188: Kid Logic (2001)

Ira Glass

Rebecca remembers exactly when she learned the astonishing truth. She was in second grade and ran to her best friend Rachel at school one day.

One interesting question in all this. Why did both girls come to what seems like the least likely conclusion from the evidence in front of them, of a parent swapping money for a tooth under a pillow? Well, Alison Gopnik studies how children think, and she says, of course it's logical for a seven-year-old to conclude that her own father might be the tooth fairy.

Ira Glass

There's a certain kind of story that kids tell, like the Ronnie Loeberfeld story, where they look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically, how one thing connects to the next, and then come to conclusions that are completely incorrect. Therapist Eileen Goldman in Texas tells this story about a little girl on an airplane.

Eileen Goldman

And she was about four years old, and her very first flight. And as the plane was airborne, she turned to the woman next to her and said, when do we get smaller? That had been her experience at airports watching airplanes take off-- they do get smaller.

Ira Glass

These stories are like jokes, and they're also like poems, I think because there's this "a-ha" quality to them. Some connection is made between things-- a surprising connection, a wrong connection, actually. And part of what makes these so satisfying as stories is that the logic in them is perfectly reasonable and, at the same time, completely and utterly wrong.

We at This American Life love these stories, and so today we bring you a full hour of them. From WBEC Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Today on our show, Kid Logic, our show in four acts. Act One, Baby Scientists with Faulty Data. Act Two, The Game Ain't Over Till the Fatso Man Sings. In that act we hear one boy's explanation of how love works.

Act Three, Werewolves in Their Youth. That story on the gap between adult and kid logic from Michael Chabon. Act Four, One Brain Shrinks, One Brain Grows. The story of a dad who's sick, his four-year-old boy, and the perhaps not very helpful lessons of The Lion King. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Baby Scientists with Faulty Data.

30 years ago, psychologists and scientists believed that babies could not think at all, that they were irrational and illogical, self-centered little balls of need and want. What science has learned in the last 30 years is that this is not true, that children are observing the world and thinking about it and coming to logical conclusions from the day they're born.

And Alison Gopnik and two of her colleagues decided to summarize a lot of this research in a book. They called it The Scientist in the Crib, meaning that babies are like little scientists. They argue that when a small baby sits in a highchair and drops a spoon onto the floor over and over and over for mom or dad to pick up, what the baby is doing essentially is running a little baby-sized experiment.

Ira Glass

While kids think with the same logic that adults use and apply that logic just as rigorously, there are certain things that they simply do not know and take a while to figure out. Up to six or seven years old, for instance, it's not exactly clear to anyone what is imaginary and what is not, or if wishing for something can make it come true.

Ira Glass

Then the researcher would walk out of the room, leaving the box behind with the child, and then something funny would happen. The kids who were told to imagine a puppy in the box would go over and peek inside the box, just to check. And the kids who were told that there was a monster in the box, they would edge away from the box.

Ira Glass

When they're still small and inexperienced about what happens in the real world, children have to make logical inferences all the time based on the data that they do have. Here is how children responded when our producer Jonathan Goldstein asked them about the tooth fairy.

Ira Glass

These stories where kids take a perfectly logical premise and go through a series of perfectly logical deductions that lead to perfectly incorrect conclusions. Turns out that science does not have a name for these stories, which is surprising, given how common they are and how they are recognized around the world for their sheer entertainment value. Here, we've collected a few more.

Woman

We lived in a duplex. The duplexes directly to the left and the right of use were aunts and uncles, across the street from us, all aunts and uncles, so there was no such thing as walking out and seeing a stranger. I just thought we all looked alike, we all had common ancestries.

Well, when I became mobile, when I got my first tricycle, I could go a little bit further, so I ventured down the street. And I looked, and I saw this couple sitting there, these two people, but there were people that I had never seen before. I'd never seen anything like that, because they were white people. And because I had never seen white people, I assumed that they were ghosts.

So I waved, like, I wonder if I wave what kind of people are they? What do they do? Do they talk?

