High School Yearbooks

I have (believe it or not) some other posts in progress, but this subject presented itself to me the other day and I thought if I waited to complete those other posts before getting to this, the moment would be past.


Now that I have a child in high school, yearbooks have entered my life again. The high school version, still printed on glossy paper and bound in a ponderous cover, is surprisingly little changed from its (classic?) late 20th century incarnation. I have noted elsewhere that as a general rule, people love their 18 year olds, if not more than at any other age, at least more than at any age that comes after that. It is to be a last gasp, or final climax, of the intense love that is uniquely felt for children, so it is obviously very poignant. I am sure high school yearbooks everywhere capture something of this feeling, but having gone to high school in this part of the country myself I feel like there are factors here which further amp up the poignancy, and which I still perceive to be at work in my son's school. I admit that there is a slight sense of sweetness for me in the idea of this continuity. The factors I am thinking of are:


1. This is still an area where most of the graduating class has lived here their entire lives, and many have family connections dating back generations, including my son, one of whose great-grandfathers can still be seen in a 1934 baseball team photo hanging in the school's main hallway. Even the people whose parents came from elsewhere have usually lived here almost exclusively. Established professional people who move here generally do so at the outset of starting a family so that the children can grow up here. While prosperous, this is a not an area for the most part to which people move as a career-enhancing step, so there is not much of an influx of uprooted or temporary classmates coming in from year to year. Of course my father moved to Maine when I was sixteen, escaping an ugly situation in his former locale and otherwise looking for a change of scene. He stayed there for about nine years and eventually moved back to Pennsylvania. I went for my last two years of high school and drifted back to the Mid-Atlantic myself for 7 years or so, but then I ended up in this part of the country again. I don't know how many people fall into this latter category, though I suspect it is more common in coastal Maine, that being a more romantic locale in the minds of east coast big city/suburban dwellers.


2. This is course an extremely beautiful area and many of the personal photos taken anywhere outdoors, even those on the school grounds at certain times of year, make the adolescences depicted therein look almost idyllic.


3. While it cannot be regarded as entirely sad, and indeed I hope at least some of my children will be included among this number, most of the eighteen year olds are going to now leave this beautiful and in many ways anachronistic place where they have lived all their lives and go away, the more dynamic and capable ones perhaps especially likely never to return. That is eternally part of life, and it is healthy, but it is also poignant.


My youngest son has his last baseball game of the season with his regular team tomorrow. Fortunately because he practices so much he is actually pretty good so he made the all star team for his age group so he will get a couple of extra weeks and a tournament in. But still, we wait all year for this season and it's over so quickly, barely more than a month. It wouldn't be that big of a deal except that this nine year old boy really loves playing baseball right now, as in, I don't know if he'll ever be as passionate about anything in his life as he is about baseball this year--after games we'll come home and he'll run a further hour of practice with me hitting him ground balls and so on. I hate to see that pass by and possibly wither and die because I think it's a positive drive, and I have long lost any comparative passion in my own heart.


I may correct this later, but given the time I wanted to get this to post tonight.