Making meatballs on Sunday morning is a long and painstaking process. So when the bulk of the work is done and the sauce is simmering and the eight-hour clock starts ticking, I like to reward myself with a meatballl-tasting. Just one -- two if I can't control myself.

And so it was this morning: I dipped my cooking tongs into the big pot and brought out one sauce-covered sphere of happiness. I swung daintily to the table behind me, wanting to place onto the cutting board to cool. I moved quickly to avoid dripping sauce into the floor, but somehow I release the tongs' grip too soon: my hapless meatball fell rolling across the cutting board, down to the chair and off. It bounced off the face of the washing machine and landed on the floor.

And I had thought my work was done for the morning; I was now faced with a philosophical question that has never been asked, much less answered: can a meatball die?

I considered the geography of my kitchen floor -- this meatball had landed in the worst possible neighborhood. On this spot suds overflow Brady-Bunch-like from the washer, fuzz-balls fall mysteriously from stinky laundry, and dishwater splashes regularly from the nearby sink.

I tried to recall what Augustine of Hippo said about the sanctity of the kitchen, only to remember that anything Augustine wrote about the soul of the meatball would certainly have been revised by Aquinas (let's face it, that guy knew how to eat).

Imagine how helpless I felt. ("If a meatball falls in an empty kitchen, and there's no one there to wipe the sauce from where it bounced off the washer...")

Finally my actions were guided by that lesser-known philosopher -- Mike Yee of Purchase, who once announced "God made dirt, dirt can't hurt!" before stuffing some filthy morsel of curry-caked chicken fat into his pie-hole.

I compromised: I washed it first.