So I waved, and I remember hearing the man going [HACKING COUGH] and I thought, wow, that must be the way they talk. It was like a scientific discovery-- like, I discovered the first ghost people and they talked to me. I communicated. I waved, they waved. I said hello, and they said hello in their language. [COUGHING]

Jack Hitt

Well, it all began at Christmas two years ago when my daughter was four years old. And it was the first time that she had ever asked about what did this holiday mean. And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that, and we went out and bought a kid's Bible and had these readings at night. She loved them, wanted to know everything about Jesus.

So we read a lot about his birth and about his teaching. And she would ask constantly what that phrase was, and I would explain to her that it was "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant.

And then one day we were driving past a big church, and out front was an enormous crucifix. She said, who is that? And I guess I'd never really told that part of the story. [LAUGHS] So I had to sort of, "yeah, well, that's Jesus, and I forgot to tell you the ending. Yeah, well, he ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities at the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome."

It was about a month later after that Christmas, we had gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. And it was mid-January, and her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools, so Martin Luther King Day was off. So I knocked off work that day, and I decided we'd play and I'd take her out to lunch.

And we were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down was the art section of the local newspaper, and there, big-as-life, was a huge drawing by a 10-year-old kid in the local schools of Martin Luther King. And she said, "who's that?" And I said, "Well, as it happens, that's Martin Luther King, and he's why you're not in school today. So we're celebrating his birthday. This is the day we celebrate his life."

And she said, "so who is he?" I said, "well, he was a preacher." And she looks up at me and goes, "for Jesus?" And I said, "yeah, actually he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for, which is that he had a message."

And you're trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything, so you're just very careful about how you phrase everything. So I said, well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message. And she said, "what was his message?" I said, "well, he said that you should treat everybody the same, no matter what they look like."

She thought about that for a minute, and she said, "well, that's what Jesus said." I said, "yeah, I guess it is. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, that is sort of like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And she thought for a minute and looked up at me and said, "did they kill him, too?"

Ira Glass

Act Two, The Game Ain't Over Till The Fatso Man Sings.

When little kids talk about a crush or love, are they talking about more or less the same thing that adults mean by those words? Well, Howie Chackowicz remembers how he thought about love in grade school. He wanted girls to like him, but they never seemed to. Here he is.

Howie Chackowicz

Notice who she doesn't mention. Even though it was so far in the past, that crush is still such an awkward thing to talk about. When I finally did tell her about how I felt about her when we were kids, I sort of mumbled my way through it, backpedaling all over the place. I even forgot to actually point the mic at her.

Howie Chackowicz

This is not how she felt about it at the time, because I felt the harder I tackled her, the more popular I'd be. I took her down like it was prison football. The game came to an immediate end, everyone circling Karen's writhing body, the football near her lay totally still. She was holding her leg, looking up at me, saying, "you tub of lard, you broke my leg!"

Karen doesn't remember any of this. She doesn't remember how she then jumped up, got four or five of her girlfriends in the huddle, and miraculously choreographed an impromptu kicking chorus line of "Fatso Men" to the tune of the Village People's "Macho Men." Fatso, fatso men, I would not like to be a fatso man. Fatso, fatso men, I would not like to be a fatso. At that point, they all through their hands up in the air in unison.

I remember it so perfectly, but then, after all, it was my crush. She had no recollection of the time the school photographer called her Daisy Duke and then turned around and called me Boss Hogg. Or the fitness day that I beat her in a "Chariots of Fire" style race. She didn't even remember the biggest story of them all-- our sixth grade graduation dance.

It turns out that Karen remembered exactly one story about me.

Howie Chackowicz

More than anything, I wanted Karen to notice me, but not in that way. I think problem with my theories was that I expected her to fall for me the same way I fell for her. That she would see me from afar, reading to our classmates, sleeping like a little prince. I thought that's what it took for someone to fall in love.

I wanted her to think that this was the real me. I wanted to think it was the real me. And the truth of it was that the real, real me was getting screamed at and having his desk spilled out on the ground each day.

