Sunday, April 5, 2020

Most of the people on the main street are wearing masks. Almost no one on the smaller streets is. People are keeping an appropriate distance from one another, though some cluster in pairs. The straps on my mask have broken from overuse, so I’ll have to go without until I find or make more. All the articles and videos I find on making them depend on items that everyone supposedly has but I don’t: bandannas, kitchen towels, hair ties, rubber bands, or a stapler. In the supermarket, I only look for a few items. It takes me a while before I find what I think is raw horseradish. I enter the word on the label above it into a translation program. The word means either “you’re back” or “the mumps.” Another program tells me that it is indeed horseradish. The words are spelled the same way when you leave out the vowels. People are panicking over a reported shortage of eggs. Two customers crouch at the egg case, carefully going through the packages there to avoid any broken ones. A line forms behind each of them. When I get up to the case, I have no trouble getting a couple of dozen. I usually don’t eat many, but I’m headed into a week of making matzah brei for breakfast. Outside a shuttered kindergarten, I see a bulletin board that had been covered with the shredded remnants of posters for shows that had been cancelled. It now bears one large homemade sign. The corners and edges have short phrases wishing us strength and a good holiday. Letters at the center spell two colorful words in biblical Hebrew: “Your souls shall rejoice.” Or maybe it says “Watch yourselves.” Beneath the dim streetlamp filtered through trees, it’s hard to tell.