I was in New York last week— 7 days in the city I hadn’t seen since a couple years before the pandemic. One thing I was especially looking forward to was a party that Helen and Michael put together for our friends from Stony Brook and, special guests from Amsterdam, Toon and Mieke and Miele’s brother Rene. The whole trip was wonderful, especially the party (and the veggie lasagne Helen made). But the party was way up in northern Westchester County, so I needed a way to get there. There’s a train but… last resort. The most unreliable and least dependable friend I have, David, had just moved to New York and has an apartment on Central Park West at 100 and something street. He knows Helen and Michael and a couple of other of my old friends and he interacts well with people much older than him. He’s around 30. He just got married and his wife is a couple of weeks from giving birth.
But he said they both wanted to come. That would be great. Everyone likes him and everyone was looking forward to meeting her, including me. He said he’d drive but he insisted on going to the Sleepy Hollow hay ride afterwards; 90 minutes out of by life… for a hay ride! And his wife didn’t want to go either so the plan was to leave her and their dog somewhere nearby where she had friends. I was trapped. It was either the hayride or the train. But by Thursday the city started buzzing about a weekend monsoon. David got a refund on the $120 pair of tickets. Yippeee!
So Saturday comes along and it’s raining but not monsoon-horrible. David told me to take a taxi to his place. So I did. He met me in the lobby and wouldn’t let me come upstairs to see his apartment or meet his wife. He said she was throwing dishes at him; didn’t want to spend the day with a bunch of old people she doesn’t know. And she threatened him, he said, if he went. So he hired me a car. That was fine.
And the driver turned out to be wonderful. He’s an imam at a mosque in Yonkers. I asked him to teach me how to pray Muslim-style. See, I pray every morning before my swim. I start with a Muslim ritual, then a Jewish ritual, followed by a Christian ritual and I end with a Buddhist one. And then I do some laps. I look forward to my prayers everyday. But these rituals are just my interpretations, not real. People have shown me a little of how to do the Muslim ritual, for example, but I was wondering if I was getting it right. So the imam said he would show me when we got to Somers.
But since he saw I was interested, he offered to sing verses from the Koran. He’s a good singer and it sounded fantastic— almost an hour of singing. When we got to their house he taught me how to pray in the driveway. I had texted Helen and when we got there she gave me a framed page from a Koran I bought for her as a present in Istanbul a couple of decades ago. He was so overcome with joy that he started kissing it and I think he teared up as well.
What I got from him more than anything else is that the prayers are to ask God to show them the right path (rather than asking for a gift of some kind).
"Guide us to the straight path, the path of those You have favored, not of those who have incurred Your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray."
As far as I could tell from what he told me— he’s from Pakistan so it wasn’t always easy to understand everything that he said— it’s a prayer for Allah to protect the supplicant from going astray and to help them stay on the straight path, a path that leads to success in this world and in the hereafter. You’re supposed to say it in Arabic and he gave me a modified version in Arabic but I forgot it by the time the party was halfway through. The thing is this though— if you’re a newbie you can say the prayer in your own language, so I’m seeing how that works out. It’s not really about religion for me anyway, just something to help me get centered and to put my mind on a calm, even trajectory for the day. (Not putting on the TV once in the whole 7 days also helped with that.) And sometimes I get ideas about… living.