Have a Rockin’ Summer: Adding Yearbooks to the Endangered Species List

My twenty year high school reunion is in the works.

I am getting old.

Also, I am not going to the reunion. Basically, I know what’s up because I am on Facebook, and I do not want to relive twenty years ago, unless I am torturing myself with distant memories to make fun of as Drew in Memoirs of an Ordinary Girl. It’s not that high school was really all that horrible (no more than for anyone else, I’m sure), but I prefer to leave the past in the past.

Unless it involves looking through my old yearbooks.

These are my high school yearbooks from WCHS

Seeing reunion posts on Facebook reminded me that I found my yearbooks a few months back when we reorganized and remodeled our home office. Those yearbooks are especially special to me because I was part of creating it from my sophomore through my senior year. From headlines to deadlines, to awkward picture caption writing and slow Macintosh computers using Pagemaker, I did it, and edited it.

Having recently taught at the high school level, I sadly realized that yearbooks just don’t have the same importance and emotional attachment (I used to use mine as reference books) that they used to. In my day (see- I told you I’m getting old), for at least a week after yearbooks came out, they were academic distractions. Often teachers, if they were cool, just gave up and let us have time for part of a class period to look at them and trade to sign them. For some reason people who hardly spoke to each other suddenly felt the need to have each other write silly things like “K.I.T.” (keep in touch) and share their phone numbers so they could “have a blast together over the summer, just like in science class,” or wish each other to “have a totally rockin’ summer, dude!” We would reserve special blank pages for our close friends where we would have space to write super meaningful notes to each other, and even draw pictures, and possibly use ten different colors of ink without the pressure of writing around someone else’s work of art. I think technology has killed some of what made yearbooks so special. Social media chronicles our lives for us now, so we don’t have to wait all year to see the highlights.

But I won’t be sad about it; after all, my senior quote in my yearbook is, “Hakuna matata!”