One of the last nights that I’ll spend here in my room in M and C’s house. I will miss having a courtyard. I will miss jackdaws instead of crows. I will miss the goats in the neighborhood, and the chickens and the cats and the pony. Not so much the roosters, though. Nor the mosque.
Did I tell you about the mosque up the street? No? Well, then… First off, I don’t dislike it because it’s Muslim, as one might think, given my anti-terrorist viewpoints. I dislike it because of the blasted noise! Five calls to prayer a day, over loudspeakers. That, and a mysterious need for the man in charge to use the loudspeakers to recite prayers or Koran snippets at about 3 a.m. sometimes. Because he wakes me up at that time, that’s how I know.
It has the distinction of being the only mosque in Israel that has an actual person at the loudspeakers doing the calls to prayer and the readings. All the other mosques use tape recordings. Ah! The perils of progress.
You know you’re getting soppy when you do pre-reminiscences about minor neighborhood annoyances, so I’ll stop at that. Especially since there’s nothing more to say about it, really.
white pebble 