God, or someone, save the yearbooks

Spotted outside my back window yesterday: a twentysomething boy, in a lawn chair, in the next driveway over, reading a book, an actual book, with a spine and all. Felt as if time had stopped for a moment. I wanted to take his picture, you know, just to prove I really witnessed this.

Did you forget your phone, child? Lose it? Drop and break it? Where on earth is your e-reader? Your iPad? Do you know what day it is? What decade?

Maybe actual books aren’t so dead after all. Did you know, though, that a certain type of timeless book appears to be nearing its waterloo? Sad but true. I keep hearing it. Where has all the love (and interest) gone?

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there existed these quaint relics, made of actual paper, with sturdy, often hand-drawn covers, and they were called … yearbooks. They hardly qualified as literature, of course, and they weren’t exactly known for stellar writing or dazzling design, but, oh, were they wonderful, preserving as they did, for posterity and the record, memories of the “craziest” nine months, mostly in photographs, captioned ever so artfully.

Students did not merely “smile” but “beam,” for example. Maybe even “beam with pride.”

On page after page, we remembered how our sports teams fared, what the school play was and who starred in it, who quarterbacked the football team and who captained the cheerleaders – count on those to be prom king and queen – or who of their less gymnastically inclined counterparts had the honor of selection to “strutters,” or at least the regal color guard, those twirlers of the flags and marchers to the drum major’s beat.

Upfront in the stalwart yearbook, we memorialized each and every committee, society, club, you name it. Finding your way into at least a few of these shots was critical if you wanted, at the end of your four-year stay inside your hallowed halls, to have a respectably lengthy list of activities after your name, something to indicate that not only were you here but you did something.

Or you could just catch yourself unawares in the gloriously eclectic middle pages, full of candid shots from school dances, pep rallies or random hallway roamings. Maybe you knew the yearbook editors, in which case, not only were you there but in abundance, and you looked killer, too. Or maybe you didn’t, in which case bless you if you found yourself captured in that unfortunate moment in some unfortunate posture while … who even remembers a camera present?

Then, finally, to the back of the book we went, to find page after page, row upon row, of headshots, yours, your friends’ and your teachers’, arranged a-to-z for easy reference.

Z meant The End, and thank you for reading, right? On the shelf the book goes, and till next year, folks.

Not so fast.

If your editors were astute and dutiful, they made sure to leave a blank page or two, plus the front and back inside cover, so the real fun could begin. And by that I mean …

The. Writing. Of. The. Notes. In all the corners, margins, flaps, wherever you could find a blank spot to pour out to a schoolmate all manner of true feelings.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

You know how some folks today marvel at or, more likely, malign the abundant use of modern-day Morse code, in the form of LOL, TTYL, BRB and the like? Yeah, well, such language is hardly post-millennial, you know. You can go all the way back to the legwarmered 1980s and likely before to find solid evidence of abbreviated expression, written in actual ink. My personal favorites? RMA and KIT – Remember Me Always and Keep In Touch – which ended easily half of the personal greetings inside all four yearbooks pulled out, along with a bag of loose-leaf paper at least a quarter-century old, merely for entertainment purposes on the momentous occasion of my recent 25th reunion.

As faithful readers of this blog know, I recently turned the Hapless Homeowner HQ into a Bed & Breakfast for six friends from high school, who had crossed the miles and soared the friendly skies to catch up with the Class of ’89 and needed a home base in between festivities. Initially I worried: Where would we go, and what would we do, and how could I make them glad they came and ensure boredom did not set in in little old NEPA?

Ha.

Turns out we could have stayed inside, at my kitchen table, from arrival to departure, with the exception of the hours spent in the company of classmates at the actual reunion, and had an outright blast. With nothing more than a couple of bottles of wine, a handful of yearbooks and about 500 scribbled notes, saved in a bag for all these years by someone’s mother and especially suitable for dramatic readings.

Oh, the drama. I tell you, the drama.

So who were we 25 years ago? Let the yearbooks and the notebooks reveal …

We were as grade-obsessed as we were academically ambivalent. In other words, who cared about this stupid test or our final G.P.A.? Except we did. (As I tell “kids today,” it really was “cool” to be smart. I hope it still is!) Our notes to each other regarding our academic performance or lack thereof were downright plaintive.

We were as fashion-conscious as we were fashion-challenged. We had big hair and wore white turtlenecks under thick, bold sweaters. We applied colored mascara – which I hear is making a comeback – and blue eyeshadow. Yet we deigned to judge others’ sartorial choices.

And, wow, were we LOVELORN. Probably 90 percent of the notes, in both the bag and on the actual books, referred to crushes, flings, boys we were certain to marry and boys we prayed our friends would not. OK, maybe boys I in particular prayed my friends – one in particular – would not.

Oh, to bring those problems back. To have my most pressing question once again be whether Dom would ever choose me over my freshman-year sidekick. Whether I had a shot with a certain Brian. Whether any of us actually would get asked to the prom or would have to resort to rent-a-dates.

Remember rent-a-dates? You didn’t have to be in Catholic school to have them, but all the more significant if you were.

Rent-a-dates bring back memories of Colin in “Love Actually,” who amusingly swore to his mate that it didn’t matter what they looked like or how they were regarded in the homeland; once they got to America, by virtue of British accent alone, women would be all over them.

Same goes for rent-a-dates from public school: Hot commodities from their own hallways they needed not be. Once they were imported and pressed into service for Catholic-school prom, their stature would shoot up instantly.

And how the night went down would more than likely make it into someone’s yearbook note, signifying, well, nothing really.

Until a quarter-century later, when the book would get hauled to the kitchen table and the readings would begin. We laughed until we cried, and probably some real tears. It truly was tough to differentiate between tears of joy and tears of pain, probably for what was irretrievably gone.

But either way, this was FUN, the kind you just can’t have with an iPhone, I swear. And reading “from the cloud” will never be nearly as natural or as easy, I just know it.

So …

Dear kids today, many of whom surely cannot wait to “get out of this place,” wherever that place might be:

Take your time. Savor your moments. Every last, silly, overly dramatic one of them.

And someone PLEASE fight so the yearbook might live. Sign up for the staff. Say you will write, edit, photograph, whatever it takes, to keep this grand old paper tradition alive. And when you do, be not too proud to pass the books around and get those margins and corners filled in with all kinds of goofy little notes.

Pour your hearts out. Put it all out there. Say what you feel, and someday, I promise, you really will look back and laugh.

Twenty-five years from now, invite your old crowd to your new playground, haul out the books, and have at it.

You’re welcome for the good time.

~ SJS (AMDG)

“I’ve been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it’s just whining, but every so often there’ll be something I can use later … It’s an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. ‘That’s not what you said on February 3, 1996,’ I’ll say to someone.”

— David Sedaris

As told to The New Yorker