. Learning amusing old scandals by researching funny park names, and why there seems to be a section of NE 188th Street/Court/Place every few blocks.

I’ve ventured out every day, sometimes with Linn and her assistant, sometimes by myself in putative search of a coffee. Actually, I go out and drive around in various Great Circles, finding … things. If I ever come here again – as I suspect I will – I’ll be able to peg part of Kenmore as familiar. Then I can strike out from there and explore more of the wild country. This is a place to make my own map.

I owe it to Kage.

Kage Baker loved new roads.

Not newly-made roads; given a choice between a mossy track and a gleaming new concrete superhighway, in fact, she would choose the track every time. We saw a lot of interesting places that way, including several views over the Yawning Precipice of Imminent Death: which is a nice enough place, but the restroom is always out of order and one’s need is always very great …

No. What Kage loved and constantly sought were roads on which she had never been before. We would drive miles out of whatever our way actually was in order to see the views on an unknown road. Sometimes Kage had a putatively sensible reason as well – the rumour of a sculpture garden, or a new restaurant, or a restored antique building – but those were just excuses for times when she thought I’d respond better to a pretense of logic.

All she really wanted was a brand-new horizon.

Her ardent love of sailing ships arose from that, I am sure. Part of Kage was always longing to be hull-down over a fresh horizon, out where the green water turns to soul-deep blue; where the curve of the globe is as obvious as a smile.

She rarely got out there on the infinite water, so she contented herself with exploring by car. And every time we turned onto some hitherto unknown way, she would pump a fist in the air and yell, “New road!” And she’d turn up whatever was on the radio, and sing at the top of her lungs in sheer glee. It was wild and mad and exhilarating.

These last several days it’s been all new roads, all the time. I’m driving around Washington alone, so I am frequently lost – though it’s so lovely, I don’t even mind much. For one thing, even on roads where it appears the forest primeval has devoured whatever human habitation once stood there, coffee houses survive. This place is paved with Pete’s, Tully’s, Starbuck’s, and a myriad of non-corporate one-offs. One could live forever on coffee and tea cakes, and on the endless blackberries of the season.

Every time I find my way to somewhere I really want to go – a bank, the grocery store, any road that leads west – I rejoice at my fragile directional skill. Being without Kage has robbed me of my compass and sextant, and I am therefore always lost.

But every time I turn onto some new road, I hear Kage cheering triumphantly. I can see her from the corner of my eye, jumping up and down in the passenger seat with excitement and delight. Neither of us ever saw Washington beyond Seattle; now I’m finding my precarious way through the edges of the Great Pacific Northwest, and some part of Kage’s spirit is still here to urge me on.

We might find the secret, hidden home of all blackberries – some valley with cliffs of briars and berries as big as melons.  We might find a sasquatch (I’ll wet myself, but for Kage’s sake I’ll snap a photo with my phone.). Heck, we might even find our way back to the coffee houses and cement plants of Kenmore in time for dinner …

And if I do, I’ll sit down and work on a story. Kage would cheer. New roads indeed.

Kage Baker – like every writer – went on every single trip she ever took with the firm intention of writing in her spare time. Unlike most, she actually sometimes succeeded – resulting in sections of stories scribbled hastily on scraps of paper from everywhere.

I have notes on the adventures of Gard (some that did not make the final cut to House of the Stag) on cocktail napkins with little monkeys swinging all over them. They’re flirting their tails and looking sarcastic, apparently doing acrobatics on Kage’s distinctively horrible cursive script. Whenever I look at these, I always see Gard in my mind looking bemused at the habits of his amanuensis.

It’s harder for me to keep to this vow. I’m newer to this gig, and am still developing habits and virtues of my own. And I also just do not possess Kage’s molybdenum-steel focus; I’m pretty good, mind you, but I cannot help noticing that – for example – an Australian terrier with Veronica Lake bangs is grinning up at me. Kage internalized all her senses at will when she wrote, and became a closed circuit between her imagination and the page.

