I had been living inside that arithmetic for 18 months when I finally admitted to myself on a Wednesday morning in February, sitting at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee that had gone cold while I was recalculating for the 20some time that the arithmetic was not going to change. My income was fixed. My rent was going up. My medication was going up. My knees were not getting better.
Nothing about the numbers was moving in a direction I could survive. I am not a man who panics. I have never been a man who panics. I have spent my whole life managing warehouses, and warehouses do not reward panic. What warehouses reward is patience, inventory, and the willingness to look at a problem for as long as it takes to see the pattern that makes it a solvable problem instead of an unsolvable one. So, I did what I had always done.
I opened a fresh page in the notebook I keep on my kitchen table and I wrote at the top if not Dayton where that question is what led me over the following 18 months and across an ocean I had never expected to cross to a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a small building in a quiet neighborhood in a city called Dumagete on an island called Negro in a country I had until my 65th year never seriously considered visiting.
I found the answer by accident in the way most people find the answers to important questions.
I was watching videos on my laptop one evening, not looking for anything in particular, just half watching the algorithm run past me when a video came up of a retired postal worker in his late60s describing in a flat and matter-of-act voice the monthly cost of living in a small Philippine city.
He had put his numbers on a spreadsheet.
He read the spreadsheet out loud, line by line.
He said, “This is what my rent is.
This is what my groceries are.
This is what my medication is.
This is what my utilities are.
This is what my transportation is.
This is what my total is.
And this is what my income is.
And this is the difference.
” The difference in his spreadsheet was over $1,000 a month in his favor.
I watched the video twice.
Then I watched three more like it.
Then I went looking for the forum he mentioned in passing, which was a community forum for foreign retirees living in the Philippines.
And I read that forum for the next 6 months without posting a single word.
I read it in the mornings before my knees were fully awake.
I read it in the evenings after the news.
I read it on my phone in the doctor’s waiting room and in the pharmacy line, and once on a very slow Sunday afternoon in the laundromat down the block.
The forum contained approximately a 100,000 messages accumulated over about 12 years.
It contained the daily reports of retired school teachers and retired postal workers and retired mechanics and retired bus drivers.
Most of them men in their 60s and 70s.
Most of them living on incomes not much higher than mine.
All of them describing lives that were by the numbers they were posting entirely different from anything my income could purchase in Dayton.
I did not believe any of it at first.
I have spent 32 years in a business where people exaggerate the good numbers and hide the bad ones.
So, I did what warehouse supervisors do.
I looked for the ones telling the truth by looking for the ones who reported the bad numbers as well as the good ones.
The ones who mentioned the electricity bill that was higher than expected, the medical procedure that cost more than they had budgeted for.
The visa run that ate into the surplus.
the pharmacy that ran out of their medication for two weeks.
Those were the ones I trusted.
Those were the ones I read carefully.
After six months of reading, I posted my first message.
It was three sentences long.
I stated my monthly income.
I stated my current monthly expenses in Dayton.
I asked whether a small Philippine city, specifically the one I had been reading about most, was a realistic option for a man with my numbers.
I received 14 replies within 36 hours.
Six of them told me yes without conditions.
Four of them told me yes with conditions about medical care and visa maintenance that I made a note of.
Three of them told me maybe with reservations that I also made a note of.
One of them told me I was too old to move and I should stay where I was and I made a note of that too because I have never in my life dismissed a warning without first hearing it.
I ran the numbers from the data they gave me.
I ran them 31 times on that same kitchen table in that same notebook.
The numbers worked not by a small margin, by a margin so large that I checked the arithmetic four separate times because I was afraid I had made an error in my favor.
I had not made an error.
The margin was real.
I booked a two-week reconnaissance trip for the following March because a warehouse supervisor does not commit to a system change based on a spreadsheet alone.
A warehouse supervisor goes and looks at the floor.
I had never been to Southeast Asia.
I had never been west of California.
My passport was 6 years old and had one stamp in it from a fishing trip to a lake in Ontario I had taken with my son the year after my divorce.
I renewed my passport, bought a plane ticket that consumed almost my entire discretionary savings for the year, and flew to Manila on a Thursday in early March with a small carry-on bag, a notebook, a mechanical pencil, and the specific quiet focus of a man who is going somewhere to verify a hypothesis and who does not intend to be distracted by anything that is not relevant to the verification.
Manila was not where I was going.
I stayed one night in an airport hotel and took an internal flight the next morning to the city I had been reading about for a year.
When I stepped off that second plane at an airport small enough that the runway ended in sugarcane fields and the heat hit me the way heat hits a man from Ohio in March and the specific smell of tropical air and diesel and cooking fires and salt from a nearby ocean arrived all at once.
