It’s the time for bread and wine as the year moves steadily on, days now getting shorter, summer both in full swing and ever-so-slight decline. Many of us can’t help but look past the sweltering days ahead of (and just behind) us with keen anticipation of the autumn and winter holidays, already anticipating how thematically unified those pumpkin-orange shoes will be, or the pretty of the streets with the houses once again covered in lights.

But first, summer. The other half. The half when it’s actually too hot to go to the beach, or even outside. The half when we’ve had enough popsicles and that fan we leave constantly blowing is starting to accumulate “too much” pet hair. That half when the drugstore packs away its flags and plastic snorkel sets and puts out the back-to-school items. It’s a wistful-er half, perfect for heat-exhausted reminiscing.

I got all mine in early this year, as I once again visited my ancestral manse for a bit with my daughter, smack dab in the middle of the midwest.

Because this year, she wanted to see my high school yearbooks.

“It’s just me with odd clothes and a giant smile.” I told her. “You see that a lot.”

Yet she insisted, so the volumes were excavated. She took them enthusiastically, with my grade school yearbooks as well.

I wasn’t underplaying it: they were all filled with black and white photographs of people even I didn’t know, and then a few of me, most often wearing shirts with unflatteringly large collars, smiling in a spirit I now recognize as “pragmatic”.

Oh, there was laughter. I feel very fortunate that it couldn’t be accurately described as “uproarious”, but it was long and loud and hearty and steady.

“I was not cool.” I felt pressured to admit.

“Aw, sure, you were ok… I mean look at everybody else, you’re all just old.”

“Well, we weren’t then, we were your age.”

She seemed not to agree, as in her lap was a double spread monochromatic visual buffet of early 80’s hairstyles.

I haven’t changed all that much. There was a moment when my face sort of looked like “my face” and it’s stayed that way ever since. My collars are smaller now, but my smile is still pragmatic, if not a bit wearily so.

All my daughter’s school pictures are fantastic; the photographers encouraging the children to jump like Phillippe Halsman or spin or laugh… the only verb that we were offered as children was “Smile!”, a strange command which, when spoken, instantly negates the ability to do so in any authentic way. We tried our hardest.

As camera film was expensive, for much of high school the only images I have are these yearbook photos, one and a quarter by one inch greyscale reductions of an entire year of my life (minus the summer).

Through digital photography, kids today will capture enough frames of themselves to print massive flip books, displaying their memories in real time. They have tools to perfect these images, and a library of pictures that would have taken a thousand shoe boxes to house is carried with them in their pocket. Where my changes are chronicled from yearbook to yearbook, she will have an archive of every micro-phase of her growth.

Finally, she looked at the pages inside the front and back covers. There were handwritten messages from other students; enthusiastic, friendly, cheeky, and a few that could actually be interpreted as somewhat torrid. I did not have a memory to go with every message, though I did remember a few in startling detail, but wouldn’t admit which ones were which.

“So you WERE popular?” she threw at me.

“No, I was interesting, the exact same way you are. Weird and kind and kind of interesting. I didn’t make lifelong friends, but I didn’t really judge people, so I didn’t make lifelong enemies either.”

She accepted this answer and tried to keep reading, but the 20th century secret code called “cursive writing” befuddled her.

Life offers a great deal of change at the beginning. Seeds transform into saplings and then magnificent trees – one not at all like the other, each requiring a different name. Humans change even more than that, and it’s impossible to predict exactly “what we are going to be” from our newborn selves (whereas if you buy a packet of seeds, there’s a photo of the eventual results right there on the envelope).

We are units of constant change, and when we’re young we document it a great deal. But then we figure we have enough pictures of ourselves, and look - we can still wear that jacket from 10 years ago and don’t need a new one, and this is must be the longest we’ve ever lived in an apartment, and all that change that used to be dynamic from year-to-year can become occasional, and then altogether surprising. Even to us.

It’s good to remind ourselves that, along with the resiliency borne from our deepest roots, we each hold within us the integrity of the seed and the (inner) flexibility of the sapling. That’s the story of your high school yearbook: we were there and now we’re here, and no matter what our age, right now we’re as young as we’re ever gonna be.

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