Nonetheless, I try. Yestreday I tried writing before I got a blog entry done, though, and discovered that it’s not a good idea to switch regimens in mid-narrative. I got my Martian heroine’s adventures rather confused with my own and had to start all over, before I lost track of who was dealing with magma flows and who was trying to find a yarn store. Though the hybrid, if I had had the time and energy, might have been amusing …

Anyway, today I have begun with the blog. The point of this is to convince my brain that a logical, professional, disciplined sequence of events is actually taking place, and therefore can be effortlessly continued. That was Kage’s theory, anyway; and I know it works, because I saw her do it again and again and again.

I must admit, I had a snivelling hope that I could lay off some of my lack of direction on my agent. Sitting and writing in her living room, under her gimlet eye, I was hoping I could achieve a sort of study hall effect: you know, where you must work, because Sister Percepta can see very clearly whether you are writing on the economy of Zaire or detailing the DIY funerary practices of Martian colonists.

However, my very entrance into the Agency has interrupted the normal course of everyone’s habits and affairs. It’s all very Schroedinger-esque. I present, unfortunately, a major distraction – one that quite enjoys being plied with amusing sushi and trips through the Wilderness of Berries, but is aware that she is slowing down the local energy economy. I am a Schwarzchild Radius of distraction, wherein all the normal moving bodies of the Agency come to a total halt, smeared out helplessly over the terrible gravitational drag of a guest in the office.

Also, Linn made the mistake of watching the Republican Convention last night. Between Anne Romney, Chris Christie and the constant updates on the current tragic drowning of New Orleans, today she is flitting round the office in a state of low-level hysterical outrage. Cracking a whip over me is pretty much the least of her worries.

So I must resist the lure of the green wilderness just outside the windows, and the sure knowledge that there are small waves singing out on the lake. I must reassure Wiley (the charming Australian terrier) that no, he actually will not crumble to dust if I don’t take him for a walk. I must resist, for a while at least, the urge to go knit kitty hats (thank you, DJ!) for my grandbabies down the road in Redmond.

It’s exquisitely cool and damp here, and my brain has come back online. Gotta write.

Kage Baker quite liked Seattle. She liked its use of stone and glass and metal; she liked the precipitate streets and the enormous expanse of the Sound constantly in the corner of one’s eye. She liked that it had kept its old buildings, and she liked the challenge of the new ones reaching up to the sky.

Especially when you glanced up a street and got a glimpse of Mt. Ranier gazing down thoughtfully at its once and future domain … that gave Kage an interesting frisson of terror. Also an admiration for the casual courage of the average Seattleian.

Washington per se, though, rather unnerved her. While Kage loved plants and loved to garden, forests made her nervous. They were the deep blue sea to one who had learned to dive happily in warm tropical shallows: things lurked there. They were fascinating things, and Kage always hoped for a quick peek – but the possibility made her shiver nonetheless.

She gave that half-frightened fascination to the Children of the Sun, and made them nervous, too, in the thick trees. And she peopled the trees with the beautiful, enigmatic Yendri, and  demons with various forms of OCD and poor impulse control for the Children to be afraid of. In Bird of the River, she wrote an entire sacred grove for a shrine of the Children of the Sun: where every leaf on every tree was made of gems and metal.

That was her sort of forest: either viewed from a safe distance or transmuted into a more familiar garden. When we drove through Big Sur, she would hang out the car window and dare a demon to snatch her away.

Me, I love the green gloom of forests. And I love the cool grey light of Seattle, which is often unfairly reviled for its constant rain and clouds. But the sun shines here! It just never shines in your eyes, and doesn’t bake your brain. Wandering through Seattle, it felt to me last week like there was a crystal roof over the place, that softened the sunlight and eased the heat, and let the sea winds concentrate themselves against the hills.

Now I am a ways inland, in Kenmore. Which is a tiny town. I think.  Most of it is the proverbial wide place in the road, in this weird state where all the roads have two appellations and then run in a third one altogether: 140th Street North East, which runs to the South … most of Kenmore is huge trees and hill-sized mounds of blackberries.

And automotive businesses – there are more car-related businesses here than along Van Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. (My previous standard.) There aren’t that many cars on the roads, but they must all run perfectly. You can get them serviced, replaced, repaired and detailed in some shop on every block.

