Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker liked Adventure.

Not having adventures, mind you; that made her uncomfortable and suspicious. What Kage liked was knowing about adventures, hearing the details, tracking down the motives and results and High Weirdness associated with them – all real adventures have weird bits – and really getting all the dish. She liked recounting adventures, especially when her own research had expanded the background.

What she liked was telling the story, you see. She didn’t pass on gossip, although she loved hearing it; but she simply adored being the one to pass on a good tale. She’d absolutely vibrate with anxiety, wanting to be the one who told something cool to someone else – she’d ask me, “Let me tell it, okay? Okay?”

And what the hell, she did it better than anyone else I knew. But sometimes, Adventure happens even to she who wishes only to tell stories.

Our first trip to Catalina was meant to be what Kage regarded as a nice, tame adventure. A little easy sea voyage, a holiday town full of hotels and restaurants with cloth napkins. Sunlight and white sand. And so as to make it the more interesting (Kage said), she decided we’d just head over and take potluck on the hotel. After all, the brochures showed the place was literally paved with ’em!

What we did not anticipate was what happened in Avalon on summer weekends: the population increases 100-fold, at least. One must have reservations for everything. As twilight began to darken the quaint buildings of Crescent Avenue, we began flitting like moths from doorway to doorway of the lighted hotels … and by the time the moon was rising, we knew we were screwed.

There were no rooms in Avalon. None. The last boat had left for the night, and it had been packed like it was leaving Saigon anyway and we had not made reservations back. We even went to the police department and asked if we could sleep in the jail – the cops (who must have encountered this problem a million times before) laughed inordinately and said No, but gave us a list of the hotels who would let a limited number of the stranded  (i.e., idiots like us) spend the night in their lobbies … but by the time we got to them, those places had filled even the couches in the lounge.

We had but one recourse. There was a small, private camp ground out beyond the Casino, on the site of the old St. Catharine Hotel on Descanso Beach. Though we had no gear, we could at least spend the night somewhere we could lie down, with access to a bathroom. So we hied us to Descanso Beach, armed with a 6-pack of ale and a large bottle of Vicks 44 cough syrup.

And there we set up a meagre little camp among the ruined walls of the St. Catharine. It had once been the premier hotel on the island, a glowing white beauty with vast lawns sweeping down to the beach. But during WWII it was commandeered as a training camp by the OSS (we learned later) which experience had left it so raddled that it was torn down in the 1960’s. The lawns had gone to oats and bunch grass, the oaks and eucalyptus and palms were vast untrimmed tangles. There were NO amenities – but for $10.00, we could find a corner and sleep.

Why did we think that this was sensible? Why did no one older try to stop us? All I can say is that Avalon was pretty blase about moronic tourists, and we thought we were competent young adults. The romance of it was rather tempting, and we were annoyed at the police for laughing at us; and alcohol was somewhat involved … anyway, we found a hollow under the remains of a wall, sheltered by trees, and more or less burrowed into the leaves.

We drank everything we had, and lay there watching the stars through the branches and listening to the rigging on the sailboats in the bay chime and ring.  There was distant dance music. A few other folks eventually retired to tents around us – we seriously discussed robbing one tent for a blanket, but the owners came back before we worked up the nerve.  Kage told me stories about a group of travelling show people in a gypsy wagon and their unlikely adventures with border guards, local militias and the itinerant arts and crafts business. It got  cold, but we got  numb. And eventually, we fell asleep.

We woke just as the sun rose over the mainland of California, 26 miles across the sea to the east. The sky and the sea were half a hundred shades of pearl and pink. Gulls were crying above the masts swaying in the dawn wind, and out in the bay there were dolphins leaping through the first bars of sunlight. There was no one awake but us. We were the only seeing eyes on the Island.

“This is the Isle of Apples,” said Kage. “And I want waffles. Let’s go find some.”

“How do you know there’ll be any?” I protested.

“Because this morning, we can do anything,” said Kage with utter certainty. “The Island has claimed us.”

We dusted off the oak leaves, and walked down through the silent town, and found waffles.

Kage Baker was a firm believer in the axiom that God answers all prayers. However, she also subscribed just as firmly to the addendum that the answer is usually No.

Nonetheless, she felt, one should always be prepared to react either way. Be patient and resourceful in the face of the predominant negative; make Plans B, C, etc. to save yourself when the divine fruit machine comes up lemons. But be equally prepared to sing praises and gratitude when you actually get the good thing for which you have prayed.