I did not have any of the reactions the videos had prepared me for.
I did not feel awe.
I did not feel wonder.
I did not have the sensation that my life was about to change.
I felt, if anything, mildly relieved because the airport was small and functional and the taxi driver waiting outside was patient with my Ohio pronunciation of the name of my guest house.
And the drive into the city was uneventful.
And the guest house was exactly where the map said it was.
And the woman who checked me in remembered my name from the email I had sent two weeks earlier.
Every small system I encountered in that first hour worked correctly.
And a man who has spent 32 years managing small systems that work correctly recognizes the feeling of being in a place where the small systems work.
I spent those two weeks doing what I had come to do.
I tracked every single expense in the notebook.
I visited apartments.
I visited three of them.
Then five, then eight.
I sat in a waiting room at a private clinic and spoke to a doctor about my two conditions and the availability of my two medications.
And I visited twoarmacies to check the prices myself.
And I wrote the prices down.
I ate at three restaurants and two market stalls and one caranderia, the small familyrun eeries where the food is displayed in metal trays.
And you point at what you want, and I wrote every price down.
I walked the boulevard by the sea in the mornings and in the evenings.
I sat in a coffee shop for 2 hours one afternoon and watched people and I did not talk to anyone and no one bothered me which was the specific quality I had been hoping to find and had not been sure I would.
At the end of the two weeks, I sat down at the small desk in the guest house and I compared my recorded expenses to the forum’s data and the variance was approximately 8% and I considered 8% acceptable variance for a preliminary assessment.
I flew back to Dayton on a Sunday.
I did not sleep on the plane.
I ran the numbers again in the notebook at 38,000 ft over the Pacific and the numbers still worked.
I gave my landlord 60 days notice the Monday after I got home.
I sold my car to a man from work whose son had just gotten his license.
I got $2,200 for it, which was fair, and I put the money in the account I had opened for the move.
I sold most of my furniture, which was old and not worth shipping.
I gave my books to the public library.
I kept my winter coat because I could not bring myself to throw out a winter coat, even one I would probably never wear again.
I notified Medicare.
I researched the voluntary health insurance system for foreign residents in the Philippines.
And I paid the first year’s premium in advance.
I opened a peso denominated bank account with a Manila based institution that had an online interface I could operate.
I packed two large suitcases and one carry-on.
My son drove up from Cincinnati to take me to the airport in Columbus.
He is a big man.
He played offensive line in college and now coaches teenagers who play offensive line and he has the specific patient bulk of a man who has spent his adult life around young men who need patient bulk.
We had breakfast at the airport before I went through security.
He asked me if I was sure.
I told him I had run the numbers 37 times and I had done the twoe ground verification and the numbers worked.
He looked at me for a long moment across the small table with the coffee cups on it and he said, “Dad, I’m not asking about the numbers.
” I did not have a rehearsed answer for that.
I had come prepared to defend the arithmetic and he was not asking me to defend the arithmetic.
I sat with the question for a while, longer than I had ever sat with a question in front of him.
And then I told him that I was as sure as I knew how to be about the other things and that I would not know more about the other things until I had lived inside them for a while.
He nodded.
He said, “That’s good enough for me.
” He hugged me at the security line and did not let go for a beat longer than I expected.
And I did not either.
And then I went through and I did not look back because I’ve always found looking back inefficient.
And because if I had looked back, I am not sure I would have kept walking.
The apartment I ended up in the one I still live in now.
Four years after I signed the lease is on the second floor of a small residential building in a quiet neighborhood two blocks off the main road that runs along the sea.
It has two bedrooms.
I only need one.
The second bedroom is where I keep the notebook and a small desk and a folding chair and the winter coat folded and stored in a plastic bag with a moisture absorber inside it in a closet I open twice a year to check that it has not been colonized by anything tropical.
The rent is 8,500 pesos a month, which came out at the exchange rate I signed the lease at to approximately $151.
The building is owned by a retired nurse named Peara who is in her early 70s who spent almost 40 years as a nurse in a hospital about an hour from here and who bought the building with her late husband as their retirement plan and has been managing it herself for 11 years since he passed.
Pearla assessed me.
That is the correct word for what she did across the two viewings I attended before she agreed to lease me the apartment.
On the first viewing, she showed me the rooms and asked general questions.
Where was I from? What had I done? Did I have a family? On the second viewing, she watched what I did without appearing to watch.
I noticed she was watching because I have spent 32 years watching people without appearing to watch.
And it is not a skill you fail to recognize in someone else once you have developed it in yourself.
