My brother Sean and I were sitting at our round kitchen table eating lunch one sticky summer afternoon in the middle of my childhood, when my father opened the freezer to survey its contents and figure out what he’d make for supper that night. This freezer was always unreasonably disorganized and packed to the gills...It was like an unexploded mine, waiting to combust and assault you with frozen shrapnel the moment you opened its door.

Empathy is a hard thing for a preschooler to understand.