Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was well-acquainted with the eccentricities of my kidney during our teen-aged years.

She did a lot of writing and sketching with her notebooks propped up on me, where I lay on my back on the cafeteria table. She carried  plastic bags in her enormous ragbag purse, to hand to me when the pain in my side reached the “throw up or die” phase – and constantly assured me that dying was the worse option. Yes, it was, don’t argue, just aim for the bag!

When I was hospitalized for The Final Solution (ha!) Kage smuggled in an entire pizza for me. After being folded in quarters and stuffed into that same huge woven purse (I think there was a dimensional portal in that thing) the pizza resembled some form of Jovian flatfish with a serious rupture – but jeez Louise! It tasted wonderful! She sat with me for hours, she brought me stories – her own, and I cannot now imagine the courage it took her, at age 19, to leave those hand-written sheets in the custody of the drug-addled post-surgery moron I was for the first few days.

My personal plan, at that time, was to have the kidney removed and given to Kimberly. (She smuggled me in milk shakes during this.) Kimberly has always loved cats, and has usually always had at least one. I figured she could give the kitties a treat – fresh kidney! Alas, my surgeon did not agree. No surgeon ever has, though the damned thing was not totally fixed by that first surgery, and has plagued me at intervals ever since.

The latest fit started last week and has made my life miserable for days. The pain has waxed and waned; and while I’m duly grateful for the waning, the waxing has worn pretty damned thin. I am very tired of essaying some bit of normal life -like, sitting up for a half hour or so – and having a pound of caltrops materialize in my right side and start rolling around like marbles in a bag.

It hurts. That’s all the English language has to describe this ghastly sensation. And it’s inadequate.

Some medical sadist compiled a list of the worst pains you can encounter in the course of getting sick or injured. Kidney pain is in the top 3. Some “experts” rate it worse than labour, although I notice that all those “experts” are male … on the other hand, the pain of labour is somewhat ameliorated by the realization that at least a baby is going to be the result. None of us baby-producing folks enjoy that amazing feeling of trying to pass a bowling ball, but when it’s over – at least you have a lovely end product.

Not so with kidney pain. All you’re left with is the desperate hope it’s over for awhile. And maybe a left-over plastic bag …

So, anyway, I have mostly been lying down trying to be unconscious for the last several days. Now that I can sit up again, I can resume writing – along with so many past-times set aside while I lay miserably abed and argued with the cat over who had first rights to the cool pillow. (I lose that argument a surprising amount of the time. ) And tomorrow, I go to see my doctor. It’s just a post-surgical check-up (and I have no doubts all is quite well on that score) but she’s gonna get an earful over the resurgent kidney problem, and what can be done about it.

Something has to be. This cannot be permitted to once more establish its insane reign of terror over my life. I have a lot more to do with my time than when I was a callow 17.

So maybe Kimberly’s cats will finally get their treat. It’s sure as hell my first choice.

Kage Baker spent a lot of her high school time in hiding. As we went to a Catholic girls’ school – good old Immaculate Heart High School, just below Ferndale in Griffith Park – the whole place was pretty much in purdah anyway. So what Kage was hiding from was all the other adolescent females that noisily infested the place.

I know there are good arguments for one-sex high schools. God knows, we had enough to distract us without adding boys. But when you keep teenaged girls in a box for 8 hours a day, ruthlessly chaperoned by ritual virgins, some essential socialization fails to occur. We all managed to grow past the maidenly hive-mind eventually, but it wasn’t an environment Kage really liked. So in order to pursue her own interests, she tended to stake out hiding places where she wouldn’t be sucked into the semi-hysterical social life of the bee hive. There were too many sports, clubs, cliques, activities; and all of them with the humid, catty atmosphere of the harem.

So she found out of the way places, and in between classes, she retired to happy isolation. Her friends and family all knew where to find her. There she’d be, writing or reading or drawing, or sometimes telling Tarot fortunes at 25 cents the pop to keep herself in Doritos and Cherry Coke.

Her favourite place was the cafeteria. Well, it had been the cafeteria when the school had one; in our time, it was a secondary study hall. Its virtues over the regular study hall were that there was NO supervision (although if you got too noisy, an enraged nun with lasers shooting out of her eyes would materialize from the nearest classroom), and you could eat in there. There were no cafeteria ladies; instead, one whole wall was lined with snack  and drink machines. I’m pretty sure the goodies on offer actually had negative nutritional values, but they tasted great.