I did not know I had been assessed correctly until several months later over coffee she brought up to my apartment one afternoon when she told me she had agreed to lease to me because on the second viewing I had taken out a small tape measure and I had measured the kitchen counter in the space under the sink before I had asked about the price.
She told me this was how she knew I was going to stay because someone who is looking for a temporary situation she said does not measure the kitchen.
I told her I always measured kitchens.
She said yes, I know.
That is why I said yes.
I have thought about that exchange more than most exchanges I have had in my life.
I did not know that measuring a kitchen was a signal I was sending.
I was not sending a signal.
I was just measuring a kitchen.
But Pearl was reading the situation the way people read situations when they have spent a long career paying attention to details other people did not know were details.
and she was right.
I have stayed.
I moved in on a Wednesday.
The first thing I did in the apartment was unpack the notebook and put it on the kitchen table.
In the position it had occupied on my kitchen table in Dayton, upper left corner, pencil laid across the top.
The second thing I did was measure the refrigerator to confirm the dimensions matched what Pearlla had described in the lease.
They did.
The third thing I did was sit down at the kitchen table with a fresh page of the notebook and I wrote across the top.
Month one, dumagete beginning arithmetic.
The arithmetic in that notebook has been continuous ever since.
Every morning at approximately 6:00 in the morning, I make coffee and I sit at the kitchen table and I review the running expenditure total for the month and I compare it to the running total for the same day the previous month and I record any variances that are worth recording.
It takes approximately 4 minutes.
It has taken approximately 4 minutes every morning for 4 years.
4 minutes a day of arithmetic that produces an acceptable number does not sound like retirement.
It sounds like a chore.
But you have to understand where I’m coming from to understand what those four minutes actually are.
I spent 47 years from the age of 20 when I started as a stock clerk on the same warehouse floor I would later supervise until the age of 67 when I signed the lease on this apartment.
Running the arithmetic on my life every morning and finding more often than not that the arithmetic was not acceptable, not disastrous, not catastrophic, just not acceptable.
Always a little tight, always a little uncertain, always the specific mild low-grade dread of a man who knew that the margin was too thin to survive anything unexpected and who was living every day waiting for the unexpected to arrive.
The four minutes I now spend at the kitchen table every morning in Dumagate producing an acceptable number are the opposite of a chore.
They are the reward.
They are the specific pleasure of a man who spent 47 years running the numbers and finding them insufficient and who now runs the numbers and finds them sufficient and who has not stopped being surprised by the sufficiency even after 4 years.
That is what this whole story is about.
If you want the summary early, not the exchange rate, not the low rent, not the affordable medication, not the friendly people or the tropical sunsets or any of the standard talking points from the videos on the algorithm.
Those are all real and I will get to all of them.
But the actual story is 4 minutes a morning at a kitchen table producing a number that is finally for the first time in my adult life acceptable.
I began building the life that would eventually surround the notebook in my first month there.
I did it the way I had done everything else carefully without haste, one small system at a time.
I walked the boulevard by the sea every morning at 6:30.
This was a habit I had brought with me from Dayton, where I had walked a residential loop of similar length for years.
But the boulevard was better than the loop because the boulevard had the sea on one side and a row of trees and small businesses on the other.
and a specific quality of morning light that I had not previously known existed on this planet.
I did not romanticize this.
I noted it.
I made the observation the way you make an observation in a notebook that the morning light on the boulevard was better than any morning light I had encountered in Ohio and that this was not an emotional finding but a factual one and that the factual finding was itself an unexpected benefit of the relocation that I had not accounted for in the arithmetic.
I began seeing the same people on the boulevard every morning.
The vendors setting up their small carts.
The fishermen returning from the early catch with their coolers on the backs of small motorcycles.
An old dog who slept then as now under the same tree at approximately the same spot every morning and who had never once in the entire time I have observed him moved for a passing pedestrian.
I called him chief privately in my notebook because he had the specific unhurried authority of a warehouse floor supervisor who knew exactly where everything was and had decided none of it required urgent attention.
I also began seeing other men who looked unmistakably like I did.
Retired, foreign, walking at the same hour I was walking, nodding as they passed away.
Men who recognize each other nod when they do not yet know each other well enough to speak.
One of them stopped me on a Tuesday in my third week.
He was walking with a small group of five other men, all of them roughly my age, and they were walking at a slower pace than I was walking because two of them had knees that clearly did not enjoy the exercise.
The man who stopped me was tall and thin with a face that had spent a long time outdoors and hair that had gone completely white and a shirt with a small unassuming logo on the breast that I later learned was the crest of a bus driver’s union from Pennsylvania.
He said, “You’re new.
What did you do?” I said, “Warehouse supervisor.
