LETTERS FROM HOME: ALTRUISTICALLY OBLIGATED TO FIND THE WAY TO PEARL

May 23, 1996

Dear Leslie,

The world we come eyeball to gnat with often confounds, offering beauty in the smashed rock, terror in the limpid pool. And yet some days it resonates with sanity, with sense beyond the senses.

Last week, our city celebrated its first and I'll bet first annual Random Acts of Kindness Week. My company committed to asking its employees to pay a visit to a resident of a nursing home, there to deliver a copy of the newspaper and a few other goodies but primarily just to say hello to people who might not hear the word often enough.

Admirable idea, I thought, although lacking the unplanned, indiscriminate and spontaneous spirit of a kindness that truly occurs randomly.

Then an e-mail arrived prodding those of us who hadn't yet signed up to get into the kindness mood, please.

I don't like being told how and when to be kind, I told DC. What is accomplished when people are good not altruistically but because they feel obligated? I'm not doing it, I huffed. It's a matter of principle.

"And some lonely old person in a nursing home will be the loser," she said, sounding a bit disappointed in me.

Guilt-tripped by my boss and wife, I arrived at the nursing home a few days later to see a woman whose name I'd drawn from a box.

On the way to her room the supervisor told me two things about her: Her husband had died recently, and she already had a visitor, a relative.

I sucked in some air, realizing this act of kindness involved a real person's still-raw tragedy. I'll just give her these little gifts and be on my way, I said.

Pearl's room looked like she was still moving in. And her other guest looked familiar.

I tried to explain my presence, but Pearl wasn't wearing her hearing aid. She thought I was selling newspaper subscriptions.

Her smartly dressed friend made Pearl understand otherwise, and as she spoke my memory searched for her name. I asked and didn't recognize it. She asked mine, and when she heard it rushed to hug me.

She has a different last name now, but had lived at the other end of the block from my family when I was in high school. I was just a teen-ager then, she was my sister's friend's mom, a housewife.

That's about all we knew of each other. But I remember all her children well, in fact a few days earlier ran into one of her sons at the golf course.

As long-lost people do, we traded information about each other's families. She and Pearl each gladly showed me a picture of the daughter's family. She was a cute little girl then, all grown up now with cute ones of her own.

I don't know why, but seeing this woman again felt like some circle closing. She's remarried and has a completely different life now. The transformations she's undergone were there in her manner and on her face.

"I wouldn't have recognized you," she said. Because I'd become a man, I knew.

Funny how I went there to do a small kindness for a stranger and wound up with something wonderful myself, a rush of gladness that I am here to have such a serendipitous experience.

Amid all the reminiscing, I remembered -- oh my gosh -- that I was there to see Pearl. She'd put her hearing aid in by then, and said she wanted to subscribe to the newspaper anyway.

In a trembly voice, she told me she'd just lost her husband but still wants to keep up with the news.

I'm sorry about your husband, I said, and asked to hug her.

I hugged Pearl and my old neighbor and walked out doubting once again whether anything that springs from the world we know exists beyond our eyeballs ever occurs randomly.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.