Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was of the firm opinion that one needed time outs from the world. It had nothing to do with virtues or faults; nothing to do with transgression or punishments. It was self defense, a necessary  mercy to one’s own soul that sometimes had to be seized by main force from the world in general.

From time to time, Kage always said, things just get too complicated, too vicious, too noisy, too crowded, too painful.  The best thing to do then is to walk away, from as much of the world as you could manage. It was always an unsaid caveat with Kage, that one did indeed intend to walk back. Eventually. Otherwise, it was just facilitating an early exit, which was not the same thing at all …

Two good friends have died in the last two days. Admittedly, my friends started dying off at an alarming rate a few years ago. I am informed that this is what happens when one gets old and fails to die one’s self. However, I had always confidently assumed that I would be immune to this sorry state of affairs – don’t we all assume that? Turns out we’re wrong. Or at least I was. The really surprising part, to me, is not the intimation of my own mortality but the realization that so many of my friends – who were as gods in the youth of the world – are just as mortal as I turned out to be. And this, surely,  is a huge cosmic error.

So I need a time out. Indeed, I am perfectly willing today to declare that the world is misbehaving in a very gross kind of way, and should be faced into a corner for a while. A generation might suffice … in the face of not being able to enforce that (never give an order you know won’t be obeyed, say all the military geniuses), I have no choice but to absent myself awhile from the wretched, puling, bratty, world.

Not that I intend to stop talking or writing – Oh no! There is nothing wrong with what I am doing: the fault is all with the world.  Two more of my friends have departed. Robin Gibbs died, too, and Donna Summer. The rapper for the Beastie Boys and Goober on the Andy Griffith Show. Jonathon Frid! Levon Helm! Dave freaking Clark – and I was sure that dear fellow had gone cyborg years ago!

Pieces of my past are dropping like flies. Of course, that guy who engineered the Lockerbie crash finally croaked it – terminal 3 years ago, my ass – so not all the news is bad … but it’s been pretty hard this May.

Anyway, I am packing bags. Tomorrow early I intend to drive North, along the fabled I-5, through the early summer fields and the changing magnetic fields, under the vast heat rainbows in the sky and the thousands of cliff swallow nests under the bridges. Somewhere there will be cherries for sale; the air will smell of wet earth and cantaloupe and hot asphalt.

And I’ll end up in Santa Rosa, lovely town, and knock around the Bay Area for the next week. I’ll blog from guest bedrooms and hotels, and have adventures. I will eat cheese and dodge trains and drink fresh-squeezed cherry juice. And I will return restored and full of peace and energy, just as Kage and I always did.

Hurrah!

Kage Baker would have been grieving today – instead, she’s very likely greeting old friends. Two of our oldest died yestreday, and those of us still even slightly attached to the Faire community are mourning. A lot.

Surrey Blackburn was a fixture and a saint at Dickens Faire. She played Miss Havisham, from Dicken’s Great Expectations. She did it so flawlessly and so well that even customers knew at first sight who the elegant lady in the cobwebbed wedding gown was. She was much, much nicer than Miss Havisham – witty, kind, extraordinarily talented in many fields. She was a skilled photographer, and in fact an expert in several antique photography methods – she spent some time generously explaining them to Kage, who was doing research at the time on Vermeer …Surrey was a regular at the Green Man at Dickens, one of the Tea Brigade for whom we kept a special place on the House Shelf of tea cups. She made Pip’s life miserable every day at one of my tables.

And she was that rarest of gems among our cast, A Real Englishwoman. And she never laughed at us.

As Miss Havisham, she was in the habit of handing out stuffed toy mice to little girls. A decade of small girls in my Green Man Public House have been subsequently hiding the damned things in the tea cozy, amid the mustard pots, on the window sills, in my reticule (yes, I mean you, Meagan. And Adelia. And Skye Kathleen)… I am still constantly ambushed by small giggling girls with stealth mice. They will be Surrey’s honour guard in my memory.

Not 10 minutes after receiving the horrid news of Surrey’s death, I learned that my old, old, dear, beloved friend Kent Elofson had died yestreday. I can’t express the depth of this loss. Kent was a friend from the oldest days in Agoura, a playmate of my youth and Kage’s, a neighbor for several years in the Hollywood Hills. He was a brilliant costumer. He was an Imagineer for Disney. He was one of the sweetest, kindest, cleverest men I  ever knew.