I interrupt these pleasant musings on Santa Catalina, the Island of Romance and Weird Happenings, to announce that my Social Security disability claim has been approved. My first notice of it was when I made my usual daily check of my bank account, and found a HUGE deposit had been made. My first suspicion was that it was an accounting error. Second choice was a Nigerian scam of some sort – in either event, I expected it to be reversed and snatched away from me.

But before I either despaired or went on a bender in the book store, I checked the source of the money. I made some phone calls to Official Government Numbers. And so I discovered that I have been moved to the head of the Fairy Godmother line. It has been officially admitted that I am neither dead, nor capable of pursuing my previous line of work. And that I am, yes, a fully eligible member of the system into which I have paid payroll taxes for the last 40 years.

I strongly suspect that my claim went through because I managed to pass some secret number of months of processing, and failed to die. Which is fine with me on a number of levels.

On another government screw up front, my unhappy nephew Michael has been battling – with thousands of other horrified young people – with the travails of the California State University system for the last two days. The CSU schools have managed to seriously overbook on admissions, and their draconian solution has been to simply cancel classes everywhere. No new students are being accepted, and only graduating seniors are guaranteed full-time status. This not only wreaks havoc on students’ educational schedules, in most cases the change to part-time (or even non) student has rendered their tuition loans and grants null.

Mike is an upperclassman, and has maintained a B average for the last 3 years. He’s in a 5-year teaching certificate program (in the History department – he is my nephew), and has built a good relationship with his dean and several teachers. For the last several days he has been laboriously working his way through the narrow official channel that will provide the ONLY chance a student has to reach full-time status … and it’s just succeeded. He has managed to add two classes, bringing his status up from part-time to full time. His scholarship will kick back in. He’s still on track to graduate.

It’s a damned good day around here. I am inclined to wonder if my beloved dead are pulling strings from somewhere behind the scenery. Kage always did think invisibility was the best fashion choice …  And so right now, I am going to go start shopping for the Empire red washer/dryer set Kage and I always wanted: singing Hallelujah Thank You all the way!

Tomorrow: Island Musings will resume.

Kage Baker planned most of her life to eventually retire to Catalina Island. I’m not even sure why – when her fascination with that nearest of the Channel Islands began, she knew almost nothing about it. Just the name, and the songs about it, and that it had buffalo. She didn’t even care very much about the buffalo, not being a big furry animal fan; although she approved of things saved from extinction, even as a child.

But we were always aware of the Island. You could see the place from the Hollywood Hills, on clear days – a big blue shadow out on the ocean. We caught glimpses of it when cresting the top of Vine Street on the Hollywood Freeway, or when exploring the twisty streets above the reservoir. You could usually get a great view of it from Mulholland Drive, where we spent a lot of time staring out over the L.A. Basin.

Kage crafted a lot of Anvil of the World up there, eating roast beef sandwiches and noodle kugel from Greenblatt’s deli and watching hawks wheel in the middle air below us. How Catalina never ended up in that story, I’m not sure. Maybe she didn’t know enough about it then.

But in 1976, I got a job working for the tiny independent  chain that owned, among other strangely located movie palaces, the gorgeous old theatre in the Casino in Avalon. Part of my job was arranging to have the cans of film shipped over there every week – so I became intimately familiar with the ferry schedule, and the itty bitty weekly newspaper where we placed our ads. I began to bring home tales of Avalon. And suddenly Kage was obsessed with the island.

I think it was the photos of the Casino, and the weird, delightful streets of Avalon. I mean, if you’ve never seen the place, you cannot comprehend what a pretty and highly weird little town it is. It was in a bit of a slump in 1976, too, and so the ambiance – which was frozen pretty thoroughly in the 1930’s to begin with – had developed a flower-in-amber glow to it as well. It looked like one of those very French illustrations of Sleeping Beauty, where the whole castle is asleep in a wilderness of roses. Except in Avalon, it was the sort of inaccurate Mission romance of the Ramona pageant. With fish. And buffalo.

One night in July, Kage had a dream. A Lady all in white, with a little weeping baby boy in Her arms, told Kage she had to go to Avalon and fetch a salve for Her child. The little boy had burns and blisters on his tiny, pleading hands. Kage woke up weeping and told me we had to go to Avalon … and as it happened, for the first time in either of our lives, I knew how to get us there. All the information I needed was at my fingertips.

