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After many years of apprenticeship, serving as the provider of the glass (or the 100-watt bulb) at weddings my grandfather performed, I was, at 10 or 11, promoted to minyan macher (maker of a quorum of 10), a job I didn't particularly relish.

A wedding ceremony, like most significant Jewish rituals, requires the presence of a minyan. Sadly enough, many of the middle-aged couples my zayde married during the Depression in the 1930s did not have nine male friends sufficiently interested to see them joined in holy matrimony.

Some couples showed up all by themselves, without even a best man. It was then that my grandfather's Operation Minyan went into full gear.

We usually had the groom, Zayde (my grandfather), Daddy and one uncle or visiting m'shulah (collector of charity), which left us six short. In the early years, when our neighborhood was almost solidly Jewish, recruitment was no problem. We had our regular cadre of minyan machers — Mr. Finck next door; Dr. Ruebeni, whose son won awesome admiration in my young eyes by getting his foot caught in his stone porch railing and requiring the fire department to free him; Mr. Chalfon, the shul's baal koreh (Torah reader); and a few others.

Even if they were preoccupied, they seldom refused a minyan summons, out of respect for Zayde and the chance for a quick mitzvah and a glass of schnaps.

The weddings usually took place in our front room and we even had a player piano with Mendelssohn's wedding march on it, which I think we used only once. For a chuppah we had a large, portable, purple velvet canopy with four heavy corner poles, and the stronger minyan stalwarts vied for the honor of holding up a corner.

A wedding usually took about seven to 10 minutes. But sometimes Zayde got carried away over a speech he was making to the newlyweds, and the pole-holders had some pretty tired biceps at the end of the ceremony.

I never did get a whack at the pole-holding job. By the time I was old enough and strong enough, Zayde's wedding officiations had dropped to almost nil. In his late 80s, he officiated at my wedding and, when he was in his 90s, at my cousin's wedding.

We didn't have to worry about a minyan for those affairs.