I�m often fascinated by the way AJ reacts to serious subjects. Yesterday evening AJ and I spent some time looking through pictures of New Orleans that my parents had taken when they were doing clean-up work there in February. Photo after photo showed destroyed houses, flipped cars, downed trees, and piles and piles of rubble. AJ, though, was laughing. Where I saw horror, he saw comical chaos � things were not where they were supposed to be. A car was under a house. Two cars were flipped on top of each other, looking like they were copulating (although I�m assuming he didn�t think of that particular metaphor). A tree pierced the side of a home and came through the other side. In the world of picture books, such disorder is, indeed, comical. In the real world it�s much less funny. But the photos of the Mardi Gras floats, the comic relief, were a bit scary for him. They were supposed to be the comic relief, but the huge looming faces of dragons and kings were ominous.

And then last night AJ and I had a long talk about death.

It started in his bathtub. He was playing with his boat with the androgynous sea captain (whom I�ve nicknamed Pat, in a joke that no one thinks is funny but me) and his �sea pirates� as he calls them (I suppose to distinguish them from all those land-dwelling pirates). He had been playing happily while I folded laundry in the next room. All of a sudden he called out, �Hey Mommy, you know how you make someone dead?� I paused. �Um, how?� �You shout really loud�IN THEIR BUTT!� And he laughed hysterically.

In case you haven�t hung around five-year-old boys lately, butts are everywhere and they are always very funny. But after he recovered himself, I could tell he was thinking about something.

After we went through our usual domestic routine of drying him off and him trying to escape and sprint around the house naked while I call him a crazy nudist (which also makes him laugh hysterically) I was tucking him in when he asked, �Mommy, what happens to you when you die?�

And so it was that I found myself giving AJ a treatise on world religions as he sat in his Home Run pajamas, his arms encircling his knees and leaning on his favorite pillow, the one with a big number nine on it.

�No one really knows,� I began. We talked about what happens to the body and we talked about the idea of a soul or spirit. We talked about theories of the afterlife or living on in the memories of the living and reincarnation. After we�d gotten through it all, AJ asked a question. �But what does your soul look like?�

�I don�t know. What do you think it looks like?�
He thought for a moment. �I think it looks like the kidneys.�
�Why do you think it looks like the kidneys?�
�I don�t know. I just do.�

His voice had a note of utter conviction in it. �Well, you never know. You may be right.� It�s really no odder than my utter conviction that there is a soul at all. And the idea of being able to hold one�s soul, a soft rounded object, in the palm of one�s hand is oddly comforting, although it would no doubt make things easier for Faustian deals with the devil than the energy force or invisible vapor conception that I suppose I would have come up with if AJ had insisted on hearing my ideas as he sometimes does. Really, what�s so inconceivable about a kidney?

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