Within a fortnight, we had found our way to the terminal in Long Beach and were on our way across the 26 miles of sea to Santa Catalina. We landed in the afternoon and wandered down the mile-long curve of Crescent Street, gaping at the beautiful old buildings, the coloured tile that covered walls and window frames and civic benches, the creamy plaster and red tiles. The air smelled of tropical flowers and frying fish and sun tan oil.

When you looked into the Bay from beside the Pier, fish that looked like giant goldfish were swimming in water like crystal – garibaldis, each one floating isolate and aloof, as artificial-looking as something on the submarine ride at Disneyland. But they were real.

It was all real – the faerie tale buildings, the ancient signs, the utter lack of cars (not allowed in the heart of Avalon), the sea-wall shaped like an enormous sea-serpent, literally blocks long. We wandered in the brick-paved streets as enchanted as if we had really stepped onto the Isle of Apples, and found a restaurant …

It was a strange beginning. We were to discover that we’d chosen perhaps the only bad restaurant in the town – Kage would shortly find broken pottery chips in her egg salad sandwich: upon the eldritch significance of which, more later. When she later wrote a restaurant guide for her own amusement, that place got 5 skulls … we had no luggage, no hotel reservations, no camping gear; and unknown to us, the ferry that had brought us was the last one that day … we watched it sail away and thought nothing of it. Yet.

But as we sat there with our cocktails, staring out at the Bay no more than 500 feet from our table, we were in bliss. We were beginning an Adventure, and a relationship with Avalon that would last for the rest of our lives and branch out into other dimensions.

Not bad for a summer impulse trip.

Kage Baker, as you Dear Readers may know, was deeply fascinated with Catalina Island. It figures largely and repeatedly in her Company series – not just because it was conveniently there and had a history as weird as snakes’ suspenders, but because Kage had been exploring its past since her early 20’s.

Discovering, along the way, that its history was a patchwork of peculiar, unlikely and outright absurd, she wrote it into her Hidden History as one of the Omphalos of the Really, Really Strange. It’s amazing if you actually know how many of the unlikely details Kage wrote into the Company history of Catalina are real … while I am not certain if there is an archive in an abandoned mine outside of Avalon, for instance, there is certainly an old and nearly invisible mine adit up there. It doesn’t show on any maps, and barely shows to an interested hiker’s eye. But we found it, Kage and I. Couldn’t get very close, due to an unfortunate encounter with a wild boar – but we found it.

The Museum in the beautiful Casino building always drew Kage like a magnet: a visit there was a requirement of every trip. We pored over every exhibit, and pestered the curator to look at the reserved artifacts; so few people usually showed any interest in the Island’s past, that we got to see a lot of very odd stuff just because the staff was bored to distraction.

However, portions of the Island’s history are … very reserved. Hidden, all but forgotten, and definitely not publicized any more. Things like the Army outpost at Two Harbors, or the eccentric settlement of Queen City; or the activities of Ralph Glidden.

Kimberly woke me up with an article on Glidden from today’s L.A. Times. She was thrilled and horrified at what it said. Once I was up and checking my mail, I found that the semi-divine Athene had also sent me a link to the same article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-catalina-bones-20120402,0,5531466.story

This is one of the stories that has been gradually left out of the history of Catalina – and if you read the article, Dear Readers, you will discern several reasons why. Most of them have to do with bones – stolen, mis-labelled, bought and sold and used most inappropriately as decorations in Glidden’s private Wunderkammer. While the article is about the splendid recovery of Glidden’s missing notes and photos – after decades of mystery, they’ve turned up in a lost storage room in the Casino – the underlying story is one of really appalling scientific incompetence and outright scammery.

I knew some of this story; I knew about the private museum Glidden built, though not how he had decorated it. I knew his notes were missing, thus totally bollixing a lot of his archeological claims – I knew he was just about the nadir of the indie “gentleman archeologist”, a bumbler and a pot hunter. But I didn’t know that he had destroyed native graves, sold their bones and grave goods, salted their looted graves with anonymous skeletons bought on the cheap from curio shops in Los Angeles … or that he was regarded as being responsible for just about single-handedly ruining Catalina Island’s Native American heritage.

So this article was enlightening and amazing. Also hilarious, in a black humour way. Because I know what Kage would say, and in fact what some of you are saying now, nodding over this blog:

COMPANY JOB!