We shared a duplex – made emergency dishes for one another’s dinner parties, shared laundry supplies, did one another’s shopping. When he had rehearsals in his half of the house, the sound of Court dancing, Privy Councils and the Reduced Shakespeare Company echoed up from my kitchen sink. He glued our toilet back together at midnight one Christmas Eve, when we’d broken it by dropping a conch shell into it and Grandma was coming for dinner the next day … when he eventually moved to Pasadena, a lot of it was in my truck. Load after load in the dark, gorgeous antique furniture, and boxes of vintage toys; ruffs and boots and swords and a skeletal Tinkerbell in a glass display jar, from his Dead Peter Pan costume.

He invented the Feta Oracalis, an heirloom of my house: the fabulous Fortune Telling Cheese of Antioch. That is a very nearly senseless reference, Dear Readers, I know: but try to understand the sensorium that accompanies it. It is symbolic of a thousand hot golden dusty afternoons under the oak trees, when we played silly games and told fortunes with a huge fake cheese adorned with one of Kent’s exquisitely jewelled gloves, laughing our brains out …

There is no way to memorialize either of these wonderful people adequately. All I can do is pour out what words I can find, wailing my furious and inchoate rage at being robbed yet again of people I loved. Fuck you, Death. You were already off my Christmas Card list, but now I’m drawing a big black line through your name.

So there. I’m sure Death is worried.

But in the meantime … Kage, good heart,  go pour a couple of cups of Earl Grey for our friends, please. It’s been a long walk, and they will be thirsty.

Kage Baker was thoroughly, blessedly diurnal. Given her druthers, she’d happily sleep in a bit in the mornings – but at need, she was up at dawn and as active as a lit sky rocket. Come sunset she began to slow; moonrise and she was drooping. By midnight, she was either asleep or so wired on stimulants to prevent it that she was audibly buzzing.

And once she went to sleep, she stayed that way. It took real effort to wake her from her sleep – earthquakes (if strong enough – she slept through several); midnight phone calls; screaming babies. Ordinary noises didn’t do it, though she was hard-wired to the sounds of telephones or unhappy children. But Kage was not one of the people to whom you could safely entrust the mid-watch on guard – your entire picket line, the cook and your best boots would have been stolen by morning, and she would never have stirred.

As I have whined interminably here (you are all so patient, Dear Readers) I am a chronic insomniac. Or used to be; lately, my sleep cycle is nothing so orderly as merely missing. It’s deranged. If it were the energy output of a generator, the lights would be going on and off constantly, and signaling aliens in Morse code between times. I can’t discern any pattern to it, and so I have pretty much given up – I’m trying to go with the flow, and see what emerges.

It appears that I am awake without remedy until I can’t stay awake any longer. Then I sleep like a hibernating groundhog until I can’t anymore. Then I wake up and am again helplessly conscious. The actual duration of the cycle is variable and I can’t figure out what it is … I’m just awake until I’m asleep, and then I’m asleep until I’m awake. I’ve pretty much given up worrying about it and am just trying to adjust.

Most people do have a sleep/wake pattern longer or shorter than our abitrary 24-hour clock cycle. It’s just that they can adjust it somewhat to fit the necessities of life. And usually they have to go live in a cave for a few weeks before their “natural” cycle asserts itself. Not me! I will now sleep through any amount, colour and pattern of lights; and I will be awake and thinking furiously in pitch darkness.

The Kindle helps. So does the computer. I can read, write, shoot zombies, all without giving a care or a fig for the hour on my Kit Kat Clock. That’s how I ended up awake at 4 AM (after 4 hours of sleep like a coma); reading about the more recent evolutionary changes in the human cerebrum and cerebellum, and sharing popcorn with the little black cat. I assume it was her, anyway – as she is black, she is invisible in the dark. I just handed down pieces of popcorn to the patch of velvet by my feet, and something took it and purred. Cats shouldn’t eat popcorn, of course. They are obligate carnivores. However, those are very big words and the little black cat doesn’t know big words. She just likes popcorn.