Kenmore also has several edges of Lake Washington, and an unusual airport cum cement plant. Little planes with pontoons come swooping in over the chimneys and silos and chutes full of gravel, to land in the lake and coast gracefully away like the landing pegasi in Fantasia. Kage would have loved it, especially the way the planes swoop down right over the road close enough to see the pilots’ plaid shirts through the windows.

Today, Linn the agent and her redoubtable assistant Kear drove me around a bit. For the life of me, I am not sure what towns we passed through or paused in – they’re all wide places in the road, and all the roads are lined with enormous trees and reefs of blackberries. Kage would have been giggling nervously through the whole drive, staring up hillside after hillside of deepening green. It was just the sort of backroads drive she loved best.

The ladies also introduced me to a wonderful thing that Kear called “a sushi go-round”. It’s a restaurant full of booths, amid which winds an endless miniature railway filled with plates of different sushi items. I’m told these are all over Washington and many other states, but I’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s great! You take what you like, and at the end they count up your plates for the charge. Amazing! And fun! And hilarious, to see amongst the eel negiri and tiger rolls, the plates of brownies, custard and key lime pie …

I am in an alien land, here. And it’s delicious.

Kage Baker let very little interfere with her writing. One of the things that usually could distract her was family. Especially baby family. Especially when one is hiding from inhuman heat.

The last few days, I have been happily wallowing in the company of some of my semi-demi-hemi-grandchildren. I am pleased to report that I am a roaring success as a Grandma, but it means I haven’t written a word in 4 days.

But I have been ever so busy with getting shoes and clothes on giggling little people (they are two, and have totally mastered undressing. Crazy little nudists.), diapering, offering encouragement to eat real meals, being fed fresh-picked blackberries from tiny purple fingers, catching and throwing all manner of stuffed animals and pillows, singing, telling stories, tickling, making percussion instruments out of paper clips and Tupperware …

Being Grandma is hard work. And worth every minute of effort, too. The joy of a bus ride with a sleepy toddler on your lap is one of the acute delights of life. I recommend it to anyone with pains, aches or high blood pressure, because there is simply nothing so sweet in all creation.

In between times I have stayed up late with the twins’ wonderful parents, discussing Faire, comic books, knitting, art and authorial business. Jason s also a writer; he and I have been brain-storming. And both he and Misty are alumni of Faire, so we have had some marvellous sessions of “Do you remember the time that? …”

Another under-appreciated joy of life is talking to people who remember the same things you do.

So, all in all, Dear Readers, while I have been doing some very successful re-stuccoing of the cracks in my sanity, I haven’t done much else that’s of any use. But I will. Tomorrow I will be joining Linn-the-agent for a week of serious writer stuff, and more timely attention paid to this blog. Seattle is cool and delightful right now and I am a new, revivified woman.

Time spent with babies and family is never, ever wasted. Kage said it was one of the things that always re-charged her batteries … and in fact, I have some new ideas and new approaches to old problems already! A weird sign in a McDonald’s that caught my attention; my grandbabies’ habit of hunting and eating rainbows; the strangely lordly cat Harrison, who appears to be metamorphosing into a dragon …

New shoots are sprouting from the ashes of my flash-fried brain.

Kage Baker told me, “Write every day. If you can’t write, read and store up information. If you can’t read – well, if you can’t read, you’re probably dead. But on the chance you just don’t feel well, try to sleep and dream. There are stories there.”

The heat is said to be breaking – but the weather people have been saying that for a week, and the heat has sailed serenely on with no discernible change. So the heat’s not breaking, but I am getting close. There have been winds and thunderstorms all around the LA Basin – hail, flash floods, lightning and its thug offspring, brush fires; tarmac is melting, kitchen gardens are turning into vegetable leather right and left. It peaked at 90 degrees or so today; it’s only 82 now and there is an actual breeze: but the humidity is up to 60%.