Yep. This has to be a Company job. Someone stashed all those boxes of the odious Glidden’s notes in a dusty little room in the arched walls of the Casino, knowing the cache  would be safe as could be until it was time for it to be found. Many mysteries will be solved by those notes and photos; many of the disinherited dead will be identified and returned in honour to their people. Some artifacts will be more firmly established in their context; some will be revealed as Glidden-perpetrated fakes. The causes of truth and history will be served!

And all this will distract people, too. So no one will wander around asking questions about the many square miles of the interior that no longer appear on any maps. (Except, of course,  the one I have …) No one will go bug the librarian at the tiny library to see that Civil War threat estimate they have, or go look for the detailed mineral survey that was done and then suppressed, or ponder why the Silver Canyon UFO film (astoundingly clear) is no longer identified as such in the archives; the road to the site has vanished, too.

Of course, you can still search out these delicious little mysteries. There are some clues still in plain sight, or stashed away by slightly loony old ladies. Kage and I used to joke about operatives coming to get us, and hope they’d send Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

So I invite you to join me in my favourite conspiracy theory, Dear Readers. You can start with Mr. Glidden.

Kage Baker hated pranks and practical jokes.

That may seem odd for a writer renowned for her humour, but she maintained that practical jokes have nothing to do with humour. They don’t  make the audience laugh; they make the audience the victim, and are all to amuse the perpetrator. They held a streak of cruelty she loathed.

Nearly everyone who spends time as a teenaged girl with brothers feels like that at some point, I suspect. The charms of silly phone calls, salted nut cans full of spring-operated snakes and plastic vomit pass down unaltered through the generations, to the delight of young males and the weary horror of everyone who has to live with them. Being abjured to catch the running refrigerator or let Prince Albert out of his can are merely annoying – it was the things that result in screams, explosions and flying debris that really upset Kage.

As a grownup, she hated those classic pranks that always seem to involve bad news: a celebrity death, a bizarre accident, the loss of some well-loved landmark or program. This weekend, for example, I’ve noticed a lot of pranks involving the cancellation of Game of Thrones, or the recalls of Skyrim or Portal  or Halo in their infinite numbers … makes one wonder about the reported compromise of Visa and Mastercard accounts by a New York cab company.

Kage just hated things like that. She didn’t play jokes, nor tolerate them from anyone over 5 years old – she said, baby jokes make no sense anyway, so it hardly matters; you just have to watch for when the kid cracks up and laugh along, and no one is the worse for having no idea what’s going on. But anything that relied for humour upon someone else looking horrified or sad was anathema. That fallen face reaction enraged her.

I must admit to a few baby pranks when very small. I tied a string to a dollar bill, put it on the sidewalk and then hid in the wintergreen bushes – but I learned pretty quickly that tying a string to a dollar bill shows. And that when the only string you could find was some of your grandma’s neon pink yarn, your clever ambush essentially has a glowing arrow pointed at it. And when you do manage to con your baby sister into reaching for the bait, and she overbalances when you pull it away, and smacks her face on the sidewalk … well, it were better you were not born.

Kage succumbed only once to the base urge to prank. She adored magic tricks, and haunted the Magic Shop on Hollywood Boulevard, occasionally saving up enough change to indulge in something. She was inexplicably enchanted once with a clear plastic fake ice crube that had a large fly preserved in it. She bought it, and convinced Momma that it would be the very height of hilarity to put the fake ice cube in Daddy’s dinner glass of iced tea. The doctored glass, with fly carefully installed at the top of the glass, was duly borne in to where Daddy was watching some sports event in the living room. Kage watched through the swinging door into the dining room, stifling giggles. Daddy took the glass, took a swig, took a second look into the glass – and promptly puked into his own lap.

I think Kage set a land speed record for her departure out the laundry room window. She related the story for the rest of her life as a bad example – not to mention divine retribution rebounding upon the prankster.

Mind you, a good silly story was different – she liked the mildly insane stories usually issued on this date by scholarly journals and institutions. Discover magazine has run some funny ones over the years: things like fossil musical instruments intended to be played by Neanderthals’ enormous noses, or hot-blooded naked ice rats burrowing through the Antarctic ice and eating explorers. Some of her own crazier stories were inspired by these standards of demented scholarship – “The Leaping Lover” and “Running the Snake” come to mind.