I, too, spent my free time in the cafeteria, talking or listening to Kage. She sat by the back door, at the table most people disliked because of the draft from the doors; it was quiet back there. I was usually lying flat on my back on the table, due to a long and vicious war with my right kidney. For most of high school, sitting up hurt too much to be indulged in except in classes where the teachers were uptight about students on the floor.

See, I was born with a kink in my right ureter – the tube that connects the kidney to the bladder. As I grew into physical maturity, the kink interfered more and more with an easy progress of fluids. At frequent intervals, the damned thing just swelled shut; when the back up reached my kidney, pain was the result. Amazing, excruciating pain; pain that ran on for hours, until I would begin vomiting. Eventually the swelling would go down, my kidney would drain, and I’d be all right for a few days.

We called these attacks “the side-aches”, as most of the pain was low on my right side. In my family, that word – side-ache – never meant anything but my attacks. It meant I would be spending the next 10 or 12 hours lying down anywhere I could; I’d develop roaring tinnitus from the amount of aspirin I took to try and kill the pain; and before too long, I’d be vomiting my guts up. All this in the one word … families always have words like this, though. Father’s “condition”, Mother’s “sensitivity”; genteel code for what was usually a pretty nasty problem …  Kathleen’s side-ache.

At 14, no one knew what it was. It got diagnosed pretty quickly, but various doctors told my parents I’d outgrow it. And I did have another kidney, which worked perfectly well, so my danger of uremic poisoning or kidney failure were quite low. However, by 18, so were my chances of staying on my feet for more than two hours at a time; and after an epic bout of projectile vomiting and raving on my part, surgery was finally scheduled. The problem was pretty much solved. I’ve had the occasional side-ache since – and my right kidney still resembles a mutant cantaloupe rather than a kidney bean – but the last 40 years have been much easier.

“Side-ache” is still family code, though. And on the rare occasions when that special twinge begins, the rest of my body goes into a system-wide panic. My body and I are afraid of that demonic kidney.

When I had my hysterectomy this year, my lovely little doctor told me my pelvis was an absolute Sargasso Sea of scar tissue. She couldn’t even find my right ovary in that mass of Nature’s duct tape. So she left it there. It’s one of the things that will be checked on every three months for the next 5 years … and last night, the old monster in my side decided to wake up and prowl. I developed, to my horror and disbelief, a rip-roaring side-ache.

It’s probably the result of another FOO, that settled in my Achilles kidney. And I’ll certainly tell my doctor about it later this month. In the meantime, I’ve been down for a couple of days in a paranoid haze of pain killers and muscle relaxants. Fortunately, the yard work and the dryer got taken care of before I was felled!

Anyway. I hate my kidney. My kidney hates me. If my doctor can’t convince it to behave, I think I’ll beg to have it taken out and fed to the cats. Of course, I’ve been threatening that since I spent my afternoons lying on a table in the cafeteria, listening to Kage tell me what became The Anvil of the World and its associated tales …

Oh,  well.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as Sister Thomas Moore used to say. And it’s not so bad – Kage has a new book out and I have a side-ache. Welcome back to high school, I guess.

Kage Baker loved receiving the boxes of her books when they came – the promotional copies, the author’s copies. She’d gloat over them, inhaling their scent and checking out the covers and illustrations (if  any).

One copy would go on the Brag Shelf by her desk right away, officially On Display. She’d keep the others in their boxes by her desk for a few days – to pet them, I think – before they moved to the big closet in my room. That closet was the Official Book Repository – also where we kept the holiday deco, and our various assorted costumes. All the products and tools of mind and heart, you see.

At the moment, the Brag Shelf is not completely re-constructed. Soon it will be, though. The extras are all in storage, not as close as a bedroom closet but still of easy access when I need to pull a copy of something. And just now, the UPS man came staggering up on the front porch with three big boxes for me; brand new books!

The Corgi and the parrot went nuts, at least half a block before he got here. They can tell the UPS truck at a vast distance, and are both convinced the poor man who drives it is a ravening monster. And they egg one another on, yelling and barking at him; if Harry gets especially excited, he also meows at the unfortunate driver. God only knows what kinds of wild beasts the guy thinks live here. He wasn’t too thrilled at the three boxes, either, and wanted to know what the heck was in them? Some kind of enormous Amazon Books delivery?

