TABASCO THE SAUCY RACCOON and THE RING: MEMORIES OF A METIS GRANDMOTHER.

I hope that your poster shoots onto the desk of some screen writer or movie producer who is looking for unusual but true stories.

Tabasco is an orphan raccoon who smuggles her way across Canada and back on 17 airplane flights. She fingers her way into the hearts of dozens of media people in newspapers, radio and television stations. She spends Christmas Eve scampering around the town looking for parties. She dives into ice buckets looking for beer.

And who would believe that a book on the history of Sam Livingston and Jane Howse and their 14 children, the first settlers in Calgary, Alberta would begin with Gypsy, an orphan gibbon ape, in my grade 6 classroom in Victoria, British Columbia? And how fact sounds like fiction when Sam Livingston 11, their 13th child, is unlucky enough to die young at 25, leaving his baby son Sam Livingston 111 to be adopted and not learn his true name and birth family till he was 66. And how dramatic and accidental is it that Sam Livingston 111 finds out about his birth family by getting a Christmas gift of an earlier book TELL ME, GRANDMOTHER which was researched and drafted by Marion Dowler married to Dennis Dowler, the grandson of Sam and Jane and the mother of two of my pupils in the Gypsy Gibbon class! Then Marion asked me to co-author her book.

So, dear readers, wherever you are, please viralize these two books (writers are allowed to invent words, right?) perhaps that word started its life as vitalize) and hope that some screenwriter or movie producer will see a film or documentary in these pages!

PLOP! Here comes MEOW, my present pet, a feral cat who caught a rat a couple of decades ago outside my kitchen door and now, every evening at this time, crashes to sleep on my fingers while they are clicking the keyboard!

Okay Meow, I’ll tell your story in a book sometime if enough readers buy the current ones.