Anyway, today is April 1st. It’s April Fool’s Day, and I hope all of you, Dear Readers, enjoyed it. I hope no one pranked you cruelly, nor that you yielded to the loutish temptation yourselves. Amuse yourselves by imagining a baby Kage’s panic when her fly in the ice cube worked too well, and her vowing to never try anything so dangerously physical again …

Who knows? Maybe she wrote down her jokes after that in perpetual fear of paternal wrath. If so, we’ve all benefitted.

Happy April Fool’s Day, y’all.

Kage Baker – that’s all, Dear Readers. My brain has seceded. In the brief moments on this grey, cold day that I am awake, I’m gonna read Terry Pratchett books and watch reruns of Supernatural.

Drink cocoa, eat pizza, and similarly relax.

Kage Baker was very fond of lists. Not only did she depend on them to schedule tasks – she just plain liked them. Lists satisfied her sense of order. One could make a list and then tick things off – done, done, done, all the ducks (as she said) dead in a neat row with little cartoon X’s over their eyes.

I used to read out books of lists to her on camping trips, for amusement: 10 People Who Died During Sex. 14 Films Written By Blacklisted Writers. A Dozen New Recipes for Eel (No kidding, from a 16th century cookbook).

Informationally, a well-done list was a always a good beginning for acquiring knowledge. She used them a lot when working out plots – notes of points she wanted to hit, with sub-lists as needed to bring out the details … fractal lists. Kage loved the idea of fractals, where each detail of an object was the object in miniature: the Viewpoint of God, the vision of the bee.

So, beginning notes for a story would be a stream of consciousness list of questions like this: where did Petrie like to dig? Hands, shovels, dynamite? Flinders Petrie – rest of name? Is the story about the tutu real? Send Kate to the library ASAP!

As the answers came in, the new questions proliferated and branched and put out roots; and they began to form an ecosystem, like one of those aspen woods where the trees all share their roots and are basically one huge tree; and finally, they bloomed. Sometimes a list ran off and started another story. Sometimes it took over the one Kage was writing and became something else.

In childhood, notes were random and scarce: although,as she learned how to write book reports and essays, she slowly applied the research rules to her own stories as well. In the very, very beginning of her actual career – when she was trying to develop professional habits – she kept the notes for Garden of Iden on 8 x 11 sheets of typing paper, and taped them together edge to edge as they began to accumulate. She kept it folded up accordian-wise until it got longer than her desk was wide – then it went into the library (we had the spare bedroom lined with bookshelves) where it began to stretch along one wall like a glacier. Because she was left-handed, she taped it together more or less backwards, so each page had to read right-to-left, like Hebrew … By the time the first draft was done, it covered three walls and was reaching for its own beginning beside the door.

That method was not judged successful, after 6 months of trying to find my books behind a foot tall ribbon of handwritten analyses of Tudor politics had rendered me insane and frothing at the mouth.  Kage changed to her beloved wire-bound notebooks, which worked well when she remembered to bring one with her. When she didn’t, she wrote on whatever was to hand – takeout menus, scraps of paper bags, my knitting charts and yarn skein labels. Grocery receipts, covered in her inhumanly tiny precise printing. Her own hands (and sometimes mine), which then had to be hastily transcribed before one of us forgot and washed a chapter resolution off with the dishes.

They say Nabokov kept all his plots points on 3 x 5 index cards. There is a (possibly) apocryphal addendum that when he found himself blocked, he’d throw them all up in the air and play 52 Pickup with the plot … and if he didn’t, he should have. Most writers do, in one way or another.

The notes from which I have been working these  past two years were on all sorts of media – I mean, paper, sure (mostly) but in all colours, sizes, shapes. I even found old Ale Tickets from the days of the Green Man Inn, now immortalized not with the cunning design that would let a thirsty actor get a cheap Guinness, but notes on the Ephesian rites. Many of the notes for the Nell Gwynne sequel were in my own handwriting, taken in dictation as Kage lay in bed, holding off the cancer to finish a last plot. And yes, we traded lines from Amadeus over and over, snickering and gesticulating melodramatically: Do you have it? Show me! /You go too fast, you go too fast!

Me, I try to stick to Kage’s proven methods, but I’m not good at lists. I can make them – I can read them out, check them off, cross-reference until the cows come home and are checked off in their turn. But I’m not really that good at relating the lists to what has to be written, translating ( for instance) a list of the cold hard facts of the invention of carbon fibre to a titillating scene with corsetry … and I am certainly no better at sensible media than Kage was.