” He said he had driven a bus for 36 years out of a depot in Erie.
He said his name was Wayne.
He said the group walked on Tuesdays and Fridays and left the boulevard at 6:25 and did an hour with a stop for coffee halfway.
He said I should join them next Friday if I felt like it.
I felt like it.
I joined them on Friday.
I have been walking with them on Tuesdays and Fridays for the four years since.
The group is six men now.
Sometimes seven when a Dutchman named Whim is in town and sometimes eight when a Filipino American named Arturo who grew up in California and has been retired here for 6 years is in from his other property outside the city.
The core is myself, Wayne, a retired Canadian accountant named Dave, a retired Ohio pharmacist named Frank, a retired British civil engineer named Jeff, and one more, a quiet retired postman from a suburb of Chicago named Kurt, who joined the group about a year after I did, and who does not say much, but nods at exactly the right moments in a way that makes his presence feel structural.
We walk.
We do not have deep conversations.
Occasionally we have shallow ones about something we have read or something one of our children has done or the price of chicken at the public market or whether the rains are early this year.
Mostly we walk silent walking with the sea to our left and the trees to our right and chief the dog under his tree at his usual spot is not a lesser kind of company than talking company.
It is I have come to believe a superior kind.
[snorts] It is the kind you find at 67, not at 27.
It requires that everyone in the group have already stopped needing to prove anything to anyone else.
Wayne asked me on our first walk together what my monthly number was.
I told him, he nodded.
He said, “Mine’s lower.
You’ve got more room.
” I told him I knew.
He said, “Must be nice.
” We both laughed.
That was the whole conversation.
It was also in a way I would not have been able to explain to anyone in Dayton the specific moment I realized I had found a friend because Wayne had asked the question that mattered and he had asked it without embarrassment on either side and we had established in under a minute that we understood each other’s arithmetic and once that was established there was nothing else to establish.
I met her at the public market on a Saturday morning in my third month.
I was at a vegetable stall comparing the price of two varieties of squash.
One was smaller and one was larger, and the price per kilo was the same on both.
And I was trying to determine which of the two was the better value for the specific dish I was intending to prepare, which was a soup I’d been making on Saturdays since my early 20s, and which required a squash that would cook down without going stringy.
I did not know that the smaller squash was the better choice for that purpose.
In Ohio, the squash I bought was a different variety.
altogether.
I was standing in front of the two piles of squash, comparing them with what I thought was a reasonable degree of concentration when a woman at the adjacent stall, a small woman in her early 60s, in a plain blue blouse and dark trousers with her hair pinned neatly at the back said without being asked and without looking directly at me that the smaller squash was better for whatever I was intending to cook because the larger one would be stringy and would not cook down properly.
I turned to her and said, “I did not know that.
” She said, “Now I did.
” She turned back to her own shopping.
I bought the smaller squash.
I made the soup that evening.
It cooked down properly.
It was, without exaggeration, the best soup of that variety I had ever made because the squash in Ohio had always gone slightly stringy, no matter what I did.
And I had assumed this was a feature of the recipe rather than a feature of the squash.
I saw her the following Saturday at the same market, at the same stall.
She was buying eggs.
I approached her.
I said the squash had been correct.
She said she knew.
I asked her name.
She said her name was Norma.
Norma Salazar Abalana, though I would not learn the second half of the name for another 3 weeks.
She was 63 years old.
She had spent 28 years as a clerk in the city registars’s office processing documents and maintaining records and she had retired the year before.
Her husband, a man named Renado, whom she had married at the age of 22, had died 9 years earlier of a kidney condition and she had spent the intervening years raising her three children the last of the way to adulthood and beginning cautiously to construct a life for herself that was not organized entirely around them.
She had three grandchildren later, four later still, six.
and she was close to all of them and to their parents and to the market vendors she had been buying from for 11 years and to the woman who cut her hair and to the neighbor on her left and to the neighbor on her right in a way that suggested she had constructed her entire retirement out of a large number of small patient relationships with people she saw at regular intervals and about whom she remembered small correct details.
I asked her that second Saturday if she would like to have a coffee.
She said she still had shopping to finish.
I said I would wait.
She said I did not need to wait.
I said I did not mind waiting.
She finished her shopping in 20 minutes.
I waited.
We had coffee at a small shop attached to the market.
We talked for approximately an hour.
I did not think of it as the beginning of anything.
I do not know if she did.
I was 64 at the time.
She was 60.
We were both people who had reached an age where beginnings were not the primary category of event we expected to encounter.
What we were doing was on the surface having a coffee at a market on a Saturday morning between two people who had not known each other the previous Saturday.
That is what it was on the surface.
