Lilith and the policeman's pug

When she was a puppy, Iwi the brown pug would run across the play area like a mad thing. Somewhere around the time her person (a member of the police) lost two of his friends near Diamond Head, Iwi developed a blockage in her esophagus. She had several surgeries. Even now, she requires a feeding tube and a balloon to open up the blockage (she's the first dog in Hawai`i to get that treatment, G told me today). She drools, because she's perpetually nauseated. G says there's no leadership from the top of the police department. No advisories on how to deal with the public. He asks me how on-line education is going. I tell him some of my quiet students have come to the fore on discussion boards; other students have gone missing. S has a missing professor. I tell him I'm worried that the crisis will become an excuse to convert us all to on-line from now on. He nods. Everything's changing. Kids whose refuge was at home are now trapped with their abusers. It's really sad, he says. Then he and Iwi go one way, as I try to steer Lilith toward the direction of a longer walk, one she starts and then refuses to continue.

[I wonder if the label "ordinary life" still applies to anything at all that appears here.]