There's a way you can love a girl in grade six that you'll never have again. There's something about kids, or at least the way I was as a kid, that is purely romantic in the truest love salutatorian sense of the word. Only a year or two later, my theories in the ways of love had changed drastically. By seventh grade, I had some spin the bottle sessions under my belt and I concluded that instead of dreaming about a true love I couldn't have, I should get a little bit more pragmatic about the whole thing.

One night, after deciding I wanted to have a real girlfriend, I called up identical twin sisters that I liked-- Darlene and Elizabeth. Darlene answered. I told her that I liked her and asked her if she'd like to officially go out with me. She kindly told me that she only liked me as a friend, but she was flattered.

"No problem," I said. "Is Elizabeth home?" She passed me over to her twin, who I made the same offer to, and Elizabeth said, sure. And that was it.

They're identical twins. What's the difference, I figured. We went out for two more months. It was great.

Ira Glass

Howie Chackowicz is the creator, writer, and artist behind Howie Action Comics. Coming up, kids talking kid talk, adults not understanding, but you will, as our special Kids Say the Darndest Things edition of our program continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some topic, bringing you a variety of different kinds of stories on that topic.

Today's program, Kid Logic. We wanted an hour filled with stories in which kids employ kid thinking, especially the kid thinking that is perfectly logical but completely wrongheaded. And we have arrived at Act Three of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Werewolves in Their Youth.

We have this excerpt in this act from a short story by Michael Chabon.

Michael Chabon

"I had known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man, and Titanium Man, and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even for a week as the Mackinaw Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.

I wasn't there when it happened. I was down in the ravine at the edge of the schoolyard, founding a capital for an empire of ants. I had just begun to describe to myself and to the ants the complicated rights sacred to the God whose worship I was imposing on them when I heard the first screams from the playground.

The girls screamed at Timothy the same way every time he came after them-- in unison, and with a trill that sounded almost like delight, as if they were watching the family cat trot past with something bloody in its jaws. I scrambled up the side of the ravine and emerged as Timothy, shoulders hunched, arms outstretched, growled realistically and declared that he was hungry for the throats of puny humans. Timothy said this, or something like it, every time he turned into a werewolf, and I would not have been too concerned if, in the course of his last transformation, he hadn't actually gone and bitten Virginia Pease on the neck.

It was common knowledge around school that Virginia's parents had since written a letter to the principal that the next time Timothy Stokes hurt somebody, he was going to be expelled. Timothy was, in our teacher Mrs. Gladfelter's words, one strike away from an out. And there was a widespread, if unarticulated, hope among his classmates, their parents, and all of the teachers at Copland Fork Elementary that one day soon he would provide the authorities with the excuse they needed to pack him off to special school.

I stood there a while above my little city, watching Timothy pursue a snarling, lupine course along the hopscotch crosses. I knew that someone ought to do something to calm him down. But I was the only one in our school who could have any reason to want to save Timothy Stokes from expulsion, and I hated him with all my heart.

"I've been cursed for 300 years," he declaimed. He was wearing his standard uniform of white dungarees and a plain white undershirt, even though it was a chilly afternoon in October, and all the rest of us had long since been bundled up for autumn in corduroy and down. "I've been cursed to stalk the night through all eternity," he went on.

"I've been searching for prey as lovely as you!" He lunged toward the nearest wall of the cage of girls around him. The girls peeled away from him as though sprayed with a hose, bumped shoulders, clung, shrieking, to each other's sleeves.

Some of them were singing the song we sang about Timothy Stokes. "Timothy Stokes, Timothy Stokes, you're going to the home for crazy folks." And the one singing the loudest was Virginia Pease herself, in her furry black coat and her bright red tights.

Virginia had blonde hair, and she was the only girl in the fifth grade with pierced ears and painted fingernails, and Timothy Stokes was in love with her. I knew this because the Stokes's lived next door to us, and I was privy to all kinds of secrets about Timothy that I had absolutely no desire to know. I forbade myself with an almost religious severity to show Timothy any kindness or regard. I would never let him sit beside me, at lunch or in class, and if he tried to talk to me on the playground, I ignored him. It was bad enough that I had to live next door to him.

