Thursday, January 7th, 2021

Three boys on foot-powered scooters zoom around the center of the plaza outside the Great Synagogue. It’s a safe, bounded area. Three shallow steps lead down to it on the street side. Higher walls bound it on two. The fourth has what is now a large square of dirt. It may have been tilled for new planting. I can’t picture what had been there before. The same girls as before sit on the ground, up against the far wall. Families cluster around a row of chairs under roofs that would shade them from the sun, were the sun still out. I sit at one end of the plaza, far enough from everyone else to be comfortable taking my mask down and eating my sahlab. I may not be able to get another for a while. A new lockdown starts at midnight. Announcements warn us that it will be enforced more strictly than the current one. I listen on my headphones to reports of the chaos at the US Capitol, collected into podcasts after the fact. A car with markings from the lottery agency drifts slowly past. A woman’s recorded voice booming from it announces the latest winning numbers. Maybe someone within earshot got lucky. Nobody appears to react. The winner must be elsewhere. The car travels on.