The academic year ended at our local school yesterday. I watched the row of buses leave the parking lot for students’ final trip home. Teachers lined the sidewalks and waved. High school students honked their horns leaving the parking lot and the 23-24 school year behind. Taken as a whole, it was a celebration of success. Children were graduated and promoted. Teachers taught and children learned a year’s curriculum. Tests had been taken, teams had played, music and theater had been performed, and the community had smiled. Gradually, the sound of cheering, the echo of horns, and the waving arms stopped and there was the quiet of a June afternoon. Viewed from the perspective of time, it was the moment when memories begin to overtake the present.
The local Class of 24 numbered 40-plus graduates. During the month of May their photos and post-graduation plans were displayed on the school’s Facebook page. Smiling faces with pennants of colleges, universities, tech schools, and armed force insignia foretold the next stories in these young lives. With 100% assurance, I know that each graduate can name the face of every grad in their Class. They have known each other as classmates for thirteen or more years. They learned and grew up together. That was their story until graduation when the road they shared forked, and they all went their ways.
Frozen in time.
Once graduates wander down the post-school paths they choose, they move farther and farther away from the day when they and their classmates shared a common story. Slowly, faces and names become images in yearbooks, online photo collections, and frames on bookshelves. They get a glance now and again awaiting reunions and other gatherings. And, awaiting a moment when memories flicker and old images become important once again.
Picture taking was and is a ritual of school life. Every year schools take class pictures. All students, grouped by graduating class cohort, school activity, and individually, have their photos taken. Most students smile, even those who didn’t smile often in school approximate a grin for the yearbook. Photos of an entire grade miniaturize faces making it difficult to discern individuals. Individual portraits highlight the face and name.
For me, it is in the class photo of Mrs. Meyer’s home room where all 33 children are shown together in rows. Some are sitting legs crossed on the floor, some on chairs, and the tallest are standing. This is where I see the classmates I knew well. Combined with two other sixth grade home rooms, we were the Grant Wood Elementary Class of 1960. On the date of that class photo, we became locked in time, locked in the image of our smile, the way we combed our hair, and how we cocked our heads trying to look good. I look at the picture of Mrs. Meyer’s home room and 64 years later I know the name of each boy and girl, and I remember who they were in 1960 as clearly as I know anything today.
The same is true of class pictures from the McKinley Junior High Class of 1963 and the Washington High School Class of 1966. Each school we attended was larger in enrollment and scope of program, but the significance of faces and names and stories remained constant. Until June 1966. That was when our roads forked, and we truly became memories and pictures frozen in time.
So, what happened?
People and friends, they and me, suddenly disappeared from each other’s lives.
Life overwhelms our attention when we are younger adults. Work, recreation, and a love life are center stage. We focus on what is directly in front of us each day with little time or option to look backward or too far forward. Often, we work for pay checks that last only until the next, scrimp to afford vacation and recreation, and if we have children, our life requires 25 hours each day. We stay in touch with school friends if we live in proximity, work in similar jobs, and our children attend the same school. But the roads most of my school friends and I took were none of these. In our 20s and 30s and 40s we chased our individual American dreams of family and/or career into communities far and wide. Joe was a physician in Atlanta, Bev was a teacher in Ohio, Marianne was a flight attendant, Jack was an institutional exec in New York, Bill was lawyer in San Francisco, and John, we weren’t sure where John was. Yet, whenever I thought of the Class of 60 or 63 or 66, it was the pictured face and story of a younger life that attached to that picture. John was still the epitome of a younger Mickey Mantle – blond and rugged, athletic, and confident. Bev was still the girl in a knee-length dress, Bobby socks, and her hair tied with a ribbon that I thought of as my girlfriend at Grant Wood. Marianne, aka Mert, was and always will be an Annette Funicello look alike.
Facebook and the Internet update stories but not memories.
Facebook and its ilk brought us both the wonder of connection and the depravity of bad actors. I like the wonder. By “friending” old friends we now share images and stories of who we are today. My white hair, wrinkles, and jowls do not resemble the face behind the boy in dark glasses in Mrs. Meyer’s home room picture. However, as much as I do not recognize myself, I immediately recognize John, Jack and Bev and many of the old classmates that use Facebook. If we saw each other on the street or in a market today, I am confident I would know their 70+ year old faces. But I could not know the story of their lives in between, and that is okay with me.
Today I appreciate giving and receiving Facebook posts with my old friends on our birthdays. We recognize that we are still alive, we celebrate another year of living, and, in a small way, we acknowledge that we have a history. Our history is bifurcated – who we were in the 50s and 60s and who we are today. We do not have enough years or energy to catch up on the details in between and those details don’t matter much anyway.
This morning another Joe from the Class of 66 posted about his golf game. Several times each summer we each post about the courses we have played, that rare day when our score and age match, and the joy we have in just being able to play. But when his face appears I immediately replace it with his yearbook photo or images of him playing basketball or baseball – he is forever young.
Old friends’ faces do not die, they just fade away.
As I paraphrase Douglas MacArthur’s statement about old generals. In both cases, I think we got it right. As long as I live, memories of my school friends will be alive. They are indelibly etched in time. I suppose my aging frailties may fray my mental capacity. I do find it comforting that as the aged lose contact with the present, their memories of years ago remain. Thanks, old friends, for being my old friends.