A Gold Cloud With Silver Lining

On the night I received my Harvard acceptance letter, my mother suggested we celebrate by buying a necklace.

I remember every detail of that night, walking to a store that I usually visited to buy gifts for others. I can conjure up the specific mix of feelings that swept over me: disbelief and pride in my admission, relief knowing that high school was almost over, validation, and liberation. I felt profoundly lucky and full of glee. I’d never felt moved to buy jewelry to celebrate. But picking out a chain and three charms—a star, a flower, and a tiny gold cloud—felt fitting. I wore my necklace out of the store.

Just as vividly, I can recall my workout two Sundays ago. I was visiting my grandparents in Florida, so I had the luxury of running outside. My pace felt quicker than usual—I was lapping all of the retired gentlemen leisurely walking their dogs. And I’d made time to run on a hectic day. I’d been traveling all morning and had work to do in the afternoon, but I took the luxury of forty minutes to myself. All of this made me feel like I was on top of the world.

Until, suddenly, I felt my necklace fall to pieces. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw seemingly self-propelled flecks of gold and silver fly off of my chest. I heard the tinny bounce of charms on pavement. I thought of a cliché: “It’s funny how quickly things can change.”

All of the things that had made me happy in one second were problems in the next. If I hadn’t been running so fast, maybe the charms on my necklace wouldn’t have scattered so far. If I hadn’t been jogging on grass, maybe I would have seen where they fell. If I’d been less frantic to start my workout, maybe I would have taken off my necklace beforehand, as I usually do.

As it happened, I stood dumbfounded in the middle of an active street. I recovered the chain, the star, and the flower, but the gold cloud eluded me. For the first time in my life, the term “sentimental value” wasn’t an abstract concept. It was how I quantified the worth of my necklace to passersby.

After my run, I surprised myself when I reacted with disgust to the suggestion that I simply replace the lost charm. That felt dishonest and anachronistic. Would you ever fix the spelling errors in your childhood diary? The prospect of acting as if this casualty had never happened made me shudder.

How many minutes of thumbing through dirt and grass is a teeny gold cloud worth? How long should you stare at the ground, looking for a charm that can’t be found, when you’re trying to rebuild a broken memory? In the case of a little golden cloud that you once loved and have now lost, where is the silver lining?

It’s in the community of neighbors I met, who stopped to help me look for my cloud as they passed, even though my mission was impossible and meaningless to them. I learned by example how to be a good neighbor, and I saw proof that good neighbors exist. This second lesson is not as insignificant as it may seem. There is silver lining there.

It’s in the new memories I can associate with the necklace that remains. If anything, the sentimental value of my necklace doubled. It still has an origin story, but now its history has an inflection point. That can be a beautiful thing if I let it. Maybe the necklace wouldn’t have broken if the weekend had been like any other, but I wouldn’t trade the memories of visiting my grandparents for a piece of yellow metal. There, too, is silver lining.

It’s in the fashion-epiphany I had: The things we wear are meaningful for personal reasons in addition to historical ones. This is not something I could have learned by reading. The scholarship and more intellectual journalism about fashion tends to focus on tying it to histories of the economy, social justice, or shifts in culture, evidence of an effort to legitimize fashion as a serious (rather than frivolous) topic of discussion. I do this too. But it is much harder to describe in writing how a mere accessory can somehow capture the very essence of its wearer. Inanimate fashion objects—be they sweaters, shoes, or necklaces—truly do change when they are worn, and, in turn, change their wearers. I know this for certain now.

I often worry about how I’ll leave my mark on the world—whether I’ll make meaningful change, build something great, or affect someone deeply. But maybe it’s self-centered to care about leaving a visible legacy. Perhaps, instead, I make my impression by the small pieces of myself that I leave behind in the places I’ve visited.

I like imagining my cloud—with all of the disbelief, pride, relief, validation, and liberation that it carries—nestled in the grass in a community of caring neighbors in North Palm Beach. Perhaps the soil will absorb it over time, kneading my memories and emotions and body heat into the earth.

Or maybe a young girl visiting her grandparents for a special weekend will find it and put it around her neck, adding to it a new measure of sentimental value. If so, I hope she remembers to take it off before she goes running.

Lily K. Calcagnini ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, is a History & Literature concentrator living in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.