Tales of Cormac and Dante

When I sit back and consider writing my life story, it feels like the proverbial eating of the whale…possible when done one teeny bit at a time, but a really, really big project altogether. I’ve kept a blog of one form or another for about 20 years, but I doubt I could find my online journals from before my original WordPress site, and the wordpresss writings only cover about 2010 onward. I have a history of disassociation and fugue states, so I don’t always remember things I should, although they usually come back to me, vaguely, upon hearing other people talk about my history. If I was going to write a cohesive life story without remembering the whole thing, I needed to focus my efforts somehow. Since my animal companions are the most consistent things in my daily life, even when I’ve lived far from family or anyone else, they have become memory touchstones. I can’t always remember trauma, but I do recall which pets were in my life at the time. They’ve actually become the way I sort out my recollections. I recall my entire life as per the pets in the house.

For example, there’s the Sapphire years, the Cassie Years, The Jake, and Figaro, Zelda, Blackie, Moro, Finn and Liam, Cormac, and Dante years. Dante years overlap the recent Oscar years, and last January when Dante finally passed on, the Etti and Poe years began.

This first bite of the whale, then, is the time I spent with Cormac the chow chow mix, and Dante the tuxedo cat; approximately 2005-2023. Let’s begin.