And I did not look past the surface because I have never been a man who looks past the surface of a thing while it is happening.
I look past the surface later when I have more information.
We had coffee the following Saturday and the Saturday after that and by the fourth Saturday it had become an assumed arrangement she would finish her shopping.
I would wait at the coffee shop and we would have an hour together before she went home to whatever she was going to do that afternoon and I went back to the apartment to enter the week’s expenses in the notebook.
At some point in the second month of the Saturday coffees, I mentioned the walking group and she said she had seen me at the boulevard in the mornings and she said she thought I looked like a man who was not making trouble for anyone, which was, she added, a rarer thing than people who had never had to observe it up close would suspect.
I said I had spent 32 years in a job where making trouble for anyone was the fastest way to make everyone’s day worse, and that I had extracted the lesson thoroughly and had brought it with me into retirement.
She smiled at this.
She had a quiet smile, not withheld, but not spent recklessly either.
She said, “Then we will get along.
” She met the walking group in my fourth month on a Friday morning when I mentioned to her that Frank had been asking about a good place to buy pillows, and she said she knew exactly where he should go.
And I said, “Would she be willing to come by the coffee stop after the walk and tell him herself?” She said she would.
She arrived at the coffee stop at precisely the time we did.
She was carrying a small folded piece of paper on which she had written in the neat script of a woman who had spent 28 years writing things neatly for a living.
The name of the shop, the address, the cross street, the name of the owner she recommended asking for, and the price range Frank should expect.
She handed the piece of paper to Frank.
Frank looked at it, then looked at me, then looked at Norma, and he said, “Ma’am, this is more useful than my real estate agents entire office.
” She said she was not trying to earn a commission.
Frank said, “That’s why.
” Dave, the Canadian accountant, whom nothing surprises, nodded at me across the table in a way that indicated that in his considered opinion, I had made a competent selection and that he approved.
Wayne, next to me, kept drinking his coffee and did not say anything, which I understood correctly to mean the same thing.
She and I did not talk about what we were doing.
We were doing it.
It did not require a name.
I had spent one marriage of 16 years failing to understand that some things did not require names and had extracted that lesson too late to save the marriage.
But not too late to apply the lesson the second time around.
Norma had, I suspected, been extracting the same lesson at approximately the same rate on her side of the ocean.
Neither of us proposed a name for what we were doing.
We continued doing it.
In my fifth month, I gave her a key to the apartment.
This was a practical matter.
I was going to be away for 4 days on a small trip.
Wayne and I had planned to a nearby island and someone needed to water the small collection of plants I had begun keeping on the balcony.
She was the obvious candidate.
She accepted the key without ceremony and used it correctly and returned it to the hook by the door when I got back.
Then, without either of us discussing it, the key remained on the hook.
It has been on the hook for 4 years.
It is one of two keys on the hook.
The other one is my own.
Her grandchildren visited my apartment for the first time in her eighth month of knowing me.
There were four of them at the time.
The two youngest had not been born yet.
Her eldest grandson, who was seven, walked around the apartment with a specific focused inspection of a 7-year-old who has been told he is visiting an important place.
And at the end of the inspection, he came up to me and asked me a question I did not understand because it was in his own language.
Norma translated.
He wanted to know why my kitchen table had a notebook on it.
I told him it was where I kept my numbers.
He asked what my numbers were for.
I told him they were for making sure everything was in order.
He nodded.
He said in his careful English, “Okay, lolo hell.
” Lolo is the word grandchildren in the Philippines use for grandfather.
I was not his grandfather.
I have not at any point in the four years since been his grandfather.
in any formal or legal or biological sense.
He called me lolo hell that afternoon in my apartment without being prompted by anyone.
He has called me lolo hell every time he has seen me since.
The other three and later the two youngest have followed his lead because that is what younger siblings do when the eldest establishes a form of address.
I have thought about this more than I expected to.
I have not raised it with Norma.
She has not raised it with me.
Some things do not require names.
Some things are their own names.
I want to describe the daily life specifically because if I do not describe it specifically, the reader will fill in something more dramatic than what is actually there.
And what is actually there is not dramatic.
It is quiet and it is small and it is arranged in the specific order of a warehouse floor that is running correctly.
And the fact that this is the best life I have ever had is a finding that I do not expect to be exciting to anyone who has not already lived for a long time inside a life that was not running correctly.
I wake at 5:45 because the body learns a schedule and does not consult the mind about whether to continue keeping it.
I make coffee, Filipino coffee, from the vendor at the market who grinds it on Saturday mornings when Norma and I do the shopping and I sit at the kitchen table with the window open and the notebook in front of me and I do the morning review.
4 minutes the month’s running total.