At any rate, I was awake. And now I find myself pondering the cerebellum – which contributes to sleep cycles – and how changes in it might have contributed to the unique, interior life of the mind that is believed to be a hall mark of crossing that final border into true humanity … maybe the Cro-magnons and Neanderthals had insomnia, too. Maybe they too stared into the tiny lights they conjured in the enveloping darkness, and handed treats down to invisible companions in the shadow …

Kage died of a tumour in her cerebellum. And even then, she never had insomnia. But I am pretty sure she was looking over my shoulder last night, nodding and thinking: There might be a story in this …

Kage Baker was a very private person. But she grew to really enjoy science fiction conventions. She anticipated hating them, before she had ever been to one – then she attended her first as a writer and discovered how much fun they could be.

And she wasn’t even a wild party person. But the chance to meet readers, to talk to them – and to lecture a little, too – plus the dealers’ room, the costumes, and the general people-watching … well, it was almost as much fun as a Renaissance Faire.

And the occasional weekend in a nice hotel was never to be scoffed at. We’d enjoy the maid service and the weird bathroom soaps and lotions, eat out for three days, and usually end up teaching the bartender how to make a decent sidecar or Singapore Sling. Kage liked retro cocktails, and would patiently instruct any bartender who didn’t know how to make them. I played entourage and sat knitting in the audiences, being Madame Dufarge on the sidelines.

BayCon was one of Kage’s favourites. It’s held in Santa Clara this year, at the Hyatt Regency. It’s a very nice hotel, vaguely Japanese International in deco – although with a science fiction convention running around the place, the decor is hardly relevant. But it’s comfy, the beds are soft, they sport down pillows, and the lobby bar is elegant and pleasant. And the parking is free.

As you can see, my demands of a Con hotel are materialistic in the extreme. This is from lengthy experience of finding one’s self in strange places where the only surety of shelter may well be the length and width of one’s rented bed …

There are two main ways of surviving much travelling, Kage always said. One is to insist on making your space as much like your home as possible: but that requires a hell of a lot of luggage (I know people who pack quite large suitcases devoted solely to deco to make their room “homey”) and the other is to settle firmly into tourist mode. The latter was always Kage’s choice. Eyes wide and eager for adventure, plenty of brass in pocket and locate the bar right off! Have at least one boon companion, and accumulate minions if you can. Then you can deal with anything.

We got through many Conventions in a state of bliss with this attitude. And this despite screwed-up panel schedules, missing Guests of Honour, and a couple of hotels that had floors in alternate dimensions: you couldn’t get to them except by secret stairways, and most of the panels were scheduled there. One place that scheduled readings in what appeared to be an enormous industrial brick chimney. The inevitable occasions when Kage’s name disappeared from the program, and she had to scavenge panel space.

So, not this weekend but the next – Memorial Day Weekend – I shall be heading for the  lovely environs of Santa Clara for another BayCon. I already know that this time, my name is the one that fell off the program – but I bet I can find a few places to sit in. I’m fetching along a few copies of Best of Kage Baker, and I shall be talking up Nell Gwynne II. I’ll be shamelessly promoting this blog.

And I’ll be companion-ing with the always-game and saintly Neassa, who has tons of entourage experience and always carries chocolate in her purse. I shall be gimping it a lot – still can’t walk very far or fast – but I have a shooting stick/seat to rest on, a hotel room,  and no compunction at all about playing the Tired Old Lady card. Neassa was with us on Kage’s last Convention, when she was a gleeful wheelchair juggernaut in the halls, and can undoubtedly protect the populace from my tendency to poke them with my stick.

If you’re in the area, stop by. I’ll be hither and yon – the rotund little lady with the knitting and Buddy Holly glasses, snickering on the sidelines.

Kage Baker was possessed of an iron will in getting tasks done. She was a prolific writer, and almost never neglected to at least try to meet a deadline. The times she screwed up were mostly because she had the wrong deadline date recorded – the worst one, she was 6 months off. That caused a major uproar and re-organization in our household, but she managed to get the novel in limbo completed within 60 days. It was a miracle.