It was toward Virginia that Timothy now advanced a rattling growl in his throat. She drew back behind her girlfriends, and their screaming now grew less melodious, less purely formal. Timothy crouched down on all fours. He rolled his wild white eyes and took a last look around him.

That was when he saw me, halfway across the yellow distance of the soccer field. He was looking at me, I thought, as though he hoped I might have something I wanted to tell him. Instantly I dropped flat on my belly, my heart pounding the way it did when I was spotted trying to spy on a baseball game or a birthday party. I slid down into the ravine backward.

At first I could hear the girls shouting for Mrs. Gladfelter. And then I heard Mrs. Gladfelter herself, sounding very angry. And the bell sounded the end of recess and everything got very quiet, but I just stayed there in the ravine. I told myself that I didn't feel sorry at all for stupid old Timothy Stokes. But then I would remember the confused look in his eyes as I had abandoned him to his fate, to all the unimaginable things that would be done to him in the fabulous corridors of the special school.

I kept recalling something that I had heard Timothy's mother say to mine just a couple of days earlier. "You know," Althea Stokes had told my mother in that big, sad donkey voice of hers, "your little Paul is Timothy's only friend." I decided to spend the afternoon in the ravine. The sun started down behind the embankment, and the moon, rising early, emerged from the rooftops of the houses somebody was putting up in front of the school. The moon, I noticed, was not quite full.

I didn't hear the scrape of footsteps until they were just above my head. "Paul," said Mrs. Gladfelter, leaning over the lip of the ravine, hands against her thighs. "Paul Kovel, what on Earth are you doing out here?" "Nothing," I said, "I didn't hear the bell."

"Paul," she said, "now, listen to me. Paul, I need your help." "With what?"

I didn't think she looked angry, but her face was upside down and it was hard to tell. "With Timothy, Paul. I guess he's just very wound up right now. He's pretending he's a werewolf today. And even though that's fine and we all know how Timothy is sometimes, we have serious things to discuss with him, and we'd like him to stop pretending for just a little while."

"What if he isn't pretending?" I said. "What if he really is a werewolf?" "Maybe he is, Paul, but if you would just come inside and talk to him for a little bit, I think we might be able to persuade him to change back into Timothy. You're his friend, Paul. I asked him if he'd like to talk to you, and he said yes."

"I'm not his friend, Mrs. Gladfelter. I swear to god. I can't do anything."

"Paul, Timothy is in trouble. He needs your help, and I need your help, too. Now, if you come right this minute and get up out of that dirt, then I'll forget that you didn't come in from recess. If you don't come back inside, I'll have to speak to your mother."

She held out her hand. "Now, come on, Paul, please." And so I took her hand and let her pull me out of the ravine and across the deserted playground, aware that in doing so I was merely proving the unspoken corollary that my mother had left hanging the other morning in the air between her and Mrs. Stokes.

There was a song about me, too, I'm afraid, a popular little number that went "what's that smell-o, Paul Kovel-o, he's a big, fat, hippo Jell-O. He's a snoop. He smells like poop. He smells like tomato beef alphabet soup."

Timothy Stokes, I knew-- as I followed Mrs. Gladfelter down the long, silent hallway to the office, hating him more and more with each step-- was MY only friend. Timothy was sitting in a corner of the office, trapped in an orange vinyl armchair. There was a Roman numeral three scratched into his left cheek, and his brilliant white shirt and trousers were patterned with a camouflage of grass and dirt and asphalt.

"Well now, Timothy." Mrs. Gladfelter took me by the shoulders and maneuvered me around her. "Look who I found." "Hey, Timothy," I said. Timothy didn't look up.

Mrs. Gladfelter gave me a gentle push toward him in the small of my back. "Why don't you sit down, Paul." "No." I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy-- not because I was afraid of him, but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs.

"That's enough now, Paul," said Mr. Buterbaugh, the principal, his friendly smile looking more false than usual. "Sit down." "It's all right," said Mrs. Gladfelter. "You see what you can do about helping Timothy turn back into Timothy. We're just going to give you a little privacy."