The comparison to the same day, the previous month any variances worth recording the final line acceptable.
I have written the word acceptable on that kitchen table more than a thousand times and I have not once written any other word.
I walk at 6:30 on Tuesdays and Fridays, the group.
On the other days, alone or with Norma if she has slept over, though she has her own apartment on the other side of the boulevard and prefers on most nights to sleep there.
This is an arrangement neither of us discussed.
It arrived.
We accepted it.
On Sundays, I walk longer than the other days because Marcus calls in the mornings.
Sunday mornings my time.
Saturday evenings, his and I like to have covered enough distance to have earned the sitting still of the call.
Wednesday evenings are the group dinner at the same restaurant run by the sister-in-law of Jeff’s late brother, where the food has not changed in 11 years and where I order the same thing I ordered on my first Wednesday and where I will continue to order it because I have found what I like and I do not see the point of changing it.
Norma joins for the Wednesday dinner about half the time.
When she does not join, one of the other men asks after her.
I say she is well.
They nod.
Nothing more needs to be said.
Saturday mornings are the public market.
I carry the bags.
She chooses.
This is a division of labor we established without discussing it because she knows what to buy and I am stronger and the system works.
Sunday mornings are Marcus.
The calls have gotten longer since I moved.
Not because there is more to report from my end.
there is less if anything because retirement is by definition less eventful than the working years that preceded it but because I am not during these calls the specific lowgrade anxious person I was in Dayton and Marcus can tell and the calls have expanded to fit the additional room in my attention he asked me in month six how I was doing ot the numbers he clarified the other stuff I told him the other stuff was fine he said, “You sound different.
” I asked what he meant.
He said, “You sound like you’re not worried about something.
” I did not have an answer for that.
In month six, I sat with the observation, the way I sit with observations for a while.
I finished the call.
I went and made another coffee.
I sat at the kitchen table with a notebook.
I looked at the acceptable number for that morning.
I thought about the specific quality of the coffee I was drinking and the specific position of the notebook on the table and the specific fact that Norma had a key to the apartment and would probably be by that evening and the specific fact that Wayne would be at the boulevard the following morning at 6:25 and would not require me to be anything other than someone who arrived on time and did not make trouble for anyone.
And I tried to identify what it was I was not worried about.
I was not worried about the arithmetic.
That was the obvious answer, but it was not the complete one.
The arithmetic in Dayton had been the specific thing I worried about most, but it had not been the only thing.
I was not worried about being alone.
That was closer.
In Dayton, I had been alone in a specific manner that I had not been able to describe to myself.
Not lonely exactly because I had known people but alone in the sense that no one in my daily life saw me clearly enough for it to matter whether I was there or not.
Pear saw me clearly.
Wayne saw me clearly.
Norma saw me most clearly of all.
The eldest grandson called me Lolo Hal without being prompted.
Being seen at 65 by people who had no reason to see you and no obligation to keep seeing you was, I understood, only slowly, something I had been without for so long that I had stopped identifying its absence.
I was not worried about my body.
This was the strangest one to identify.
My knees still hurt.
My diabetes still required daily attention.
My hypertension still required its pill.
But I was not worried about my body the way I had been in Dayton, where every minor complaint had been the leading edge of a potentially catastrophic medical bill, and where I had spent years quietly avoiding the doctor for anything that was not already emergency shaped because I could not afford to find out what was wrong.
Here, the medication was $31 a month instead of $230.
The clinic charged what a clinic should charge.
My knees hurt, but the hurt did not carry the second layer of financial dread that had been attached to it in Dayton.
It was just pain.
Pain by itself, without the financial dread attached to it, is a much smaller thing than pain with the dread attached.
I had not realized until I lived without the dread, how much of what I had thought of as physical suffering had been the dread and not the body.
I was not worried most fundamentally about tomorrow.
Not in the sense that I did not think about tomorrow.
I was still a warehouse supervisor and warehouse supervisors think about tomorrow and I still updated the notebook every morning.
But tomorrow had stopped being the thing I braced against.
It had become instead the thing I was walking toward at a comfortable pace in the company of people who were also walking toward it at a comfortable pace.
And there was nothing about it that I felt I needed to protect myself against in advance.
I told Marcus on the following Sunday that I thought he was right.
I sounded like I was not worried about something and I thought the something was everything I had spent my whole adult life worrying about and it had stopped and I had not noticed it stopping because it had stopped the way most important things stop which is quietly and one small piece at a time.
He was silent for a long moment on the phone.
Then he said, “Dad, I’m really glad.
” I said, “I was too.
” He said, “I wasn’t sure when you left.
I trusted your numbers, but I wasn’t sure about the other stuff.