We started keeping a huge white board with timelines on it after that SNAFU; all her projects were marked in different colours, to keep her interest. Kage was a sucker for coloured inks … that system worked pretty well; as long as I remembered to ask her at frequent intervals just what she had recently committed to produce. As long as I found out about it, I could make sure she did it. The trick was finding out …

In Kage’s favour, she tried to do the same for me on my own deadlines. But mine involved Faire rehearsal schedules, and set building, and mundanities like paying the rent. They were easier to keep in mind. Besides, it was mainly when it came to her own things – whether they were  entire novels or promised book reviews – that Kage’s memory went on vacation … even with the fascinating polychrome Reminder Board at her elbow, she had a way of casting an eye over the items and registering a total zero in visual comprehension.

I think it had something to do with the eye becoming inured to what it sees a lot. The overly-familiar tends to blur out of focus and vanish. On the other hand, knowing Kage, she might have been seeing something, all right – the race times at the hyppogriff track, or the featured dinner menu at Mrs. Smith’s Grand Hotel Grill in Salesh-By-The-Sea. Not that that was always a bad thing, mind you. She was often inspired to try one of Mrs. Smith’s recipes after those long blank stares. I recall Bandit Beef with Tangerines with especial fondness, and a luridly striped ice cream bombe complete with fuse …

Anyway. I did my easily-distracted best to keep Kage on track. And Kimberly now tries to keep me on track in turn. Of course, she has her own household, including a husband, a son and an ever-increasing menagerie to look after; she does her very best, but usually only manages to make sure I took all my daily pills and remembered my latest doctor’s appointment. Lately we have been pursuing the renovation of the back yard and the kitchen, and so the poor girl is also occupied with reducing the acreage of skunk-friendly cover while preventing me from keeling over from too much chain-sawing. (The chain saw is my very favourite gardening tool …)

This is not to say that it’s Kimberly’s fault I haven’t been up-to-date on writing lately. It’s totally my own fault. Between getting seasonally distracted by summer afternoons and plums, and using up my thimble-full of available energy beating back the carnivorous grape vine, I have left myself little time for bloggery and composition. Which is just plain stupid.

I shall do better. It’s mostly utter laziness lately – the soft weather, the burgeoning fresh fruit, a new China Mieville novel, innovative Pop Tarts with new frosting patterns: there is always something to distract a writer, there really is. I need to put up a picture of Kage looking stern, and maybe one of those photos of the lovely lads from The Avengers (thank you, Thena!) telling me to write … yeah, that’ll get my attention.

Kage Baker, as I have mentioned, resisted taking pain killers because they filled her brain with fuzz.

That was her description, by the way – she said they made her brain feel like the lint trap in the dryer. As anyone knows who does any laundry, after a load of towels the lint trap yields a fascinating felted textile with a texture like Angora wool, in pastel versions of whatever towel you just washed. Wonderful fun to play with, especially if you have some spare googly eyes lying around the place. You can also card and spin the stuff into a recycled yarn of amazing softness. It’s almost a self-made roving weight.

However, it’s not so great to have your thinking parts filled with the metaphoric version of this stuff. So I do understand why Kage objected to vociferously to clogging up her neurons with fuzz.

On the other hand, my kidney is being very naughty. In my experience, nothing actually masks kidney pain – even on very strong analgesics, you continue to feel the damned thing; it just becomes slightly more bearable. Anyone who has a recurring history of kidney pain knows that you learn to just live with the crap below a certain level, because otherwise you can’t do anything at all. A certain nephritic stoicism becomes a natural part of life.

At the moment, I am teetering on the high bar, balanced between a brain full of towel fluff and being curled in a cashew of pain. It’s cool; I am remembering all the old tricks of managing this absurd condition – I did my last two years of high school and my first year of college like this; with an A average, no less – but it takes some time. Luckily, I should hear from my doctor about the results of the visualization tests any day now, and then we can fix this problem. It’s probably just stones.

Yes, it’s cosmically unjust, racka racka racka and a hotch-cha-cha. But these things happen in real life, you know? Worse things could happen. I really am grateful nothing is wrong with my car, and that the Corgi and the skunks seem to be working on a truce. I am happy my doctor gave me a prescription for Percocet. I’m ever so pleased the kidney waited its turn, rather than deciding to get jiggy during my cancer treatment. I can deal with this.

And to begin with, I think I’m gonna get some googly eyes and pipe cleaners, and see if I can make a blanket octopus out of the fabric from the lint filter. And if that works, I’ll see what can be done with the stuff in my brain. I bet there’s some form of fluffy monster that can be built out of that, too.