She followed Mr. Buterbaugh into his office and then poked her head back around the door. "I'm going to leave this door open in case you need us, all right?" There were three chairs next to Timothy's. I took the farthest and showed him my back, so that anyone passing by the windows of the office would not be able to conclude that he and I were engaged in any sort of conversation at all.

"Are you expelled?" I said. There was no reply. "Are you, Timothy?" Again he said nothing, and I couldn't stop myself from turning around to look at him. "Timothy, are you expelled?"

"I'm not Timothy, professor," said Timothy, gravely, but not without a certain air of satisfaction. "I'm afraid your precious antidote didn't work." "Come on, Timothy," I said. "cut it out. The moon's not even full today."

Now he turned toward me, "where were you," he said, "I was looking for you." "I was in the ditch." "With the ants?" I nodded. "I heard you talking to them before.

So, so are you Ant-Man?" "No, dummy." "Why not?" "Because I'm not anybody. You're not anybody either."

We fell silent for a while and just sat there, not looking at each other, kicking at the legs of our chairs. I could hear Mrs. Gladfelter and Mr. Buterbaugh talking softly in his office. Mr. Buterbaugh called her Elizabeth.

The telephone rang. A light flashed twice on the secretary's phone, then held steady. "Thanks for calling back, Dr. Schachter," I heard Mr. Buterbaugh say. "Yes, I'm afraid so."

I went to see Dr. Schachter a couple of times," I said. "He had Micronauts and the Fembots." "He has Stretch Armstrong, too," said Timothy. "I know." "Why did you go see him," Timothy said. "Did your mother make you?" "Yeah," I said.

"How come?" "I don't know. She said I was having problems with my anger. I don't know. I guess I was mad about my dad and things."

"He had to go to jail," Timothy said, "your dad." "Just for one night." "How come?" "He had too much to drink," I said. "Did you visit him in jail?" Timothy said.

"No, stupid. God! You belong in special school, Timothy. I hope they make you eat special food and wear a special helmet or something."

I heard the distant slam of the school's front door, and then a pair of hard shoes knocking along the hall. "Here comes your mother," I said. "What kind of special helmet?" said Timothy. "Ant-Man wears a helmet."

Mrs. Stokes entered the office. She was a tall, thin woman, much older than my mother, with long, gray hair and red, veiny hands. Every morning she made Timothy pancakes for his breakfast, which sounded OK until you found out that she put things in them like carrots and leftover pieces of corn.

"Oh, hello, Paul," she said in her Eeyore voice. "Mrs. Stokes," said Mrs. Gladfelter, coming out of the principal's office. "It's been kind of a long afternoon for Timothy, I'm afraid."

"How is Virginia?" said Mrs. Stokes. She still hadn't looked at Timothy. "Oh, she'll be fine, Mr. Buterbaugh said-- just a little shaken up. We sent her home early. Of course," he added, "her parents are going to want to speak to you." "Of course," said Mrs. Stokes. "I'm ready to do whatever you think would be best for Timothy."

"I'm not Timothy," said Timothy. "Oh, please, Timmy, stop this nonsense for once." "I'm cursed."

He leaned over and brought his face very close to mine. "Tell them about the curse, professor." I looked at Timothy, and for the first time I saw that a thin, dark down of wolfish hair had grown upon his cheek.

Then I looked at Mr. Buterbaugh and found that he was watching me with an air of earnest expectancy, as though he honestly thought there might be an eternal black magical curse on Timothy and was more than willing to listen to anything I might have to say on the subject. I shrugged. "Are you going to make him go to special school?" I said.

"All right, Paul, thank you," said Mrs. Gladfelter, "you may go back to class now." "See you later, Timothy," I said. He didn't answer me. He had started to growl again.

As I followed the secretary out of the office, I looked back and saw Mr. Buterbaugh and Mrs. Gladfelter and poor old Mrs. Stokes standing in a hopeless circle around Timothy. I thought for a second, and then I turned back toward them and raised an imaginary rifle to my shoulder.

"This is a dart gun," I announced. Everyone looked at me, but I was talking to Timothy now. I was almost, but not quite, embarrassed. "It's filled with darts of my special antidote, and I made it stronger than it used to be and it's going to work this time. And also, there's a tranquilizer mixed in."