In Los Angeles, when humidity reaches 60%, it’s supposed to freaking rain. But all we have now is boiling fog on the edges of the sky, slowly simmering pearl reducing us all to a miserable stock …

Air pressure is making my joints ache. Heat is making my head ache. Humidity is making my skin itch. My feet are swelling like loaves of Bridgeford bread, which has to be the most repulsive thing so far about getting old. And I am a right bitch in all of this, and incapable of anything useful. But next week I’ll be in Seattle – which will at least be different – and I ought to maybe start packing; getting enough clothes and vital supplies for a week through the TSA takes careful thought and much three-dimensional experimentation in suitcase volumes. Such a pity, then, that my brain has been boiled down and rendered into orange grease for taco  frying …

I would looove to sleep. Of course, now that I actually want a nap, there is no hope for one. My mind is full of senseless static, but the sparking and gibbering is still too loud and constant for me to drift off and dream. Reading is taking almost too much effort – thank goodness for the Kindle, since anything much larger would snap off my poor little wrists like cheap peppermint candy cigarettes. Which would be kind of tasty right now, but no one seems to make them anymore – candy cigarettes having succumbed to Political Correctness – and really, is there anything at all neat left from my youth in the world?

It hardly seems worth it to have survived this far.

But … within the week I will be in Seattle, happily replacing my cerebral spinal fluid with good coffee. I can tap-dance out messages to Those Who Sleep Beneath in the chthonic halls below the streets. (Kage used to do that when we visited …) I can snuggle and spoil my semi-demi-hemi grandbabies, until their parents are sorry they told me I could visit. I can contribute more to my patient agent’s grey hairs; and spoil her charming little dog, too.

I’ll start packing tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to sit as close as I can to a fan, and wind yarn. Gotta have yarn if I mean to travel away from home. I’m not fit for human company, so yarn is just about my speed.

And I can dream while I wind it.

Kage Baker was a staunch, dedicated and – above all – demonstrative supporter of women’s suffrage.  She never missed an election; and, being as she was in the first batch of 18-year-olds in California to get the vote, that was an awful lot of elections. She liked to vote early in the day, on the way to work if possible; and then she wore her “I VOTED” sticker on the shoulder of her blouse all day, like a cloak pin.

She had an enormous affection and regard for the suffragettes. Those were tough ladies, rising from a status as nonentities to claim their civic rights alongside men. Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among her favourites  – probably because they all approached the topic as a human right and not just a women’s right.

It was all sort of amazing, since Kage was one of the least public people ever. She didn’t like to advertise her political or religious views. She didn’t like people knowing what she thought – unless she’d had time to polish and refine those thoughts, and then she put them out in a story. It’s one of the reasons she was a writer. It let her present her inmost thoughts in a completed, elegant form, rather than (as she succinctly described it) “blurting them out like you’re throwing up.”

Of course, Kage didn’t shout out her views: just what she had done about them. She voted. She detested political arguments and refused to participate (unless someone wanted to re-examine the relative merits of Stephen vs Matilda for the British throne … ); when pressed for her party affiliation, she would usually reply, “Tory”. And she only went that far because Jack Aubrey, her second-favourite fictional seaman, was one.

Aside from that one conversational whimsey, though, Kage was a serious voter. She studied the issues. She marked her ballot beforehand and brought it with her. She changed her registration from Green when Ralph Nader became a monkey wrench in the Presidential election; she went Independent. She changed from Independent in order to vote in primaries. Now that California has open primaries, she would doubtless have either returned to Indie status, or actually registered as a Tory – which is not, as several elderly registrars have argued with me, actually illegal … just pointless, unless your state goes to open primaries.

Today was a red letter day on Kage’s calendar. It is the anniversary of American women attaining the right to vote. In fact, is is the 92nd birthday: which means our personal Lady Liberty, oh my enfranchised sisters, is now a veritable wise old woman and is approaching the threshold of immortality.

At least, let us hope so. Our right to vote, Ladies, deserves to go well beyond the standard two score and ten, and on into the Noachin ages. We must all do all we can to ensure that it does, and that our patroness avatar of Athena Ergane – that fierce voting Lady – is never without Her devotees and wreathes of approbation.

And the best thing we can do is vote. Regardless of your affiliation, get out there and vote. Keep this right alive and with all her necessary circulation; don’t let her heart slow, her bones grow frail. Our daughters and a thousand, thousand daughers-yet-to-be depend on us to keep her alive for them. And for their brothers, too.