My lists are mostly on wildly coloured Post-It notes, stuck all over my desk. In places, they are stuck in cascades to one another in long swooping drapes, like stalactites or roosting bats. They’re stuck to my Kindle, my coffee cup; occasionally one sticks to the little black cat and eventually walks away to have a sun bath in the front yard.

Only today I was looking for my lists on manganese catalase. I found, instead, a grocery list from some weekend at Faire (shitloads of lemonade, it reads in Kage’s printing), and a more recent grocery list that reminds me we are low on H&H. Whatever that means to Kimberly … Lastly, I found a note from Kage. Try for better form, clarity it said.

Sounds good to me. I’ll add it to my lists.

Kage Baker loved opera. She loved musical theatre. She was fond of the dear old recordings of Tubby the Tuba and Peter and the Wolf that adults gave us on purpose: but what she loved best her whole life long was classical opera.

When she was very small, she listened to the old glassy-fragile shellac 78’s in the cabinet upstairs by Auntie Anne’s piano, where she would sit on the Polar Bear rug, yclept Archibald. She liked to sit on his head and swing her feet, and her little red leather sandals eventually kicked a lot of his teeth out – Mamma carved new ones, out of the same sort of old-fashioned clothes pins I now give to Harry for chew toys. Weird how time brings so many things around again …

Lots of good old classic operas were Kage’s musical baby food; also, the recordings of Aunt Anne’s singing, since Anne Jeffreys was, in her sparkling youth, a noted opera and Broadway singer. She played the ingenue role in the original production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene (it was written for her, in fact); and in her time memorably sang both Hajj’s daughter Marsinah and the slinky Lalume in famous productions of Kismet at the Greek Theatre.

Kage found an ancient volume of The Victor Book of the Opera (I’m not sure the dog at the gramophone had his eyes open yet when it was published) somewhere when we were small, and cherished it forever. I remember the leather binding was flaking into discrete muscle striations, and the book smelled inexplicably of grapes and incense. Though maybe the incense was from Kage’s adolescence, when she would sit in a cloud of it her tower at all hours listening to Aida and Carmen and Der Rosencavalier and Madame Butterfly and La Boheme and Sir John In Love and Rigoletto  …

I preferred musical comedies, myself. In fact, I didn’t really get into opera until my teenaged years, when Kage decided to educate me. The trick was the librettos – she led me through what the words meant, reading out of that ancient book; and when I wasn’t howling with laughter at Gilda the Goat Girl and other lost gems, I learned to love the rich, psychotic gorgeousness of opera.

There was one summer in the 70’s when we were nuts over La Boheme, which I think has an especial attraction for young women. Especially if they lived in romantic, draughty apartments in the Hollywood Hills … We were able to buy modern vinyl records from time to time by then, and God! it was easier to listen to long-playing LPs than those ancient 78’s.

Anyway, one perfect hot summer night, there was a production of La Boheme at the Hollywood Bowl. We got our usual dollar tickets in the nose-bleed section, packed red wine and a pizza, and went off for a lovely evening. There was a full moon, the night was warm, and though it was a recitative performance – the principals not costumed, just standing there in evening clothes singing – the expereience promised to be grand.

We were a little surprised to discover that the Bowl, which will hold 18,000 people, held barely a third that many that night. In fact, as soon as the lights went down, we sneaked down to better seats, giggling and triumphant. They played the National Anthem, we uncorked our wine, and it was announced that tonight the part of Rodolpho would be sung by an unknown rising tenor making his Los Angeles debut – a young man named Luciano Pavarotti …

There is no way to describe the wonder that ensued. The Bowl was filled with moonlight, the crowd was astounded and then rapt; and so small, you could hear the gasps all over the audience when Pavarotti went into high gear on Che gelida manina. His was the voice of a young god that night, and we were two astonished shepherdesses on a hillside (in that Wood Outside Athens, maybe) listening to divinity on the warm night wind.

It was one of the paramount nights of Kage’s life, she always said  later. I know the memory still brings tears and shivers to me.

Last night,  idly following a link posted on Facebook by a friend, I listened to a young man named Jonathan Antoine audition for an absurd show called Britain’s Got Talent. I don’t watch this kind of thing; I had no idea what or who he was – although, given his youth (17) and looks (Falstaff in an XXXX Jimi Hendrix T-shirt), I figured he had to be either astonishingly good or astonishingly bad. He and his lovely 16-year old partner Charlotte sang The Prayer – and from the first note, I was thunderstruck.

