We all suffer loss in life, be it the loss of a person we love, a pet, health, fortune, identity or fame. In order to assuage the pain of such losses we need to regain balance in our lives. This remarkable man, Poet Tristan, through humor, storytelling, heartbreak, self-deprecation and whimsy, in this, perhaps his first volume of work, helps us to replace that balance through his songs of love and life.

THE SUBTITLE OF THIS BOOK OUGHT TO BE 'THE LEGACY OF BUP and Thane' because, quite simply, if it hadn't been for those two German Shepherd dogs, this book would never, could never, have been written. First, because Bup pulled my adoptive mother out of deep, cold, fast moving irrigation water in the canal when she was three, thus saving her from drowning, and second because Thane, at the age of seven months, fought a house-breaker down a flight of stairs and drove him away one bitter January day when I was living far out and away from town, all alone on a large cattle ranch with no other help within call. Without that big pup, I seriously doubt I would have survived that attack intact, if I had survived it at all. In the first case, I would have been adopted by someone else and might never have grown up with German Shepherd dogs, and in the second case I probably wouldn't have survived at all. _______________ REFLECTIONS FROM THE DOG HOUSE HAS been in the works for over 100 years. The German shepherd dog sprang on to the scene in the late 1890s and early 1900s when a retired German Army Calvery General made the development of national dog breed his mission. This book traces the development, and what many have lamented to be, the decline of this noble breed we call the German shepherd. The book is divided into six parts containing seventeen (17) chapters.