I don’t understand why you’re doing that. Fair enough. The person doing the asking was sitting in our salon (living room), looking over to the wine fridge next to the window, on top of which sits this ghastly piece of pottery (spoiler alert: whenever we move, it ain’t coming with us), next to which is a tube of hand cream, a package of tissues, and a yellow, legal-size pad with a pen on top. I had to explain why the pad was there and what we were scribbling on it. And why. As I said, fair enough…

‘We’re tracking what we’re spending. Look, we’re now in July 2024. You can see, this entry is for groceries, this one for having dinner out, and so on. The page before is for June.’

‘But, wait a minute, you have pages going back to 2023 and 2022. You have another pad underneath; that’s for 2019. You’re just writing down numbers. What are you doing with all this information?’

‘Not much. Since we’ve been here in The Land, we seem to be doing OK financially, better than we did in The States; we always have money in our U.S. and Israeli bank accounts. (Of course, we don’t have a car.) So while we’ve felt we should be keeping some control over what we’re spending by keeping a record, I’ve always found an excuse not to tally it all up and look at the totals. But now that we’re thinking of moving, we need to have a more precise reckoning of what is coming in and what is going out. And that means making a spreadsheet.’

‘I don’t see you as a spreadsheet type of guy. I know some of the things you’re good at. But fiddling with numbers? Not so sure.’

‘Well, you don’t know the half of it, mon ami. I guess I’ve never told you about my great spreadsheet adventures. So let me edumacate you, if you’re willing to listen to a trip down Memory Lane. We’re going back over thirty years when I was the second in command of an office of 150 people in the Child Welfare Administration (NYC). My basic job was just to make sure everyone else was doing their job. And what was the biggest problem everyone had? Paperwork, drowning in paperwork. Now a few years before when I was working at a different office, the Administration had dumped a few computers into every workplace, with no instructions or plans as to what to do with them. We were able to find one computer guy upstairs to hold our hands and show us some basic stuff, like turning the machines on and off and what DOS meant. I only wish I had one of those computers here to show you the software we had, WordPerfect, dBase, and Lotus 1-2-3. Let you have a crack at it. It would be like giving you a phonograph or a dial telephone. See how smart you are, figuring how to use a computer without a mouse or a trackpad.  

‘Anyway, I had done a few simple reports back then, but now I was ready to do some heavy lifting. Every week, the office had to prepare a statistical report about what we had done that week and send it to C.O. Not that anybody there would do anything with this information except file it away for safekeeping. Each caseworker would get the ball rolling by filling in a lot of numbers on a form, and then the supervisor would tally up the forms from his team and send it up the line to somebody else until finally it came to me to look at. The problem was that some of the staff had limited skills in basic math – which is why they were working in Child Welfare. If you’re adding up a column of numbers this way and you don’t get the same answer as when you do the tallying the other way, and you can’t figure out what’s wrong, that’s stress. Stress with a capital ESS.

What I decided to do was create something in Lotus so nobody would have to add up anything and make a mess of it. Just give us all the raw data and we’ll plug it in. It took me some time to figure out how to put the spreadsheet together and how to write the formulas. But once that was done, it was simple. Easy. Put the numbers in here, and the totals we needed would appear by magic over there. It took us about an hour every week to enter all the data in this huge spreadsheet, but we figured out that it saved everybody else about thirty hours of tedious labor. And then we printed out the finished report on our dot matrix printer… You have no idea what that is, do you?…and sent it in.’

‘You couldn’t send it by email?’

‘We didn’t have email.  Yes, our family had AOL. But Child Welfare didn’t have email. Subways. That’s how things got sent back in the day. In manila envelopes on the train.’

‘Did anybody ever thank you?’

‘Oh yeah. Big time. But what I’m especially proud of is that, first of all, all the spreadsheets and databases I created…. You’re right, that’s completely out of my wheelhouse. But also, nobody else in any of the other offices thought to do what I was doing. Everybody else was still cranking out these reports by hand. ‘

‘And then what happened?’