Timothy looked up and bared his teeth at me, and I took aim right between his eyes. I jerked my hands twice and went fup, fup! Timothy's head snapped back and his eyelids fluttered.

He shook himself all over. He swallowed once. Then he held his hands out before him, as if wondering at their hairless pallor. "It seems to have worked," he said, his voice cool and reasonable and fine.

Anyone could see he was still playing his endless game, but all the grown ups, Mr. Buterbaugh in particular, looked very pleased with both of us. "Thank you very much, Paul," he said. "I'm not Paul," I said. Everybody laughed but Timothy Stokes."

Ira Glass

An excerpt from Michael Chabon's short story "Werewolves in Their Youth," from the collection of short stories of the same name. Michael Chabon's latest novel is "Telegraph Avenue."

Ira Glass

Act Four, One Brain Shrinks, One Brain Grows.

Back in 1999, Julie Hill's husband was diagnosed with a rare brain disease. And two years later, when her son Nick was just six years old, he began trying to make sense of what was happening to his dad. Julie gave us this dispatch back then on how her son was thinking about the whole thing at the time.

Julie Hill

My son is mad at God and hates babies, and I blame The Lion King. I found out about Nick's feelings for babies about a year ago. We'd go to the park and he'd see a baby in a carriage and he'd say, "ew, a baby."

His school has mixed age classes, so there are kids aged three, four, five and six. This fall, our friend's three-year-old little boy named Chance joined Nick's class. We loved Chance and his family. We spend holidays with them.

But having Chance in the same class annoyed Nick. Nick taunted him, teasing Chance to tears, telling him, "Go back home, you're too little for school." Nick usually isn't mean like that. We couldn't figure it out.

Then one night at bedtime, Nick asked me, "mom, is Chance a baby?" I explained that Chance is much younger, but technically he wasn't a baby. Nick was quiet a while, and then he asked me if babies replace dying people.

Finally, I got it. You see, in The Lion King, the hero's father dies, and the big lesson of the film is that it's one big cycle. Some might die, but others are born. Some get to eat, and others are eaten. It's all part of the great, great circle of life.

So if you're a kid, you think if you could stop babies from being born, you'd stop people from dying-- you'd stop the circle. Nick thought if there were no babies, then maybe his dad wouldn't die. So to Nick, Chance was a threat to his dad's very existence.

If you ask my husband's college friends about him, they'll tell you Doug was a comedian. Not that he really ever made money at it. Doug was an advertising copywriter, actually, but dabbled in improv and stand-up and recorded humor. Back in the '80s when answering machines were new, we sold tapes of wacky outgoing messages.

Julie Hill

OK, so that's not that funny. Still, I miss him so much. He was my best friend, and I'd take that stupid silliness any day. This is a recent voicemail from Doug.

Julie Hill

His brain's shrinking. My husband's brain is shrinking. The results of Doug's PET scan showed that he had frontal lobe dementia, a rare degenerative and ultimately fatal disease that slowly atrophies the brain. Its progression is similar to that of a baby's development, only backward.

The doctor said Doug, my 38-year-old husband who ran marathons and insisted on organic vegetables, had two to 10 years to live. During this time, he'd slowly, slowly lose his ability to work, drive, reason, feel emotions, count, go to the bathroom, walk, talk, swallow, and breathe.

Since then, Nick has tried to make logical sense of this mostly illogical disease, and he does this by looking for patterns to help sort it all out. These come up all the time. For instance, before he got sick, Doug drove most of the time. But as he got sicker, he could only sit in the passenger seat.

About six months after we took the car keys away from Doug, my friend Tim came in from San Francisco. Tim hopped into the passenger seat. Nick sat in the back in his booster. He stared at Tim sitting just in front of him and then asked, "Tim, do you have a brain disease?"

I'm not sure when it stopped making sense for Doug to live at home. Maybe it was the day he took a cab downtown and was missing until late that night. Maybe it was the day he went outside with nothing on but shaving cream. Or maybe it was the day he let a homeless person into our house. But at some point it was just too much-- especially too much for Nick to see.