Juliana Gaul, I should have known you wouldn’t upload something bad. Thank you. These children are a revelation of beauty – especially Jonathan. I tracked down all the other YouTube videos I could find, and sat here writing and weeping for an hour or more. His rendition of Time To Say Goodbye, young and rough as it was, nearly stopped my heart with joy.

I wish Kage had lived to hear him, see him, rejoice in his voice and the glory on his face as he sings.

It could only have been better had I been sitting with her. In the Bowl, in the moonlight, in the summer darkness.

Kage Baker was a determined, disciplined writer. She could power through almost anything, and did – even dying of cancer had only a slowing effect right up to the day it killed her. Hers was an old Roman, votaress kind of inexorable progress: slogging on both grimly and joyously, utterly wrapped up in her goals.

Death sneaked up on her while she thought she was having a nap. I have long suspected he had to make an appointment, dress formally and send in his card before she consented to depart with him, besides. It would have taken even Death considerable effort to pry Kage from her chosen path. But she always did like tall, lean men …

I am not so tough nor strong; my virtues of perseverance are wired differently. In the last year, I’ve become susceptible to FOOs: fevers of unknown origin. They hit, my arms and legs ache fearfully for a day or two, I have several episodes of extreme fever and oceanic sweating, and they go away. In the meantime I feel like a jellyfish drying out on the beach.

My doctor says I don’t have malaria (I asked. I like gin and tonics, and it would be so much easier …) and that I am simply suffering from a common post-cancer debilitation. It’ll get better as I recover more fully. Drink lots of fluids, take aspirin and sleep.

Bleah. But that’s what I’m doing. More later, when I advance up the evolutionary ladder from cnidarians to, maybe, jawless fishes …

Poo on FOO!

Kage Baker was pretty philosophical about the weather. She figured there was really nothing she (or anyone else) could do about it, so complaining was pointless.

At least, after the fact. She also had a vaguely defined belief that various folkways could influence the weather before it happened; things like washing the windows or the car to make it rain. Planting out seedlings, or bringing out the winter quilts to bring on a hot wave. Things like that.

Mostly, she contented herself with watching the weather Very Closely. Kage was convinced that watching things Very Closely was a sure and certain way on influencing them – she claimed it was all proven by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Apparently the weather is paranoid.

Hence her delight in having a weather program on the computer, and keeping a barometer and thermometer by her desk. She always wanted one of those floating bubble Galileo thermometers, though it may have been the coloured glass that tempted her there . She was fascinated with historical weather reports, and in trying to calculate cycles and patterns.

“I’ve been alive for over half a century,” she said in her later years. “What use is that if I can’t rely on my weather observations? That’s how the Farmers Almanac works!”

The actual Farmers Almanac, though, was always bit of a disappointment to Kage. The recipes and historical anecdotes and maps and such delighted her; but the weather forecast was not really great for the Pacific Coast. It tended to rather shirk us; its predictions were long and detailed for everything East of the Rockies, but pretty patchy for us out here. But she combined its prognostications with her own observations, and was usually pretty spot on about any given season.

I decided, in a moment of sleeplessness last night, to check it out for this year. It’s coverage has improved, at least in width and depth. The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the eventual weather … but it said that our usual rainy system of February and March would be drier than usual (and it was.) It also said April and May would be wetter – which looks likely to happen, as the promise of further rain is still inching down the coast from Canada to us … most interestingly, the Almanac predicts that the summer here will be both hotter and wetter than usual.

Hotter would be hard to accomplish than the normal Southern California Season of Dessication, but it does happen from time to time. Wetter, though – pretty easy to do, as we are ordinarily dust dry here for 6 months at a time. But summer rain is very rare. And very desirable. I can remember maybe half a dozen years in my own half-century where it rained between April and October – and it’s always the same pattern. Tropical storms, thunder and lightning in July and August, then extreme autumn heat. It’s not a bad pattern – the garden always has a mad rush of late growth, and the harvests are good.

So I’m hoping the old Almanac is right. The rain we got yestreday and last night was a delight, and the garden and lawn are palpably happy today. There is apparently a chance of more rain next week, which betokens well. I shall hope. And hand water.

And watch the skies Very Closely.