If I were a character in a TV series, we might say my storyline has tanked. I mean, of course the entire cast is saddled with the pandemic plot, and many characters have been dealt tragedies that dwarf my own, but what the hell is going on with Marion Winik? Will they even bring her back next season?

We didn’t realize how many things would expire in 2020, did we? Where were the tiny numerals stamped on the restaurants, the stores, the jobs, the knees, the relationships?

            — from last month’s column

I wrote those sentences about two weeks before my darling Beau — Beau Heinie Beau, Hein-Pooch, Beau-linsky, Bitty Hom Poo Chem, Poochadeen Mateen, Mon Peauché, more recently and who knows why, Pumpala (Pum Pum Pum) — a nearly sixteen-year-old black-and-tan miniature dachshund, left me for good, at 10:30 am, on Friday, September 18th, at the Aardmore Veterinary Hospital.

I have repeated the insane nicknames above so often they seem like actual words to me, and only when I try to spell them do I realize how far over the linguistic edge I have gone. (Speaking of silly names, didn’t it used to be called the Aardmore “Veterinarium”? I pictured dogs paddling around the squat brick building like furry four-legged fish, a few aardvarks in there, too.)

A few years ago, my son’s longtime girlfriend Shannon did a capstone project for her grad school program in design. The assignment was to come up with a novel idea for a non-profit organization and design all the graphics for it; at the end, a panel of professional designers came in to judge their presentations. Shannon’s group’s project was The Rescued Radish, a company that would go around to grocery stores and pick up all the older, less attractive, but still usable produce – the spotty bananas, the pock-marked peppers, the brown-edged lettuce, the frosty carrots – and take them to soup kitchens and food pantries and also sell them at a deep discount to impoverished college students and others living on ramen.

In the face of a bizarre disaster that has derailed daily life everywhere, in the face of isolation, fear, disappointment, and a constant flood of bad news, a spring-green fuse of creative energy is sizzling and popping all over the world. The memes and parodies, the YouTubes and TikToks, the Italians singing to each other from their balconies, the New Yorkers pounding pots at 7 pm. The Getty Museum art challenge, the family in London with their adorable rendition of Les Mis, the spandexed mom doing her Jane Fonda workout to I Will Survive. The Israeli woman in dark glasses ranting in Hebrew about online elementary school.