Last night I made my usual trek from Findlay, Ohio, where I teach seminarians and undergrad religious studies majors, to Perrysburg, about 35 minutes north. I moved with my wife to Perrysburg just under a year ago, a picturesque Midwestern town with parades for just about every occasion, no shortage of American flags, and a proud history of being the only other city platted by the U.S. government (Washington D.C. being the other, of course).

I'll be honest. Small-town living has been a bit of a re-adjustment for us. While both my wife and I were raised in the area, we left for the city life of Chicago more than 17 years ago and later spent several years in Philadelphia. It came as a shock when, during one of the worst economies in U.S. history, the school with the most immediate faculty opening after my doctoral graduation was smack in the middle of Ohio. I had fond memories of my childhood here, but I'd lived in big cities all of my adult life. In Philadelphia, almost all of the 11 neighbors in our apartment building were from other countries or ethnicities. We grew accustomed to the potent cacophony of scents that filled our hallway at dinnertime. Not so in Perrysburg.

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Things had been not great for a while when I started thinking about leaving him. We weren't fighting, we weren't at each others' throats, we both just seemed to be getting casual with our marriage. So it didn't surprise me that when I said "I'm just not happy with this relationship", his response was "Ohh, that's too bad", followed by another few moments of eating in silence before changing the subject. It made a weird sort of sense that when I asked for space, I was able to move onto the futon in our living room without a single protest from him about how he wanted to sleep in the same bed with me. My vocalization of unhappiness, like a lot of things in our relationship on both sides, passed without much fanfare.

Our decision to marry wasn't completely insane. Before I started realizing that marriage- no, that love meant feeling passionately about someone, and that never fighting with a spouse was not something to brag about, we had gotten along just fine. We were good friends, we supported each other, we had similar values- all the good stuff. What was lacking was any interest in each other's thoughts, hopes, fears, or dreams, and I didn't realize how big of a deal that was until well after we were married.

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving -- a holiday grounded in the principles of celebration and gratitude.  Here's one holiday that does not smack of commercialism, and it is instead a time for families and friends to assemble around the dinner table, to talk, and to feast. In the broadest sense, so many of us do indeed have much to be grateful for, including the bounty of American agriculture, and tomorrow is a day to reflect on that good fortune.

It is also a holiday built around the consumption of turkeys.  Sadly, the domesticated birds sold from factory farms look like a caricature of the wild birds from which they descend.  Today's industrially produced birds have been selectively bred for enormous body mass and, as a consequence, many of them cannot stand or walk after only a few months of life. They have so much breast meat that they are even incapable of copulation -- reproduction now occurs only through artificial insemination.  They are not healthy animals, and they suffer chronic pain.  Some of them die from heart attacks -- suggesting that something is deeply wrong in their physical make-up when baby and juvenile animals perish from maladies we associate with old age.

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Two-thirds of our country is overweight or obese. The current generation is predicted to have a shorter life span than their parents for the first time in recorded history, by up to 10 years. And the greatest killer in our country, the greatest single threat to our lives is not terrorism, but poor health. The situation is totally out of hand. We all know that we have to do something, and it's not like we aren't trying. Last year alone we spent $60 billion trying to lose weight and get healthy only to watch our health and the health of our nation continue to plummet. So, is all hope lost? Not at all! Because, while the problem couldn't be more serious, the solution just might be a game ... literally.

I recently watched a video of a subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. It was noticed that when given the option between stairs and an escalator to get out of the subway the overwhelming majority took the escalator. And trust me, that isn't only happening in Sweden. But why is this the case? It's not like people don't know how to use the stairs, and it's not that people are necessarily opposed to getting a little exercise. Is it because it's easier, or is because we have simply gotten into the habit of taking the escalator?

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