Margin Notes: How can you capture the passage of time?

The kids run in circles on the fields. They chase each other: passing a soccer ball, throwing a football, lunging to tag someone. They are red-faced and sweating. It is the last day of school and, finally, the kids get to play.

At the end of the day, the kids line up to get their yearbooks. The covers are shiny, spines unbroken.

Rachael Allen

“Can I have your signature?” the kids ask. They approach friends, teachers, teammates. The signatures are slanted, good luck and you’re the best scrawled out while under the hot June sun. Even those who aren’t close trade autographs because on this day, they are all celebrities.

On this day, they are unusually aware of the passage of time. Maybe it feels like time is moving too fast, the events of school’s ending coming one after the other in a way that is hard to process. Maybe the onslaught of endings brings a sense of overwhelm. Loss. Nostalgia. Or maybe it feels like nothing is different at all, only they’re being told that they must remember this moment, to document it. Signing a yearbook is one of their first steps in becoming archivists of their own lives.

A yearbook is one of those things that can go under-appreciated for most of its time on a shelf — until that one day when you might need its reminder the most. I opened mine up recently, peering through the faces of strangers who once made up my daily life, who I once counted on seeing as frequently as my parents. I read the signatures, smiling at one from a friend I’m no longer in touch with. “You’re going to be a writer,” he had scrawled, though I’m not sure I ever said that aloud to him.

I imagine my younger self reading the message and feeling understood. I imagine her feeling overwhelmed by how much she wanted it to become true, how intimidating it felt to get there. To read a yearbook is to read while peering over the shoulder of your younger self. Look at this. And yes, look at us now.

This meaning, though, doesn’t always feel present in the creation of the book. As the yearbook adviser at my school, I’ve spent a lot of time with the kids talking about what goes into a yearbook. Much of the process is tedious. The dozens of emails that circulate about picture day. The scheduled photographs of every single club. The fact-checking of staff and faculty’s titles.

When the book is first out, I don’t want to look at it. I’ve pored over the headers, the commas, the lines that separate photos. If there is a mistake, it is too late to change it.

And yet, the mistakes, too, I know are part of the process. The yearbook is an act of learning, created by students who are figuring out what they value, and what their school values. Should the arts get as many pages as sports? What current events from this year are most important? Which theme embodies this moment of our lives? They must try, again and again, to gain perspective on something they are still experiencing.

Old yearbooks make clear that perspective can be incredibly hard when you’re still in the middle of a moment — and, when your society is still in the middle of an era. My students spent a unit poring through yearbooks in the library’s archive. Anachronisms stuck out to them like a Where’s Waldo? book. They noticed when boys dressed up as girls for the school play, given that the school used to be all boys. They studied the book from the year the school first went co-ed. They searched for the first student of color at what had historically been a predominantly white institution. They tried to get in touch with some of the people they had read about for interviews to better understand the school that was now their own.

The people pictured are strangers, but the books are still steeped in nostalgia. Those strangers are captured at a moment in which they are kids — an inevitably fleeting time that reminds the students that their own time in high school is momentary.

As the school year ends, the yearbook will be a staple for another generation of graduating students. Outside of school, though, it can be harder to hold onto these markers of time. More of our lives are online — from books to news to correspondence — making it more unlikely that we’d stumble across something from many years ago, like a newspaper clipping at the bottom of a desk drawer or a note tucked into a book.

But there’s something wonderful about stumbling across something old, whether or not it’s yours. My friend recently said she loved studying classics in college because it reminded her that for so long people have been going through the same things. The reminder can make you feel small in a way that’s powerful, almost comforting; you are a part of some bigger cycle.

In next year’s book, there will be photographs of the last day of school. More kids will run in circles, chasing each other, lunging to tag someone. They will be red-faced and sweating, thrilled, as so many were before them, that they finally get a full day to play.

Rachael Allen grew up in Canton and is now a writer and high school journalism teacher in New York.

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Posted by Rachael Allen on Jun 23 2023. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.