Not quite. It’s my copies of The Best of Kage Baker. Three leather-bound copies, a dozen hard-covers, and another dozen soft covers. I think. They’re gorgeous – covers by Kage’s very favourite illustrator, J. K. Potter, and interior illustrations, too! I need to sort them all out – some are already spoken for – and see precisely what I have before I put them safe away.

And then – why, I’ll be able to tell how many I can spare as goodies for you faithful Dear Readers. Because I will have a few to give away as my heart wills, and not as marketing expedience demands; and I mean to offer them to you.

And in the meanwhile, the UPS man better get used to this. These are not the only boxes that will be arriving here. Not if my luck holds!

Kage Baker, when faced with the annoying vicissitudes of everyday life, handed them off to me and dove into her computer screen.

I would love to do that, but I think I’d need a tesseract to accomplish it.  It just doesn’t work. No matter what I hand off to myself, when I check I am still holding it …

It’s grey and cold drizzly. The endorphins from yestreday’s massive and successful garden cleanup have faded. My back hurts. We have no cookies. The little black cat is snoring in my bed, after a fun session of typing nonsense on my computer and butt-dialing emails.

A nice lady who once commissioned a story from Kage wants to reprint the book it was in – yay! But my agent can’t find the contract and wants said nice lady to wait 3 weeks for her to locate it – boo. The nice lady has a deadline and is unhappy. Whole thing is now in my lap. I resent everyone involved.

May Grey has descended upon Los Angeles – really, we’re under a marine layer about a mile deep, and it’s dissolving on anything more than 50 feet high. Not even decent rain; the whole city just seems to be defrosting messily. It’s too warm for a sweater and too chill to go without. Why oh why is the Helms Truck extinct? I could really use a fresh glazed doughnut the size of a Vespa tire about now.

The heck with it. I’m going back to bed. Move over, little black cat.

Kage Baker was an enormous fan of modern conveniences. Especially really good laundry machines, and top-notch food processors. Ease in cleaning clothes, and crushed ice for cocktails – very high on her Vital Necessities of Life List. And if  the things were red, so much the better.

Tomorrow, the new dryer arrives – half a dozen different cycles; lacquered in ruby red; a lint trap that exudes all the perfumes of Araby and makes bunny-shaped dust bunnies, for all I know. But it has to be brought in and fitted in place, and the old one removed … and ours is a small house. So there is a frantic moving things around to facilitate a clear path from the front door to the laundry room going on today.

This is but Stage 1 in a drastic refit of the kitchen, too. When it is done, several of my outrageously red appliances will be accessible once again. Kimberly, too, is very fond of crushed ice – and we already have a dozen projects just waiting for my Imperial Red Kitchen Master. One of the great discoveries of my middle age has been  bread hooks …

Also tomorrow, the back yard gets a drastic trim. The wintergreen trees that lurk around the place are ruinously old – and they are getting topped tomorrow. The ravening horde arrives at 9 AM to begin the work. But again, there is a certain desperate clearing of crap that has to occur before they can work. Also, Tomato-henge must be moved to a safe place.

This all interferes with writing. I salve my conscience by reminding myself that Kage would approve of all this up-grading no end. An efficient kitchen, a comfortable garden and easy laundry: all things she required from life. Me, too.

But in the merry meantime, Dear Readers – while I move things around – I have a favour to ask. Some of you have already gotten my whining requests for help, but – Lion Brand Yarn is having an essay contest. The first prize is $500 worth of Lion stuff: yarn, needles, patterns, yarn, some yarn, some more yarn … and I entered, because I am good at essays and because I crave yarn.

So could you all go and vote for me? Well, read the essay first, of course, and if you like it: then vote for me. You can vote every day. The voting period runs until May 13th.  If you are so generously inclined, you’ll find my   entry at:

http://apps.facebook.com/lbstorycontest/contests/202727/voteable_entries/47340885

It’s entitled Holding My Sister’s Arm.

And now – off to move tomatoes!

Kage Baker loved gardening. She loved the act and enterprise of creating a garden: of maintaining cultured earth for dedicated purposes. She said it made her feel like she was part of the life of the plants, a real participant in the photosynthetic process.

