Days of Yore

Some time last week, Simon - during his routine exploration of all the objects in our house within his now seemingly massive armspan - found our old yearbooks.  Katie had all four years yearbooks from high school, like any normal child would, but I only had two - one from senior year and one from sophomore year.  Obviously, I thumbed through my senior yearbook with Simon in an attempt to get my son to badmouth pictures of kids I didn't like and to show him how dorky his dad used to be.

I'm just kidding!  I'm still a dork.

Looking through a yearbook is an odd thing.  I've never been one to dwell on high school nostalgia; if anything, I've overreacted in the opposite manner.  I am perhaps too fast to leave the past behind, to slowly drop people out of my life once I am no longer connected to them in the present.  I've kept in touch with few people from high school and - if not for Facebook - I'm sure I would have lost touch with a lot of college friends as well.  While I've always felt that reliving high school forever was a bit silly (and sad), I do wish that I wasn't so firmly pegged on the opposite side of the spectrum.

As a parent of two, though, it's odd because I almost don't recognize that serious Chinese boy looking back at me.  In a little over a decade, I had become an adult who had a career, a wife and kids, and a house.  And it made me think about the hundreds of other faces in that book of memories.  How many of them were now parents?

Acquaintances, good friends, crushes, guys I didn't care for, girls I thought were annoying - all of them had been living their lives for 11 years outside my observation (except for those suckers who had gone to college with me or allowed me to friend them on Facebook).  A lot can change in 11 years.

In the end, the yearbook did what it does best: it captured a moment in time and showed me who I was when I was graduating from four crazy years and about to embark on four more.  And it did something else that was unexpected - it filled me with just a smidge of regret.

There were so many people in my relatively small graduating class that I had never gotten to know in high school.  There were a large number of people that I had gotten to know that have since disappeared from my life due to an overall lack of interest or effort from both sides.  It's inevitable, of course.  People grow up, they grow apart, they start new phases of their lives.

They have kids, and suddenly, everything else seems less important.  For all I know, some kid from my high school is at this moment pointing out my picture to their two-year-old and saying, "I wish I had gotten to know that Scott guy better.  He seemed nice."

Or, more likely, "Check out that dork!"