Les Bonnes Choses

Happy New Year!

I don't know of any particular doomsday prophesy calling for the Apocalypse on 01/01/2011, and so you may not fully appreciate the relief you might otherwise have felt to find the sun rising as usual this morning.

A few days ago, Jude asked me an innocent-seeming question at bedtime. I can't remember the exact wording, but I thought it had something to do with the end of the day. He wanted to know about a day where the sun doesn't come up. I explained to him about the days getting shorter, and how at the North Pole where Santa lives and the South Pole where penguins live, the sun doesn't come up at all during some of the year. He followed up with a question about the sun burning out, to which I replied that the sun will eventually burn out, but not for a very very long time, after we're gone.

I had thought at the time that this second question was a sort of shift in topic, but I suddenly realized yesterday that this was what he was interested in the whole time. You see, he asked again, en route to the museum, about "the end of days", when the sun burns out. No idea where he heard about "The End of Days", but it appears he was under the impression that the last day on the calendar marked the end of days -- after which time the sun would burn out and the world would grow cold and dark. And I appreciated at that time just how well adjusted Jude seemed to be in the face of Armageddon.