Whenever we had room, we dug gardens. Kage cut her teeth, as it were, on the many terraces and lawns of Mamma’s house, where there were granite walls hand-built by three generations of Baker women  enclosing the fruit trees and roses and irises. Rose beds and long lines of corn – that was what Kage liked; every edge of the yard lined with penstemon and apples and snapdragons and sweet peas.

When we had no real garden space, she planted in pots. And Kage was not content with, say, a few geraniums and a hanging basket of petunias … oh, no, she could get nearly anything to grow in a pot. Bulbs, roses, trees, vegetables, herbs – even in our last home, a second-story apartment with a porch only 5 feet wide (but 15 feet long!) she lined the rail with pots and you approached our door through a pergola of blossom.

Kage’s irises are even now swelling with buds in their pots on Kimberly’s front lawn. So are her roses. Her Christmas cactus is now bigger than either of the cats, huge fleshy tentacles of ruby and emerald, as smooth and sensual as the limbs of some desert nymph.

Kimberly’s own garden has been undergoing a fallow period the last couple of years: it’s been somewhat neglected, mostly because she was trying to make sure I survived the transplant to Los Angeles and set some viable blossom of my own. College has had weird dystrophy effects on the nephew’s muscles; he apparently finds mowing the lawn life-threatening these days. And while I am willing, it really is life threatening for me. Because if I mow the lawn and then complain of angina, Kimberly is going to kill me …

Aside from the tidy circle of Tomato Henge (all of them in fruit!) the backyard  has gone from fallow to feral.  The grape vine stretches entirely across the driveway – not on an arbour, at knee level. Blinking eyes peer out of it like the end the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Half the lawn has disappeared under ivy, colonizing from its bastion on one wall of the garage. All the trees have become rooms, their branches forming the walls of bowers – and a superhighway for squirrels, raccoons, ravens and stray cats at roof height.

If Ithilien had looked like Kimberly’s backyard, Faramir’s Rangers would never have found Frodo, Sam or Gollum. And maybe not the Oliphaunts.

Only a few years ago, I’d have charged out there with weed whacker and chainsaw, and carved the yard into something closer to Kim’s heart’s desire. I’m pretty good with a weed whacker, or  chain saw: I was Kage’s muscle in her gardening exploits, and learned how to do all sorts of energetic things. All that differentiated between me and some burly undergraduate-for-hire was The Amazon Problem – how to use large tools without damaging my secondary sexual characteristics. And like all women before me, I learned how to deal with that. Those. You know!

The problem now, though, is my damned heart. Much as I would love to lay about me out there with a machete and the chainsaw, I can’t. As the spring has advanced, the grass has risen like a tsunami and the wintergreen trees have shed massive boughs with every high wind.  The grapevine is sending tentacular forays to test the defenses of our beloved tomatoes. The backyard is sneering at me!

So today … I hired an army. This has ever been the last resort of besieged ladies, and I am a student of history, after all. So next week, my mercenaries will arrive to top the obnoxious wintergreen trees, beat the grapes and the ivy back to their borders, and succour the lemon tree: which, in its advancing old age, needs some sort of Abishag-like support to hold its limbs up.Various volunteer trees from God only knows where will be deported.

They will bear away the booty of severed branches, and I will be left with a lawn I can mow without producing a rain of toothpicks.

Kage would approve.  And when I plant the night-blooming jasmine, and the fuchsia magellenica and the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple tree; when I sitting out there in the summer twilight with a pitcher of margueritas and my Kindle … I know she’ll be smiling.

Kage Baker loved gardening. She loved the act and enterprise of creating a garden: of maintaining cultured earth for dedicated purposes. She said it made her feel like she was part of the life of the plants, a real participant in the photosynthetic process.

Whenever we had room, we dug gardens. Kage cut her teeth, as it were, on the many terraces and lawns of Mamma’s house, where there were granite walls hand-built by three generations of Baker women  enclosing the fruit trees and roses and irises. Rose beds and long lines of corn – that was what Kage liked; every edge of the yard lined with penstemon and apples and snapdragons and sweet peas.

