Book 2: The Afternoon Prayers

From March through September, 2018, I worked in a hotel by the beach. I answered the phones, mostly working from 11 PM to 7 AM, including weekends and holidays. It paid just enough for me to get by. I was able to explore the area on days and nights when I didn't work.

In the middle of September, a new job found me. A small but well-established computer company was looking for an English-speaking technical writer who could also do video. They liked me.

A few days before my sixtieth birthday, I left the hotel job and started the new one, back in my original field. I could walk to work. I consistently worked a standard week, Sundays through Thursdays, during the day. It was a small team with little turnover. Much of the staff had been there for twenty years or more.

I rarely got into the larger city just south of us. I mostly went to work, to shop at the nearby mall and the stores on the main street, and home. I would visit relatives at a nearby assisted living facility. We called it The House of a Hundred Grandmothers. Sometime later, I started going to performances at a dance center on the far side of the other city.

It was a time of integration. I was learning how to fit into the society, now that I had a reasonable paycheck and a conventional schedule. I had to learn a lot about the language, the government, and the way that society worked. I gradually figured a few of these things out. Many would continue to surprise me.