Hey J crew, it's Mark here in my basement and this is episode one of the view from my basement.

An occasional series reporting from the front lines of the coronavirus as it affects a family

of seven, not including two dogs and a cat, on a sort of light self-quarantine, or at least

avoidance of others, creating lots of social distance here in New Haven, Connecticut.

I was in Shull this morning. I was at synagogue, many places canceled services, but my synagogue went ahead with them, not least because there was a pair of twins, two wonderful girls who had been preparing for their Bat Mitsva, for their Benote Mitsva, becoming daughters of the commandment for a long, long time,

and they had a lot of people coming, and they went ahead with the show, and so did I.

And it turned out that a lot of people came. I would guess that 63% of the invited

guests from within Greater New Haven came and not all of them stayed for food

afterwards. There seemed to be this funny thing where some people felt it was okay to come but not okay to eat the food so they hurried out afterwards

lest they be tempted by the locks and salad and bagels and seltzer that had been prepared last week in the in the

synagogue kitchen. It's funny where people draw these lines and I had a conversation at the Kiddish as people were doing the the

mot see the blessing over the bread and over the wine and we were about to get in line

and get some food I was talking to a friend of mine who works shall we we say, in a white-collar profession.

This is someone who doesn't get paid hourly.

She is a esteemed professional in a highly credentialed intellectual profession.

Let's just say the work she does, the labor she does is intellectual labor.

And she has children, young children, and she has a husband who's also in a kind of a verified

field.

These are not people with a lot of money, but these are people with a lot of

cultural prerogative and jobs where they don't have a boss leaning over them, forcing them to make

the widgets faster, right? They have a lot of freedom in their work. And she was saying to me, you know, this coronavirus is obviously very upsetting and we are both aware of people who,

especially because they might have elderly parents who are scared are scared.

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