When we had no real garden space, she planted in pots. And Kage was not content with, say, a few geraniums and a hanging basket of petunias … oh, no, she could get nearly anything to grow in a pot. Bulbs, roses, trees, vegetables, herbs – even in our last home, a second-story apartment with a porch only 5 feet wide (but 15 feet long!) she lined the rail with pots and you approached our door through a pergola of blossom.

Kage’s irises are even now swelling with buds in their pots on Kimberly’s front lawn. So are her roses. Her Christmas cactus is now bigger than either of the cats, huge fleshy tentacles of ruby and emerald, as smooth and sensual as the limbs of some desert nymph.

Kimberly’s own garden has been undergoing a fallow period the last couple of years: it’s been somewhat neglected, mostly because she was trying to make sure I survived the transplant to Los Angeles and set some viable blossom of my own. College has had weird dystrophy effects on the nephew’s muscles; he apparently finds mowing the lawn life-threatening these days. And while I am willing, it really is life threatening for me. Because if I mow the lawn and then complain of angina, Kimberly is going to kill me …

Aside from the tidy circle of Tomato Henge (all of them in fruit!) the backyard  has gone from fallow to feral.  The grape vine stretches entirely across the driveway – not on an arbour, at knee level. Blinking eyes peer out of it like the end the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Half the lawn has disappeared under ivy, colonizing from its bastion on one wall of the garage. All the trees have become rooms, their branches forming the walls of bowers – and a superhighway for squirrels, raccoons, ravens and stray cats at roof height.

If Ithilien had looked like Kimberly’s backyard, Faramir’s Rangers would never have found Frodo, Sam or Gollum. And maybe not the Oliphaunts.

Only a few years ago, I’d have charged out there with weed whacker and chainsaw, and carved the yard into something closer to Kim’s heart’s desire. I’m pretty good with a weed whacker, or  chain saw: I was Kage’s muscle in her gardening exploits, and learned how to do all sorts of energetic things. All that differentiated between me and some burly undergraduate-for-hire was The Amazon Problem – how to use large tools without damaging my secondary sexual characteristics. And like all women before me, I learned how to deal with that. Those. You know!

The problem now, though, is my damned heart. Much as I would love to lay about me out there with a machete and the chainsaw, I can’t. As the spring has advanced, the grass has risen like a tsunami and the wintergreen trees have shed massive boughs with every high wind.  The grapevine is sending tentacular forays to test the defenses of our beloved tomatoes. The backyard is sneering at me!

So today … I hired an army. This has ever been the last resort of besieged ladies, and I am a student of history, after all. So next week, my mercenaries will arrive to top the obnoxious wintergreen trees, beat the grapes and the ivy back to their borders, and succour the lemon tree: which, in its advancing old age, needs some sort of Abishag-like support to hold its limbs up.Various volunteer trees from God only knows where will be deported.

They will bear away the booty of severed branches, and I will be left with a lawn I can mow without producing a rain of toothpicks.

Kage would approve.  And when I plant the night-blooming jasmine, and the fuchsia magellenica and the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple tree; when I sitting out there in the summer twilight with a pitcher of margueritas and my Kindle … I know she’ll be smiling.

Kage Baker was an excellent photographer. She had her artist’s eye for colour,composition, lighting – all those things that make real art out of an electronic reproduction of what you see with your own, human eyes. She looked through the lens and saw more; and further, could get the machine in her hands to memorize it that way so other people could see it, too.

There was one Faire, very early on, where all the pictures Kage took have a line of fallow gold across the top – which was the edge of her solana, keeping the sun off her face. But she got that out of her system pretty quickly, and anyway switched to a wimple and a felt hat – so the special effects stopped. After that, she took great photos.

Not me. I am a wretched camerawoman, even with the near-miraculous cameras now available to those with no art in their hands or eyes. Nor am I often moved to memorialize what I see, preferring instead the biochemical miracles of my brain to house my memories. Besides, most of the time at any given Faire, I was in character: and whipping out a camera was a dreadful sin to characterization. One I never committed.

Last weekend, though, I took my nifty red (RED!) digital Nikon to see what I could see. And catch. Turns out the camera works fine, and I am still a lousy photographer. I stand too far away from things, and I am no judge of light. My taste isn’t bad and my hands are steady; though nephew Mike informs me pityingly that would not have been a problem, as the camera has some extraordinary gimbal inside to compensate …

Nonetheless, I have selected a few photos to share, Dear Readers. I did promise you a glimpse of the Wizards Rainbow.

