A Place At The Table

The first time I sat down for dinner with Joey’s family in the Philippines, I did what I had always done at a restaurant: I picked up the menu and started deciding what I wanted to eat. I soon realized I had it all wrong. Nobody was ordering their dinner. Dishes were being chosen for the table, passed around and shared by everyone.

It was a small moment, but I didn’t forget it. In the years since, I’ve come to see that first meal as my introduction to something I would encounter again and again in the Philippines: a culture where sharing, family and generosity often seem to matter more than what belongs to any one person.

At first, I thought I was simply learning the customs of another country. Over time, I realized I was learning something about its people.

One morning, I watched construction workers making their way to a building site. They walked together, talking, smiling and laughing. In one photograph I took, a worker has his arm draped over the shoulder of the man beside him. There was an easy camaraderie that caught my attention. They weren’t just heading to the same workplace. They were heading there together.

On Valentine’s Day, Joey and I visited a park where a restaurant and food stalls had been set up. As we walked from the parking lot, a family we had never met invited us to share their meal. We were complete strangers, yet they simply offered us a place at their table.

I’ve also accumulated photographs with people I’ve met at hotels, restaurants and even the barbershop. In many, I’m standing with my arm around someone who, not long before, had been a stranger. They weren’t simply anonymous people providing a service before disappearing from my life. There was a warmth to these encounters that made me want a photograph with them, and the feeling seemed mutual. They touched my heart, and I didn’t want to forget them.

Even a delayed flight became part of the lesson. A taxi driver we had used before agreed to meet us at the airport. Our flight arrived an hour late, but he was still there.
Waiting was inconvenient, but he had made a commitment and kept it. We continued using him whenever we needed a driver. A business transaction had become something more personal: loyalty returned with loyalty.

I also noticed the respect and courtesy shown to others, particularly elders. I frequently heard po, a word added to conversation as a sign of politeness and respect. These were small gestures, but I began to realize it was precisely the small gestures I was noticing most.

None of this means money doesn’t matter. Filipinos have mortgages and medical bills, need to put food on the table and worry about their financial futures just as the rest of us do. Financial security can relieve many of those worries. It can provide a comfortable home, good food, travel and choices. I’m grateful for those choices.

But money can’t make someone invite a stranger to share a meal. It can’t manufacture the friendship between two workers walking onto a construction site. And it can’t make a taxi driver keep his word when waiting has become inconvenient.

I spent much of my working life learning how valuable money could be. Retirement, and especially my time in the Philippines, has been teaching me about everything money can’t buy: family, friendship, respect, keeping your word, sharing your dinner, putting an arm around a coworker’s shoulder and making a stranger feel welcome.

Years ago, I tried to capture some of what I was experiencing in a poem I called Land of Smiles. I wrote:

You feel in your heart a warmth,


Bringing to you a feeling


That this could be home.

At the time, they were simply words describing how a place halfway around the world made me feel.

Today, they mean something more.

Perhaps what makes somewhere home isn’t owning property there. Maybe it’s the moment when the people who live there stop making you feel like a stranger.