Monday, April 6, 2020

Sometimes my boss walks around the office in the late afternoon offering cookies or fruit. Today, he has a large bowl with wedges of cabbage. I don’t recognize what they are at first. At a glance, each looks like a stack of layers of thin wafers. I ask him what they are. He hands me one. “It’s good. Take it. Eat some.” I do. It’s quite good, and more healthy than the snack that I had planned. As usual, I’m one of the last people to leave the office. I put on my new mask, which I got in a trade: several masks and some hand sanitizer for some of the raw horseradish I got yesterday. The new mask goes on more easily than the last one. It has elastic rather than strings. I don’t have to tie knots behind my head. On the way home, I see a woman jumping rope in front of an apartment house. I saw her in the same spot yesterday, rolling out a yoga mat on the rough cement. At the produce market, the wall phone rings while I’m shopping. The man at the counter, answering, just says “Vegetables.” The store has half the produce that it did on my previous trips. I hear him say that the supply chain is breaking down. Some stuff never arrives. Some is delivered at 7 AM and gone by 8:30. I find what I need. In the evening, I see the Prime Minister announce that there will be a complete lockdown on the first night of Passover. Last year, walking home from the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, I had heard large families singing from within their houses. I planned to walk around and record them from the street this year. But there will be no large gatherings for the seder. I hope to get together with other members of my family online, at least, and do what we can.