Sunday, July 28, 2019

The afternoon prayers at the office get started more or less on time today, as a tenth man is reluctantly pulled into the conference room. Three co-workers tend to rotate leading the services. Today, fortunately, it's the one with the best voice. The service has its usual lumpy structure: people murmur prayers, beginning in unison but continuing at different speeds. When the leader hears that many of the men are done with a prayer, he sings the ending and begins the next. The longest stretch is actually a group of eighteen different prayers run together. Almost everyone else has been saying them several times a day in their native language for decades. They get done about twice as quickly as I do. Usually, the leader picks up again while I'm still in the middle. This time, he waits for me as others shuffle their feet in annoyance. Later, I tell him that I know that I'm slower than everyone else, and that he can continue if I'm not done yet. It turns out that he's a stickler for the rules, and insists that he can't go on until at least ten congregants are done -- and since we had exactly ten, he had to wait. So now I have to hope that we get not just ten men each day but eleven, so enough will finish before me. Or maybe I'll just hit the high points and leapfrog to the end.