” I said, “I had not been sure either.
” I said, “The other stuff had turned out to be more of the reason to come than the numbers had in the end.
The numbers had been the reason I’d allowed myself to come.
The other stuff had been what was waiting when I got here.
” He said he was going to come visit that year if I would have him.
I said I would.
I said I would take him to Jeff’s restaurant and to the boulevard at 6:30 in the morning to meet Wayne and to the public market to meet Norma.
He said he would like that.
He said he had been wanting to meet Norma for a while.
I asked him how he had known about Norma.
He said, “Dad, you mention her in every call.
Not by name, but you mention her.
” I said, “I had not been aware I was mentioning her.
” He said, “I know.
That’s why I’ve known about her.
” He came 6 months later.
He stayed for 8 days.
He met Wayne at the boulevard.
He met Norma at the market.
He met Pearla who assessed him the way she assesses everyone and afterwards told me privately that my son had good bones and that I should be proud of the way I had raised him.
I did not tell her that Beverly had done most of the raising and I had done most of the earning that funded the raising.
I let her compliment stand as she had made it because a compliment about a son is not something you correct with technical clarifications.
Marcus and Norma had a conversation on his fourth evening that I did not participate in.
I was in the kitchen making coffee and when I came back into the living room, she was smiling in the specific way.
She smiles when she has been given information she considers important.
and he was looking at me the way he had looked at me across the airport breakfast table years earlier when he had asked if I was sure.
He did not ask me anything this time.
He nodded at me.
The nod meant roughly, “You did all right, Dad.
This is good.
” I nodded back.
Roughly, my nod meant yes, it is good.
That is most of the story.
I am aware that most of the stories the internet tells about foreign men who moved to the Philippines are stories of catastrophe, of scams and swindles and marriages that turned out to be business arrangements and property purchases that turned out to be traps and old men who lost everything they had.
Those stories are real.
I have met men here who have lived through them.
I have listened at more than one Wednesday dinner to a newcomer who arrived with the wrong assumptions and made the wrong decisions and was by the time we met him in the middle of the wrong outcome.
Those stories exist.
I do not dismiss them.
But those are not the only stories.
My story is not one of them.
I did not come here for love.
I did not fall for anyone I met on the internet before I arrived.
I did not marry into a family whose finances I did not understand.
I did not buy property in someone else’s name because I had been told that was the way things had to be done.
I did not at any point across these four years transfer a large sum of money to anyone on the basis of a story I could not verify.
I came here because the arithmetic in Dayton did not work and the arithmetic here did.
And I ran the numbers 37 times and I did the twoe ground verification and I did not commit to a system change until I had confirmed the system change was going to hold.
And what I found when I got here, what I did not run any numbers on, because you cannot run numbers on things like this, was that when the arithmetic works, everything else in a man’s life has room to work as well.
That the four minutes at the kitchen table every morning are not a chore, but a reward.
That a walking group that meets on Tuesdays and Fridays and does not require you to prove anything to anyone is one of the most valuable structures a 67year-old man can be part of.
That a landlord who assesses you correctly on the second viewing is a gift you do not deserve and should be grateful for.
That an old dog under a tree who has never moved for anyone is a form of daily consistency you did not know you needed.
that a woman at a public market who tells you which squash to buy without being asked and who is right and who continues to be right and who eventually has a key to your apartment and whose eldest grandson calls you lolo hal is not a plot point in a scam story or a plot point in a love story but the specific quiet center of a life you did not know you were going to be allowed to have the title of this video says I live like a king on $1,800 a month that is not accurate it and I want to correct it before I finish.
I do not live like a king.
Kings do not measure kitchens.
Kings do not walk with retired bus drivers.
Kings do not carry the bags home from the public market for a woman who chose the squash on a Saturday 4 years ago and whose choice was correct.
Kings do not have notebooks on the kitchen table.
Kings do not update running expenditure totals and mechanical pencil at 6:00 in the morning.
Kings do not have a dog under a tree they respect because he has never moved for anyone.
I am not a king.
I am a retired warehouse supervisor from Dayton, Ohio on $2,150 a month living in a two-bedroom apartment in a small Philippine city with a notebook and a walking group and a landlord and a companion and a son who calls on Sundays.
What I have actually is the specific arithmetic supported dignity of a man whose income has finally for the first time in his adult life caught up with the requirements of his cost of living and who is discovered in the ample space that opens up when the arithmetic finally works.
that a life he had assumed was close to him, a life with people in it and consistency and quiet and the specific pleasure of being seen had been waiting the whole time on the other side of the numbers.
That is not a king’s life.
That is a man’s life.
It is the first proper man’s life I have had.