Blanket Octopus, Flaunting Its Blanket

Kage Baker didn’t like taking drugs. She felt it blurred her edge; and unless blurring her edge was what she wanted to be doing – as sometimes it was – she didn’t want to take anything that just incidentally melted her brain.

Consequently, she’d rather suffer pain than take a pain killer, even one as mild as aspirin. She always insisted on waiting to “see if it goes away on its own.” Which it never, ever did, of course – I learned how to treat pain with accu-pressure and massage, because she would not take pills. Even in her final days, it took the argumentative skill of a Caesar or a Cicero to get Kage to take a pain pill. Sometimes I felt like Cato the Elder instead, fruitlessly hollering at the Senate to please do something, anything,  about Carthage …

I honestly think she only took the damned meds because she knew it would soon make no difference. Stubborn, stubborn woman.

Me, I can tolerate a high degree of pain – but I’d rather not. Pain sucks. Its only virtue is in its ebbing, and I do not believe it has any practical use at all. It doesn’t build character, it doesn’t teach you patience, it doesn’t assist your mind to a higher level of consciousness. Algesis is not an aid to spirituality unless you’re a masochist. Put that in your pipe and poke it in your eye, Teilhard de Chardin!

My kidney decided to kick up again tonight. It started during a showing of The Avengers; which, I must admit, was wonderfully distracting. What a great film! I challenge anyone to succumb to any physical or mental discomfort in the face of such splendid heroics. Especially while watching Hulk imbed Loki in a tile floor, like a huge green cat tossing a horned mouse around.

Anyway, after the movie it became obvious the kidney was in full cry. What this is (this time) has not yet been determined – scar tissue, stones, the old kink rising from the dead? A plague of little razor-clawed hamsters? Who knows? Not me, not yet; but I had an ultrasound yestreday, from a charming little girl who looked like a pea-pod faerie and had the pressure capability of a boa constrictor in her dainty little arms. I think she etched my ribs. That may be what has set the miserable kidney off tonight … I’ll find out next week.

My dear little doctor, though, is not one of those physicians who believes pain is good for you. She gave me a prescription for Percocet should the pain resume – and I’ve taken one, and whoo wee! I can’t even feel my waist or flank, let alone anything nasty in the vicinity. There’s a nice cotton candy and velvet void where an hour ago it felt like Prometheus’ liver-eating eagle had moved in.

Of course, my mind is dissolving. Kage was right – pain killers that work also eat your brain. But in some cases, like vicious demon-possessed kidneys, it’s worth it. I am going to eat leftover Chinese food and watch a couple of episodes of I, Claudius, and luxuriate in the absence of pain.

Tomorrow, when my mind comes back on line, maybe we’ll talk about The Avengers. Kage loved super-hero movies. She’d have liked this one immensely.

But for now, my damned kidney is apparently dissolving in chocolate syrup. Oh, lucky, lucky me!

Kage Baker was not a repetitive-motion sort of person. Considering it, I’m a little surprised to realize it – but she just didn’t indulge. Not a thumb-twiddler, nor a desk-drummer, nor a rock-back-and-forther, was Kage.

She did tend to tie vast, complicated knots in her own hair, but that may have been self-defense: there was such a lot of it, and it twined around things she sat near like copper ivy. When she was engaged in conversation or watching something, she would start twining a strand around her finger; then, gradually, into cat’s cradles and webs and radiating knots. She never seemed to notice she was doing it, until she tried to move and found she’d either macrame-d herself to her chair or couldn’t get her hand out of her hair. More than once, Kage knotted herself to the person she was sitting beside. She tied knots in other people’s hair, in gentleman-friends’ beards, in the fringe on garments, and in my knitting.

Other than this Arachne-esque absent-mindedness, though, Kage was not much of a fidgeter. She talked with her hands – probably couldn’t have gotten a coherent sentence out if you’d handcuffed her – but when she was silent her hands lay quiet and well-behaved. Except for the knots .