‘Some of us got to retire, which is what I did with a decent pension and few regrets.  And I have no idea what happened next at the agency. Except that now, thirty years later, I’m getting to tally up all the information we’ve been saving about how much the two of us spend, which is taking me more than a few hours to enter.’

So let’s forget about my glory days thirty years ago. I needed to sit down at my 27” iMac and put together a brand-new spreadsheet in Excel, which is a little more user-friendly than Lotus 1-2-3. One column listing ‘groceries’; one column for ‘entertainment’; one column for medical expenses; and so forth; add up each column month by month; do a grand total of all the columns; then do an average of the monthly totals; see if you’re spending less than your bringing in.

I started out with what’s on the yellow pads from this January to June, six months total. But with Barbara going through all our bank and credit card statements, we realized that a lot of what goes out never gets put down on paper. If we order something online, for example. Or all the bills that get paid automatically from our Israeli bank account or one of our credit cards. (It’s scary how much we spend without thinking twice about it. I can show you how much we spend just on wine and whiskey.) And the thousands of shekels Barbara gives for tzedakah she keeps listed separately, so I had to add it in. But when the amount I was tallying for our expenses was creeping perilously close to what our income is, I thought to ask, “‘Barbara, have you included our tax refunds and our R.M.D.s (required minimum distribution, what we have to take from our I.R.A.s) as part of our income? No?” A sigh of relief. The spreadsheet page ‘Income’ now looks a lot healthier. We’re rich, we’re rich! (Well, not quite. But I won’t have to give up my weekly slice at Craft Pizza to economize.)

‘In the middle of all this spreadsheeting, Barbara’s phone rang. It’s Esther, she has an apartment she wants to show us. It’s a garden apartment. And so off we went down the block to #25 Hakeren, in a cluster of buildings where some of our friends live. If nothing else, that’s convenient. And I have to give credit where credit is due. Unlike other apartments we’ve been shown, this couple did a first-rate job in their shiputzim. But even the best renovation can’t make up for the lack of space. Tiny is tiny, at least in the universe as we know it. There was one small bathroom in the hallway and another half-bath next to it. You could enlarge them, but then you’d be making the kitchen smaller – known as the robbing Peter to pay Paul syndrome, or our version: robbing Shlomi to pay Tzachi. (There’s probably a tractate of the Talmud that deals with just that.)

Yes, it had a patio and a little garden with an olive tree that would certainly get bigger. But no for a lot of reasons. Out of curiosity, bow much are they asking for this little gem? Esther figured it was as good a time as any to have a conversation. She had given us an estimate of how much she thought we could get for our apartment, but, given the lack of interest, she suggested (?) that we lower our asking price. Was it a coincidence that what she now thought we could realistically get for our apartment was the same shekel figure this couple was asking for their apartment?

If there is an art to having a well-controlled temper tantrum, then I acknowledge my mastery of the technique. I reminded Esther of the selling points of our place. Why is it only worth the same as this much smaller apartment? Ah, but the other one is a garden apartment, which is apparently a big deal in these parts. I readily acknowledged that such an apartment would be worth more than the one above it with no garden. But we too have a patio. It’s just several stories above ground, and it’s called a merpeset. In fact we have three of these merpesot, the main one being the one off our dining room. We have spent quality time, often on Fri. nights, having dinner on said balcony watching the skyline slowly fading into darkness and flocks of crows circling in the sky on their way to the tree where they will rest for the night. OK, it doesn’t have a fledgling olive tree, but still…

However, and this should be taken into consideration but apparently isn’t by many…. In The States it’s being called a ‘heat advisory’ – ‘climate change’ being too politically charged a term. In the last few years there have been fewer and fewer days when we can sit outside. Either it’s too cold and blustery or it’s too hot. Our merpesot are becoming spaces that don’t get used much – except, of course, over Sukkot – but need to be kept clean of bird leavings so the drains don’t get clogged. Let some random Israeli pay for the privilege, say I, but I am not said random Israeli. We’ll pass on the apartment. We did agree to lower our own asking price, but not quite as much as Esther had suggested. And we would wait for another day, not knowing what it would bring. (That’s for next time. Spoiler alert: it does get interesting.)