In the meantime, remember Susan and Amelia and Liz. They, and all their own sisters, suffered and fought and sometimes outright died, Dear Readers, in order that you should not only be free but be able to do something with that freedom. So don’t you dare turn off your brains and  shirk your duty! If you can’t bring yourself to vote for any of the collection of clowns now strutting on the public stage, then get out there and vote against something!

God She knows, there is a lot that needs stopping these days. Don’t just stand there wringing your hands and screaming as the giant ape approaches, Ladies. Stand up and mark him out with a firm swipe of your Sharpie pen on the ballot. Vote!

Kage Baker liked books of lists. It wasn’t a love of facts, or a fondness for solid information. She didn’t read them for research. It was her particular personal approach to whimsy that led her to read peculiar lists, because they amused her. They were all attempts to classify and make logical things that were usually based in craziness.

There are practical lists, of course – we learn them in history classes, in mathematics drills and chemistry labs. King lists, battles and truces and congresses. The Periodic Table of the Elements, and where the lanthanides lurk. Pronouns and adverbs, case and gender. None of these is especially entertaining, not even sniggering schoolgirl jokes about  conjugating verbs (amamus, amabus, yerapairofrollerskates …)

What Kage liked were the impractical ones. Absurdity, mischance, general confusion and improbable results all lined up tidily: the perfect illustration of her much-loved assertion that Truth was not only stranger than fiction, it was funnier. Ten National Leaders Who Expired During Coitus. Movies That Would Have Flopped If Their Plot Holes Were Plugged. Six Animals Devolving Before Our Eyes. Saints Who Lost Their Vatican Franchises.  Those were the sorts of things she liked.

And since she liked them for their giggle quotient, she preferred to have them read aloud to her. Being read to was always a luxury, and one Kage associated with perfect leisure and all being right with the world. And in such surroundings, what could be better than listening to someone recount a Dozen Biology Projects Eaten By Their Originators? Only the sequel, Four Biologists Who Survived Eating Their Research Projects …

She read them for pleasure, for downright fun – there was a bit of a craze for the books in the 1980’s, and we bought them all and took them with us camping. Nothing like a good read from a book of lists, by candle or propane lantern light, round an oak fire on a summer evening … especially enlivened by the reader and the audience choking with giggles and spraying rum into the fire to spark all blue and green in the flames.

My mind was led to this remembrance naturally (if by convoluted means) today. I’ve been thinking about Kage an awful lot the last week – to better effect every day, thank goodness, since at first all I did was make myself miserable. But the pits on the road of recovery can be climbed out of, eventually, and then left behind. I’ve been slogging on resolutely, melting in the gods damned heat and feeling sorry for myself, and then – this morning, things were … better. Good, even.

The weather is cooler and dryer. The thunderheads and wild cirrus manes of clouds are closer, and have obligingly sucked up the swampy damp that was clinging to the earth. There is a wind, an actual wind! It’s blowing through every door and window of the house, getting grabbed up by the many fans and flung through the house in long glassy ribbons of coolth.

My brain has come back on line.

Doing so, I finally noticed it was August 15th; which was especially handy since I had a doctor’s appointment today. And I therefore remembered that this date always struck Kage as memorable, since a lot of heroes fulfilled their destiny and kicked the ol’ jam jar on this date. The second Arab Siege of Constantinople, for example, was lifted – lots of dead heroes on both sides, and lots of relieved survivors who had no idea the reprieve was to be temporary.

This is the anniversary of the battle of Roncevaux Pass, where great-souled Roland shattered his horn and his heart calling for aid. In succeeding years, the Saracens destroyed Taranto on this date, and the Holy Roman Emperor Otis II was killed by them at Capo Calonna.

Duncan I of Scotland was murdered by Macbeth on this date. And so was Macbeth, in his turn, 17 years later. The city of Rhodes surrendered to the Knights of St. John.  The city of Lucca surrendered to Francesco Sforza. The Mongols invaded Japan and were promptly destroyed by the Divine Wind – for the second time. Brussels was destroyed by the French, and Leignitz by Frederick the Great.