I’m the opposite. I like to keep my hands busy unless I am talking; years of training in debate, improvisation and motion isolation have taught me not to wave my hands around aimlessly. But I do … fuss. I run my hands through my hair, twiddle my glasses, beat little rhythms out on my knees. I do this while driving, and it always drove Kage insane – she was sure someday I would drive us off the road while scratching my nose. After rubbing my ear. After re-fastening my hair clip one-handed …

“Will you please for God’s sake keep your hands on the wheel?” she’d finally shriek as I was pushing my glasses back up my nose.

“I’m fine! My glasses slipped!” I would yell back.

“I don’t want to end up backwards on the center divider again, like in Santa Barbara!”

“Oh, bring that up again! I choked on a date -” ( True story, that. Absurd, embarrassing, but true.)

Anyway, I’d eventually settle down and drive for the next 50 miles fuming, with my hands resolutely at 10 and 2 on the wheel. Then I’d start sneezing, and Kage would  hand me a Kleenex. And all would return to normal. And at the next gas stop, I’d have to use a mat-knife to get her un-knotted from the window crank …

Where Kage practiced repetitive motion exercises was in her mind. Part of it was always working, running through memories and histories, selecting shiny bits and loose pearls and promising strands. Then she’d plait them together, experimenting and replacing and trying out various effects – hardly aware of what was happening up in the front of her mind, I think, where like as not some other story entirely was being fashioned.  Ultimately, some rare and glorious yarn would lie in a neat skein, all ready for use; and I’d hear her finally muse aloud, “What do you suppose it would really take to transplant a head?”

Or back-breed a relict animal? What actually happens in an auto-immune reaction, and what does the body pick on to suddenly hate? Do the strange ices that plate themselves across the faces of meteors ever survive the fall to Earth? Why does damage to a certain part of the temporal lobe always result in hallucinations of dwarves?

That was Kage’s thumb-twiddling. She never forgot anything, and in her idle moments she would sort through all that stuff – trash and treasure, emeralds and wrought gold and a nicely cut cabochon of beer bottle – and her long white hands would weave it into the textiles of imagination. Scheherazade with a loom and needles made of lightning.

I just knit socks, mostly. But I’m broadening my horizons.

Kage Baker – on those rare occasions when she found herself with no plots or ideas burning in her brain – would lie back in her wingback armchair and moan, “Tell me stuff. Give me ideas. Inspire me …”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” I would grump, usually tangled up in some fiendishly difficult knitting stitch.

“I dunno.” Kage would wave her hands in the air like sock puppets. No one could be as boneless as Kage. “Caper and sing. Tell me jokes. Has something weird been dug up anywhere? Go look through your nerdy science magazines and find me an anomaly.”

“Oh, screw you,” I would wittily reply.

And the afternoon or evening would proceed on a gentle tide of bickering. Ancient disagreements might surface, and the many crimes of adolescence. (“Remember that time you ate all my chocolate-covered cherries?” “It was an emergency. My metabolic theobromos was dropping!”) We would discuss favourite old candies – Kage could lecture on old candies for hours. We’d discuss old movies and television shows – theme songs: see the candy comment. Kage never forgot anything and could sing those for hours. Hours, I tell you.

I would explain planetary rotation and the precession of the equinoxes, with balls of yarn. Kage would explain how to mix Phthalo blues and greens to try and get transparency; which is hard in acrylics. I don’t think either one of us listened much to the other, except for the pleasant  murmur of a familiar voice … God He knows, I would give quite a lot now, to just have her low, cinnamon-and-honey voice in the background while I try to write …

This is not happening, though; not even in my mind. You might note, Dear Readers, the relative lateness of the hour – the day has rolled on by me, with any energy or inspiration that might have been garnered oblivious to my desperate, grasping hands. Also, apparently coated liberally with KY, ’cause I sure haven’t gotten anything. The news is full of fools and malice. The weather went hazy and dull today; no interesting neighborhood activities or sounds aside from some mysterious tumult down by the nearby railroad tracks that sounds like someone was demolishing a piano. It went on for hours, though, which I don’t think one could manage with an actual piano – on the other hand, I can’t imagine what would make such boinging and zinging and tormented harp-sounds as were coming from the tracks …

We had some brief excitement at twilight, when it was revealed that a Mommy skunk had littered in the garage – she was bringing her little ones out for their first excursion into our newly de-forested back yard. Apparently skunks, like true suburbanites, also prefer a nicely clipped lawn to a jungle …  and I must admit, they are illegally cute. But we’ve had to put the baby-gate over the dog door now, partly because Kim doesn’t want skunks in her kitchen but mostly because the Corgi wants to go out and herd the little things.

