Some of you might have noticed news of my newest book release, The Cat Chronicles: Stories, Poems, Photos and Essays About Cats and Life trumpeted all over my pages here at AuthorsDen.  I'm enormously proud of the book, which is a collaboration with my two sisters, and takes the reader prowling through life as cats must see it. 

But the purpose of this blog isn't really to sell books, and my excitement has more to do with the feeling of accomplishment that the three of us finally put some of our lives, separated through marriage, education, the years, and such, back together in a context of memories and shared experiences.

Funny, though, that those memories and shared experiences seem very different now than we ever thought they would.

Take Ebenezer, our African lion.  We were teenagers--from just turned teen to almost young adult (I think!) when we got Eb.  We all thought we remembered the great, beautiful beast perfectly.  The brags to stunned neighbors, the escapades with the vet, the peacocks who made a pilgrimage through the lion's den and never came out--we agree on all that.

Yet, the stories differ.  Did he almost kill my brother Chris or my sister Vicky?  Did I name him, or did the man who would make national headlines years later, when his cougar Tom mauled a kid at a Mercury dealership?

We all agree that our vet--whose name we collectively don't remember, although Garner suddenly comes to mind--called Eb "Sport" and bopped him in the nose when he met him the first time.

We agree we shouldn't have had a lion, and wouldn't now.

We even agree that cats were never really our animals of choice, yet that cats have always been in our lives--sometimes even controlling our dreams.

There was Jinx, the meanest, biggest, most conniving Siamese in the world. He would knead his needle-sharp claws in our stomachs at night, making me wake up shrieking hysterically, thinking the crawfish my sister Stephanie collected had escaped and come after me.

There were Pam and Hildi, left out of our book, a Siamese and Persian, that were my mother's comfort for almost twenty years--and who died when our house burned to the ground.  Those memories weren't ones we chose to share, but we think of those cats almost immediately when we think of Mom.

Perhaps the funniest thing about those old memories is that everyone seems absolutely sure that her memory is the way it was.  Period.  Memories fuel conviction--the rest of the world has aged, and has forgotten.  Not the person clutching those past experiences, whether they be of forgotten loves or lions.  Or, chasing forgotten loves through lion cages...no matter.

Working on old memories, rehashing stories and moments from the past with two of the people who have shaped so much of my world...what better way to jumpstart the holiday feelings of togetherness?  I'd invite everyone to join me in a round or two of Auld Lang Syne, but I just remembered...I'm the sister who can't sing!