Yesterday, AJ was helping me push our heavily-laden shopping cart from the supermarket to the car when I found the twenty dollar bill. It was in the middle of the parking lot, crisp and clean, neatly creased in half and lying yards from any cars. I bent to pick it up.

�No, Mommy, you shouldn�t take it. It isn�t ours.�

He was right of course. But after looking around to see if there was someone to give it to (there wasn�t), I took it anyway. We went home. AJ forgot all about it, but I didn�t. It�s still folded up in my bag. I can�t bring myself to put it into my wallet, at least not until I resolve this question: What would I want AJ to do?

As a kid I was always finding money. I think I was just always noticing things. Or maybe I was just always staring at the ground. But I almost always returned from walks with some change in my pocket. And once I found �50 in the British Museum � the equivalent of about $100 at the time. At 11, it might as well have been a million dollars. It was two years worth of allowance. I tried to return it to the information kiosk, but they practically laughed at me. Apparently �Finders Keepers Losers Weepers� isn�t just playground justice. It�s international law.

The problem with finding the $20 with AJ really had to do with what had happened at the playground a few days before. Like me, AJ is also always finding things. And like me, AJ seems to have an innate sense of morality with a fairly stringent code. At the playground a few days ago, AJ had come across a couple of Matchbox cars buried in the sand. He played and played with them, making roads and garages out of sand and sticks, sending them down the slide and watching them fly. When it was time to go, he wanted to take the cars with him. I told him no, that they belonged to another little boy who might come back to look for them. AJ arranged them carefully on a bench, where they would be easily visible to the little boy who would surely come back for them. The lesson AJ got from this: if it doesn�t belong to you then you shouldn�t take it.

So why was the $20 different? In terms of value, it was the greater find. Matchbox cars sell for about a dollar a piece and you can often get them free in cereal boxes or packs of batteries. The best I could come up with was that the $20 didn�t belong to a kid and, given its newness, clearly didn�t have sentimental value. But really, I don�t know anymore about it. It could have been the last $20 in someone�s bank account. Someone could have withdrawn it to pay for medicine for a chronically ill mother.

In the end I decided that the windfall is going to charity. I think I�ll let AJ help me decide where it should go.

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