I intend to keep it.
Saturday morning, the public market, I am at the vegetable stall.
I am not comparing squash prices.
I know which squash to buy.
I have known for four years.
I buy the smaller ones without deliberation and I put them in the bag I am carrying.
Norma is at the adjacent stall.
She is talking to the vendor whom she has known now for 15 years.
She does not check what I am buying.
She knows I know.
She noted four years ago that I paid attention the first time and she has noted in the four years since that I have continued to pay attention.
This has, she told me once over the Saturday coffee, been more valuable to her than she had expected it to be when she noticed it.
I have thought about her sentence more than she probably intends me to.
We finish the market in 40 minutes.
We have coffee at the same coffee shop we have had coffee at for 4 years.
The coffee is from the same vendor.
It is the same coffee.
It is good coffee.
It has always been good coffee.
We talked for an hour about things that do not need to be important to be worth talking about.
Her grandchildren, Marcus’ football season, and the specific boy on his team this year who reminds Marcus of a boy he coached six seasons ago and who Marcus is trying to keep out of the trouble the first boy did not stay out of.
What Frank said at the Wednesday dinner that was worth repeating.
The dog under the tree on the boulevard who has still never moved for anyone.
I say I respect this.
She says she knows.
She has heard me say it before.
She does not tell me I have said it before because it is true every time I say it.
And true things do not expire from repetition.
I carry the bags home.
12 minutes.
The route I know.
The neighborhood is doing what it does on Saturday mornings.
The small store on the corner open for its steady trickle of Saturday customers.
The children on the street engaged in a game whose rules I have never fully understood.
the specific unhurried quality of a place that has been going about its business for a long time and does not require anything from me except that I am here and the arithmetic works and the morning review produces an acceptable number.
I unpack the bags at the kitchen counter.
I put the squash in the bin under the sink where Norma has always kept the squash and where I now also keep the squash because when someone shows you where the squash goes and they are correct about it, you do not move the squash.
I sit down at the kitchen table with a fresh coffee.
The notebook is in its position.
The mechanical pencil is across the top.
I open to the running page for the month and I run the 4 minutes.
The number is acceptable.
I write acceptable on the line for today.
I close the notebook.
I look out the window at a strip of tropical sky and I think about the man I was in Dayton in February at the kitchen table there with a cold coffee doing the same arithmetic and finding it insufficient.
I think about the 18 months of running the numbers before I finally admitted that they were not going to change.
I think about the plane and the passport and the small carry-on bag and the specific unromantic focus of a man on a reconnaissance trip to verify a hypothesis.
I think about measuring the kitchen counter on the second viewing.
I think about Pearl watching without appearing to watch.
I think about Wayne on the first Tuesday asking me what my monthly number was.
I think about Norma at the vegetable stall telling me which squash to buy.
I think about the eldest grandson calling me Lolo Hal without being prompted and the four grandchildren who followed his lead and the two who arrived later and inherited the address without ever being told there had ever been another way to address me.
I think about Marcus on the phone saying I sounded like I was not worried about something.
He was right.
I am not worried about something.
I am 67 years old and I could not afford retirement in America and I did not stay in America to be unable to afford it.
And I did not lose anything on the way out because I did not bring anything with me except a notebook and a mechanical pencil and a habit of 32 years of paying attention to details other people had decided were not details.
The habit turned out to be the only thing I needed.
Everything else was here when I got here.
The apartment, the boulevard, the dog under the tree, the walking group, the Wednesday dinner, the Saturday market, the eldest grandson, Norma at the adjacent stall, the morning coffee, the 4 minutes, the acceptable number.
If you have watched this video the whole way through, if you have stayed with this quiet story about a man who did not lose anything and did not find a great love and did not solve any of the world’s problems, but who did find at 67 the specific arithmetic supported dignity of a life whose numbers finally worked then? I think you might be someone who understands why this story mattered enough to send.
There are men like me all over the world sitting at kitchen tables in the morning running the numbers and finding them insufficient.
I am not their solution.
Dumaged is not their solution.
There is no universal solution.
But there is for some of them in some place an arithmetic that works.
And I wanted them to know that the finding if you find it is quieter than the videos on the algorithm led me to expect.
It is not a king’s life.
It is a man’s life and a man’s life if the arithmetic works is enough.
Please subscribe if this story reached you.
There are more like it different men, different arithmetics, different countries, some of them successful and some of them not, but all of them true.
I try to tell them the way they deserve to be told.
Your subscription helps me keep telling them and helps the algorithm find the person who most needs to hear the next one.
My name is Harold Dumont Price.
The notebook is on the kitchen table.
The number is acceptable.
