Pitting Cherries

  Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong would answer the question “how shall we express love?” with a single word: “Wastefully.”    ✧✧✧   We don’t express love wastefully. A story and then some thinking about why.   ✧✧✧   It’s 2006. I’m in NYC to—among other things—celebrate the fifth birthday of my first niece, Maya.  I wait outside her school

For reasons a team of psychoanalysts might have been able to crack, my dad couldn’t get the three-word phrase “I love you” to come out of his mouth. I knew he loved us. It’s just he couldn’t say it. I rationalized that I didn’t need to hear those three words, but it hurt anyway. This is the story about how

I am standing in Kenya, with my left foot in the Northern Hemisphere and my right foot in the Southern. A line on the ground indicates the equator. Young men—asking for nothing, but hoping for tips—entertain and educate tourists, like me, about the Coriolis effect. They pour water into bowls with small holes at the bottom and let the water