Doug moved into long-term care in late March. After Doug moved, though, Nick's stress changed. Two weeks later, Nick came out of his bedroom crying. He missed his dad. He just wanted him to get better and to come home.

I had what I thought was a great idea-- to call Doug up. I wanted to prove his dad was alive, that contact was possible. We went through the rigmarole to get Doug on the phone.

"I love you, daddy," Nick said. "I love you," Doug repeated. "I miss you, daddy." "I miss you," Doug said.

Nick started to tell Doug about his day, how he played outside and how he skinned his knee. Then I heard the recording of the operator. "If you'd like to place a call, please hang up." Doug had hung up on Nick.

The way Nick makes sense of all this can catch me off-guard. His conclusions are perfectly logical. And sometimes the only way to address his fears is to use the same logic he does, with the same assumptions.

For example, last Mother's Day weekend, Nick and I had a session with Cory, his therapist. Mostly in these sessions I talk, and Cory helps me figure out appropriate responses to some of Nick's really big questions. But this time, Nick interrupted. He wanted to know what would happen to him if I died.

We gave the answer that clinically was supposed to satisfy him-- that I'm healthy, that I eat right, that I exercise, not to worry. And for a preschooler, that was supposed to do. But he called us on the carpet. "Daddy did all those things, too." Nick wasn't supposed to make that leap. The books say so.

And then he said, "Mommy, if you died, I'd be in the house all by myself. Who'd make dinner for me? How would I get to school?"

We explained that my parents would take care of him, and then he jumped to yet another level. "But it takes a long time to get to Chicago from Ohio where Grandma and Grandpa live. Who would take care of me until they got here?"

Nick is a planner. Having a plan seems to help him. So in a moment of inspiration, Cory took out a picture of Nick from my wallet. On it she wrote specific instructions that, in an emergency, call his babysitter Amber to take care of Nick while his grandparents drove from Ohio. Just having that little card in my wallet, that little plan, allowed him to let that fear go.

We don't know what caused Doug to get sick. It could be a toxin, it could be a long-forgotten head injury, it could be genetics. I try to pack that information away next to the Christmas ornaments, but one look at Nick and I get scared. Since no celebrity has this disease, there's very little money devoted for research, and so I'm doing this story for Nick. Not only so that people will understand this little life now, but maybe someone will take notice and start working on preventing this terrible disease before my kindergartner turns 30.

You might think it's all dark and dreary at our house. It's not. Actually, we're doing OK. This month, Nick graduated from kindergarten and he got his first bike without training wheels. And he's over his circle of life theory.

At night I stay in Nick's bed until he falls asleep. It's a bad habit his father formed right after he was diagnosed, like was trying to squeeze one last cuddle out of the day. Since I've taken over, it's become the time to talk about Doug, about everything. So for the past two weeks, I've brought a tape recorder into Nick's bed.

Julie Hill

One night, Nick asked me if I cried when his namesake, my grandfather, died. I said, "yes, I did." "Do you still cry about him?" I told him that I didn't, that right after someone dies, we tend to cry a lot, but after a while we stop crying and just feel lucky that we got to know and love that person so, so much.

Nick thought about that for a while, taking it all in. And then he said, "I know why you stopped crying. You decided that if you ever had a boy that you love so, so much that you'd name him Nick so you'd remember your grandpa, and that's why you stopped crying."

I think he's looking to me now for how to grieve, for what the next step is going to be. That it's OK to be sad and cry, and then it's OK when you finally stop crying, too.

Ira Glass

Julie Hill and her son in Chicago.

Our program was produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Paul McCarthy, Seth Lind, and Tommy Andres.

Special thanks today to Vivian Paley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Michael Cohen of [INAUDIBLE] Research and Consulting, Elaine Evans, Brett Berk, Julie Rigby, Jennifer Fields, Jack Hitt and Noah Miller. Our website where you can get our absolutely free podcast or listen to old episodes of our show, or see video from our new TV show, www.thisamericanlife.org.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - PEGGY LEE, "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"]

And I'm sad in a way, sad that I'm no longer a child.