This is not my first book. The others arrived in the post box with joy, excitement, and ok, it's done.

But the arrival of this particular book is like holding Love in hand or paw, daily. Each morning I pass it (it is of course still sitting on my table) and touch the cover image of the pups. I smile whenever I see it.

I've been wondering why.

And then I realized -- it's a little concrete piece of space in which Love still exists.

For months I put off finishing the book, knowing that when the last line was written, that part of my life might feel "over" or "done." Wrapped up.

I didn't want that. For as rocky and grief-filled and joy-filled and challenge-filled those years of my life proved to be, I realized in writing that I was truly
alive.
I was writing a part of my life journey that was filled with laughter, love, sorrow, loss, more Love, and more realizations and growth.
It was the time of my life.

After another period I was equally sure was 
the time of my life.

And isn't that what we learn in memoir:
Realization
That the time of our lives is now, daily,
moment to moment,
and looking to be held or touched each morning.
remembering and living again
Love?

So it's out! It's arrived! It's a story of Love incarnate and of losses and growth, and futility and humility and joy and Love.
I can share it with others and have given
a few to good friends.
I hope they read past the first few chapters
to realize:
It's a story of the Language of Love
taught by masters in it.

Someone asked me last week how I knew when the story of the pups in Training Two began?
At what point did I realize it would become a story to be told,
or that even would be told?

Good question, I thought.

For a moment I was lost in memory, the 'movie' of each scene of those early days with my beloved pups Cimi and Caspian,
running backwards through my mind.

Before I continue, maybe I should explain:
When I was little, and the old home movie projector came out for an evening of watching the 'home movies of a recent family car trip...',
I would watch the images flutter on the screen, everyone doing their same schtick for the camera.
It was entertaining. Mildly.
But after watching the same movies of family
waving at the screen over and over,
after everyone left the room for other interests,
I would sometimes watch the movies by running them backwards
while rewinding.

I did so because it brought comic relief to what were otherwise
the same old images.
I sometimes wondered if we knew what happened the moment
after we waved...
but that was a magically deep thought and too much for a child
to wade into much farther than a passing wonderment: 
If we knew what happened next,
would our wave or smile or gamming for the camera
have changed?

So when asked this question, my memory went back
through the 'movie' of life with what became my beloved pups,
looking for the 'first moment I knew...' it would become a story.

As a writer, this is fun digging.
As a human, it causes a long, silent reflection that is sometimes worrying
to friends, who wonder if I've been seized or am ill.

After due consideration, I can say that I knew this was a story-movie
upon entering training class with The No-No Lady.
The characters were too rich there to let the images go.
The sparkle in Caspian, of his seeing it as the game it truly was,
too much fun ('tho I didn't feel it be a game, he did).
But the clincher was walking Cimi forward
— well, trying to — actually dragging her forward on her back,
step-pull, step-pull, step-pull
and then swiveling her round to go back
to our place during that first lesson.
The 'image' of this moment,
trying too hard to become a 'M and C of my littermates'
and my utterly helpless ineptitude at that moment, had Memoir
and  "movie"
all over it.

From there the story spun itself into time and space,
from fated moment of discovering them in PetsMart,
to fateful moment of life when they departed 13 and 16 years later.

Did I know what would happen after this first hello,
or even after the first goodbyes?
Of course not.
But that is how Story goes, poking at each of us to wonder at it,
even as we observe it, feel it profoundly,
and live it, all at the same moment.

Life is really a miracle, isn't it?

Was there a moment when you 'knew' with your beloved that this would be a memory or a Story worth keeping?

And all of a sudden it's here! In paper and ebook form, the story's  place in the universe carved out by paper, will, intent, photos,
and sheer stubborn insistence
that it is a story worth sharing.
I'm not quite hoisting statues around a square in a parade, but I feel like it!

I've put an excerpt up
here in theportfolio.
The book is Available Now!!
At Amazon in both
paper and Kindle.

Please do take a peek at the new bit of compassion and love
I have tried to carve
into our worldly realm, the result of a lot of missteps and barely hanging on
to the roller coasters life gives us.

The book is released
and it's a miracle it is,
especially to its author... :-)

More about the winding journey of writing it to come in this space soon.

I like to tell stories.
I always have.
I like to roll around in the dirt of them, smell the earth, hear once again the calls of crows (or are they ravens? It's always the same question), and visit again a time and place and moment when a life changed. It may have changed for me, or for someone I loved, or for someone I just met, but it was a blink of an eye when suddenly everything was new that would be remembered but likely never lived again in just that way.
That moment remembered is where
story begins its journey.

When some of us think of memoir, some of us start crying. Not that story again.

But in telling a story, I learn where things started, how I or they or we all grew, what I felt then and
more importantly,
what I learned on the journey
that was a string of seemingly unrelated moments
that became
that story.

Even when told again.
Especially when told again.

Everything changes.
And a glimpse of
wisdom is discovered in what was
simply a journey of moments strung together.