By Peter Wortsman

Sister Maria Annunziata sat with a tin cup in Penn Station. She sat there silently, clutched the cup in her lap, and stared down at the ground. She never once looked into the faces that belonged to the anonymous hands that dropped coins into her cup. For years she sat at that same spot and watched the shoe styles change from heavy Irish brogues to the flimsier narrow-toed Italian imports. Pennies turned to nickels to dimes and then - she did not know how old she was, how many years she had been sitting there in that station - then it was the heavy clink of quarters by which she measured time, not clock time - God's time, she called it. Each clink of a coin marked a celestial second; sixty clinks made a minute; sixty times sixty an hour of eternity. And when she felt the cup grow heavy, she knew it was time to go. → Read more