That way lies madness. Also, bathing a traumatized Corgi in Coca Cola. Which is not as entertaining as you might imagine.

It would have been be a great night for brain-storming. We could have turned on the Lava Lamps and the battery operated candles (earthquake safe!), and I could knit something simple in the breathing twilight while Kage sang all the verses of the theme to Robin Hood. The good old British one with Richard Greene, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Hair Oil … which didn’t strike us as funny in our childhoods, but certainly does now.

Ah, me. Good memories. And memories of memories, of the times Kage reconstructed some part of our youth with the shadows of her hands on the living room wall. We always found something to talk about; and eventually some idea would lodge like a multi-coloured burr in her mind. And she’d fall silent, and then the next time she got up for a fresh glass of Coke, she’d drift off to the computer … and shortly the keys would start to sound, faster and faster, like rain on thirsty ground.

And my God, the things that bloomed!

Kage Baker, though a faithful daughter of Los Angeles, grew weary of her hometown in her 30’s. I was thinking of that as I drove from Griffith Park to the Westside this morning, through the panoply of Los Angeles in early summer. It was a lovely morning, and I really enjoyed the drive – it was quite weird, remembering how frantic Kage was to leave this city when we did, in a hot May 20 years ago …

But things were getting bad and strange in Los Angeles back then. The 90’s were a pretty ugly time everywhere, and especially so in LA – the artistic industries of our city were trying out a new business model (producing crap); jobs were vanishing in the first early seasons of employment drought; civic unrest was evolving from letters to the editor to firebombs in the mini-malls. Architecture was going through a sucky phase.

Rodney King got beaten by the cops and taped by his neighbor. When the cops were declared innocent in an absurd trial, Los Angeles erupted in riots. We holed up in  our house in the Hollywood Hills for three days, watching our city burn on television – You Are There! But you’d never be There again, as Kage observed, because it burned to the ground. Our office was in Koreatown – the best sandwich shop, our favourite doughnut store, our freaking bank: all ended up as smoking rubble.

Mamma was in the hospital with some undiagnosed pain in her tummy, and she ordered us not to drive out to see her. By the time we could visit her again, the diagnosis was in – pancreatic cancer. She died before two months were out.

The insurance company for which we worked was put up for sale – and our new corporate masters chose to visit the day the riots broke out. They didn’t enjoy having to be evacuated, and promptly closed the Los Angeles office and moved anyone willing to relocate to South Carolina.  Kage and I couldn’t face that idea – but as the days went by, we couldn’t bear to stay in L.A. either.

So we ran away with the circus. Well, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, to be precise: we joined the staff, and began a wonderful period of following the show up and down the state for the seasonal performances. Those years of wandering healed a lot of wounds, and when the Faire was eventually bought by yet more corporate masters – we quit, we middle-aged bacchantes, a pair of matronly gypsies …  We ended up in Pismo Beach, and Kage’s head was full of new worlds finally coming ripe and ready to be born. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But all of it is history, really; and it’s all twined together in enormous shining Moebius strips and Gordian Knots of miracles and coincidence and outright lunacy. Here I am back in Los Angeles, just about in that season where Kage and I originally fled the place. And it’s beautiful! The weather has turned hot and the Basin smells of orange blossoms, barbecues, wet pavement, hot tar and roses. The hills are green-going-gold. Jacaranda trees are painting entire streets an hallucinatory purple with their sticky little blossoms; magnolia petals drift down like ghosts of broken china, and lie pale and exhausted on the sidewalks, smelling of lemons.

Perfume of heat, Kage called this weather and season. She loved it, until the damned city got too close up and personal with its ghosts, forcing her to flee. But ghosts don’t bother me as much – I don’t see as many as Kage did – and I’m glad to be back.  As long as I can remember how to see it through her eyes.

Oh, P.S. … saw the doctor today, and passed another 3-month check point with no signs of cancer. It is suspected my kidney has begun producing kidney stones. I have a nice prescription for Percodan, and a battery of tests planned for the amusement and edification of my doctors. Life staggers on.