However, the last man ever executed for treason at London Tower also died on August 15th, presumably marking a more civilized era beginning – at least for the staff of the White Tower. The Tivoli Gardens opened; The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Woodstock opened. The “WOW! Signal” was received by SETI.

It is the first day of the flooding of the Nile.

The Beatles played Shea Stadium.

So it wasn’t all bad. And those are only part of the list that Kage celebrated on August 15ths, the various August 15ths she traversed in her years of exploration. She drank to Roland and Duncan and Macbeth; to the drowned Mongols and the resurrected Nile. It was fun.

It’s still pretty much fun. Looking back over the lists, sipping a Limeade Sparkler from Taco Bell, well-adulterated with Bombay Sapphire Gin … so much better than lying in a pool of sweat and tears feeling sorry for myself. So I drink to Kage.

Do join me, Dear Readers. It’s August 15th – a glass with you, my friends!

Kage Baker was a salamander. She loved heat and prospered in it. She almost never sweat – a ladylike “glow”, as elder female relatives put it, might accompany a faint blush to her face when the temperature soared … but she didn’t sweat.

“Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire and ladies glow,” we learned in our childhood. Kage took it to heart, aided by the fact that she never seemed to feel any heat until the ambient atmospheric temperature exceeded her own.

Me, I glow like a horse. And at any temperature over 80 degrees. I loathe sweating, and it has always been one of my personal metabolic strengths. Life is ironic like that.

When I was young and strong, I just slunk around with my hair pinned up on top of my head, looking like a bad pre-PC cartoon cannibal with a topknot: rather as if my brains had boiled over, according to Kage.  She could coil her braid into some weird non-Euclidian knot and stab a pencil through it, and voila! She just looked charmingly en deshabille, at least until her hair ate the pencil or Harry yanked it out and ran off with it … but I always look like a badly mutated cockatoo.

Now that I am old and tired, the heat has leaped my closest barricades and attacked relentlessly. The moat is full of barbecue, the heat demons are dancing in the inner bailey, and I am holed up at the top of the last tower – you know, the one with no door at ground level, where you can only get in through that dog-door in the third confessional booth down in the chapel. All I can do is hope to hold out until some approaching air pressure change rescues me.

It’s gone past just being hot. I’m flirting with heat sickness, adding nausea and headaches to the general malaise of being too freaking hot. It has to be due to the unrelenting nature of the weather – it hasn’t gotten below 70 in days and days, not even in the middle of the night; the house never cools down and neither do we inhabitants.

And due to the aberrant “monsoonal moisture” that has developed this year, the humidity has been 40 to 50%, also for day and days. In the mountains, in Orange County, down near Riverside – they’re getting thunderstorms and hail and yestreday an actual, brief tornado! But at least it sort of rains. In the L.A. Basin, it’s more like the walls of the world have been replaced by 1950’s vinyl upholstery; that glittery stuff that had an inexplicable depth to it, and stuck to the backs of your legs when you sat on it.

I miss the dry heat. This wet stuff is not compatible with my personal phenotype. I could handle triple digit heat if it just weren’t so damp!

Being responsible citizens, we don’t use the air conditioning during peak power usage hours. The fans are helping, but …  The drawback to going to the movies is that you have to come out, sooner or later. And after more than a week of this, I am a sad, self-pitying sponge of misery. I cannot work enough to keep my mood up; I fall asleep, exhausted by the heat, and wake up nauseated. Oh, poor me!

Be patient a little, friends and Dear Readers. The weather will improve and I’ll be in a better mood soon. Last week of August, I am fleeing to Seattle to visit Linn the agent and some friends and family. I’ll be much better then. And in the meantime, I am slowly digging my way out of the Slough of Despond that I’ve unexpectedly tripped into.

One thing I’ve learned is that the Progress of Mourning is not the neat, straight line they show you on motivational posters. It’s more like a bowl of worms, or the Gordian Knot. And you know how Alexander solved that one … it’s just taking me longer, see,  because I have to use this sharpened spoon instead of a sword …