Kisses and Clouds

            Well. I was going to write some super dry, overly cliché thing about how we are all Reverend Dimmesdale. But alas! Hawthorne’s warnings against conformity and the impending knowledge of Ms. Valentino’s hatred for predictable blog posts have inspired me otherwise! I’ve decided to write about something much more complex: Pearl.

            Pearl. That gorgeous, impish child, with the “waywardness of an April breeze,” representative of the beauty and piercing wisdom of Nature is a character that has baffled minds more brilliant than my own. But I think I may have solved the mystery this weekend by observing my family.

            Friday night, after a mass for my grandfather, my whole family—including Amelia, my cousin’s two-year-old daughter—stopped by my aunt’s house for dinner.

            Amelia is the most adorable baby in the world, with big chocolate eyes, porcelain-pink skin, and a boundless energy that causes her to glide gracefully from one thing to another when the first causes her boredom. Now that I think about it, she kind of reminds me of Pearl.

            For the last two years, it has been my personal goal—my search for the Grail—to make Amelia love me. Sometimes my antics have made her laugh; sometimes they’ve annoyed her to the point of tears.

But this Friday, something changed.

I don’t know if it was the fact that I played this game for an hour with her where she threw her teddy bear down the stairs and I caught it, or if it was the fact that I sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” twenty times upon her asking, but she gave me a kiss on the cheek! Of her own free will! Twice!

 I felt that my compassion for the little one who had no other playmate was finally being recognized! When I had to go, and she saw me off with a deeply disheartened “Bye-bye Kach-ohh,” (my Polish name is actually pronounced KAH-shah), I realized that all of her reactions to me—from the loving ones to the angry ones—had some truth to them.

When I don’t feel like being kind to others but am anyways, I deserve to be treated with love and happiness. When I’m sleep-deprived, stressed, or jealous, I can be a real jerk and deserve to be treated accordingly. I realize that the actions of Pearl, Amelia, and nature—though they seem erratic and inconsistent—make perfect sense because they are reactions to the inconsistency in our behavior and attitudes.

You have sunny days, and sunny feelings. Cloudy days, and cloudy feelings. The sun never shines on Hester and Dimmesdale because they are sinners and jerks, and Pearl laughs at them for it. But on the scaffold before Dimmesdale’s untimely demise, when he and Hester decide to face their sins and not run away to Europe like cowards, the sun beams joyfully upon them and Pearl even gives Dimmesdale a kiss. Well, Amelia gave me a kiss. And just as clouds eventually come after sunshine, I’m sure Amelia will eventually find a reason to be angry with me.