For those who have not read Stephen King’s epic fantasy series, The Dark Tower, the Wizards Rainbow refers to a series of coloured glass globes: tools of sorcery, all, and of augery, and of sights of the past and future. It also refers to a stained glass window depicting same in the childhood bedroom of Roland Deschain, doomed gunfighter of Gilead.

I love these books. I just read the most recent (finished this morning about 2), and am bout to embark on re-reading the entire series. I am in a reading vein … and I urge these books on everyone I like, because that is the self-serving mania of the bibliophile; the greedy demon in our brains wants to spread and propagate! And I like all of you he he he.  Hence, I will try to infect you with these books – be warned!

Also, Kage loved coloured glass. It has long been the habit of the glass vendors at the Renaissance Faire to display their wares in the sun, to show them off to best advantage; as, I suppose, all outdoor glass vendors do. Anyway, it’s always been a magical sight – the glass in the sun, spreading rainbow wings on the dusty ground so that one walks through every-changing spectra as one passes by, through illumined landscapes and eldritch gardens, cast like rivers of light on the earth. Kage loved that. My poor, few pictures tried to catch it to share with all of you.

My words don’t do justice to the glory of the glass, either. But I must admit that when we passed through the glaziers’ booths, my heart rose and sang for the beauty on display – just like in the old days of Faire. At least, until we passed a vendor loudly crying his wares in unadulterated American, and describing with perfectly modern elan the extra added attraction of his particular glass: solar panels that make them turn in the sunlight.

In the old days … he wouldn’t have been allowed to shout that admission into the ears of Faire. Heck, he wouldn’t have been allowed to sell them, nasty modern things. The art of the glassblower – which, for your general information and literal enlightenment, was largely reborn at just such archaic festivals as the Renaissance Faire – depended on the sun and the wind to enliven the melted sand and pigments. Solar-powered hummingbird feeders belong at the County Fair or Costco. Not in my childhood faerieland.

But, hey, I knew I’d find things like that when I went there. The glass was still there, at least; the Wizards Rainbow, burning the in the hot morning sun, every curve and globe and goblet another world brought to life by the light.

Oh, it’s hard and painful to get old, Dear Readers. Not just for the lovely things that die and change and vanish – but for the ones that live on, and are different. Ah, well. A wise and dear friend has told me that the measure of aging with dignity is how we decide to live with loss. He was right. And the colours are still there.

Kage Baker scorned such pithy observations as: There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. The inability to drink without pouring it down your shirtfront, she pointed out, is not really great as an all-encompassing philosophy, and what the hell does it mean anyway except that you are high in Derp Quotient?

Likewise The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. What is that, she demanded, some sort of weird maritime judgement on the engine room crew?Who cares what the plans of mice are?

She favoured things like Entropy always wins. And Have a Plan B. And The Universe will screw you over every chance it gets.

While waiting for my amazing red Red RED dryer to arrive, we have limping along using the old one – which took 3 hours to dry a load of laundry, but at least did it. Yestreday evening, it stopped doing even that – which we discovered, of course, during post-prandial clean up, for a load of clothes urgently needed for today. It was insult to injury to realize that yestreday was the day the dryer was originally scheduled to arrive … until it was back-ordered to May 1st. Two hours in a local laundromat solved the clothes problem, but left my sister Kimberly and I in rotten moods. And we still have to wait till May Day for the working dryer!

On the other hand, I got the newest Stephen King novel yestreday. This is more along the lines of bad luck for you, Dear Readers, as I am an utter addict to Stephen King novels. And I need a mood elevator. So I am taking the rest of the day off to actually READ MY NEW BOOK, MWA HA HA Ha Ha ha ha snort snicker …

And get another 4 loads of laundry ready for another trip to the laundromat. At least Roland Deschain of Gilead will be keeping me company.

To make it up to you all, tomorrow I will show you the Wizard’s Rainbow.

Kage Baker quite liked Marcel Proust. She actually read all of Remembrance of Things Past, and claimed to have enjoyed it. But then, she was also very fond of French surrealistic cinema, so God only knows what she was seeing in her mind’s eye as she read through that massive recollection.

Me, I’m a much less classy person. I too have read the entire thing, but I hated it. I think Marcel Proust with a whiny little neurasthenic with a silly moustache and pop-eyes. And he looked like Percy Dovetonsils; though that is a point in his favour … also, I have a most working-class dislike of French surrealism; except for Jean Cocteau, who seems to have been almost the only Frenchman in the 20th century who enjoyed sex. Him, and Maurice Chevalier.

If any of you, Dear Readers, do like Proust, please accept my apologies for undoubtedly offending you. I admit to having some low tastes in literature

On one aspect of memory, though, Proust was entirely correct: the effect upon it of taste and scent. Entire time lines can be evoked by a flavour, as Proust carries on about interminably in the incident of the madeleine. What works for flavour works even better with aromas, too, since the nasal nerves are about the only ones that connect to the brain without any intermediary. And they connect to emotional areas, so that smells can actually conjure up feelings.

It goes beyond mere memory or even nostalgia – the brain, and the body along for the ride, reacts as it did the first time. So, if you were threatened at an early age by a babysitter with a gorilla mask and a handful of lemon cookies, that explains why you now wet your pants when offered a Cosmopolitan with a slice of lemon … awkward, that. But your brain can’t help it.

This Saturday I went to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, out at the Sante Fe Dam Recreational Center in Irwindale.  A bit of background is needed here, Dear Readers, so be patient. Also, caveatum, expect no pleasant objectivity from me …

The Faire was bought from the Pattersons, who invented it, some years ago – lock, stock, and most of the actors, except for the troublemakers who scarpered with their favourite props under their cloaks. I was one of those. A lot of other very good people stayed, heroically doing their best to keep the event on track: because the new owners (based in the Cheese Paradise of Wisconsin) don’t like things to be “too California”. To this end, they have imported modern acts with electric guitars and amps, downplayed historicity, and parked un-camoflaged taco trucks around the place …

Since they also own the copyrighted name, they decided to celebrate the Faire’s 50th anniversary this year (there is some confusion as to actual dates), and billed themselves as The Original Renaissance Faire. Which they are not, except that a lot of fossil performers, booths and acts are still hanging on  stubbornly, refusing to give in to the Nouveau Regime. And a lot more fossils came to visit this weekend. Including me.

I came with an old friend. We did not wear costumes. We wore sensible shoes, heat-proof clothing, industrial-weight sunscreen. So the first blast from the past hit us while getting out of the car in the weedy field that was the parking lot, under the hot morning sun: the rising pineapple smell of crushed chamomile under foot, along with the smell and taste of sunscreen melting on one’s lips. Whoosh! Thirty years hit us, three decades of staggering into site while frantically lacing a bodice and trying to fish your passes out of your boots …

The crowd was light at the Front Gate, but walking in was another BANG! to the brain. The smell – incense, garlic, beer, cinnamon, hot wax, cold steel, the fireworks reek of a working forge. Leather steeped in odorous substances you’d rather not know about, but also perfumed by the villainous mercenary walking by wearing it and smelling inexplicably of Axe body spray. Lilacs, lavender, roses, sweet peas, lily of the valley, carnations twisted from their stems like confetti poppers and the petals thrown over the crowds’ heads in a rain of cloves and nutmeg.

Dust. Hay bales. Canvas, burlap, new lumber under new paint smelling like peaches, old wood under new paint smelling like compost. Hot bread, hot beef, hot chicken, hot cooking oil, hot diesel oil from a hidden generator and a dreadfully visible taco truck. Strawberries. Chocolate. Frangipani everywhere.

Ten feet inside that front stockade gate, and I was reeling with the sensory onslaught. Twenty feet, and I was drunk on 1973 – lithe and strong and 20 years old again, plumes and ribbons on my hat, dancing down a dirt road and completely intending to fall in love that day. Which I did. And never came up for air nor fell out of love, neither; but have continued in that sweet mania ever since. Even if my beloved is currently living coarse with an unworthy bawd, and is a little the worse for wear … I know the perfume of his breath.

They say, when you go to Fairieland – or the afterlife – taste nothing, or you will never escape. But with the very firmest of intentions, I couldn’t help but taste the past, which sneaked up and then assaulted my lips with no shame or subtlety whatsoever.

I have kissed that mouth a thousand times. And so I walked back in.