subject: High School Yearbooks And Other Mementos [print this page] When I get to hang out with my old friends from childhood, we always pull out our high school yearbooks to take us back in time to simpler times. We each have a particular photo that just mesmerizes us. These special photos vary in style but each one reminds us of who we were all those many years ago.
There's a picture of me in the Clubs section of my high school yearbook that I will never live down. It's nothing embarrassing, just a funny face close up of me expressing all the contagious excitement of being a teenager. I look at it and I remember what drove me to do what I did at that age, but somehow it seems absolutely foreign today.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons I love mementos. When we attach emotion to a particular object in our lives, it can serve as a reminder of what stays the same and what changes over the years.
A friend of mine has a photo of herself and her husband that means more to her than any other photo she has ever taken, had taken or seen. It captures their relationship during a particularly good few years, and it symbolizes everything their relationship means to her. It's the commitment and the love that keeps them together immortalized by a photograph.
This is common. Most people have a memento photograph that is particularly meaningful to them. Being able to see a time in the past in such clear detail as cameras allow gives us an incredible opportunity to revisit our memories with a clarity our minds lack.
Even though it's been over a decade since we all graduated, I still am able to see my old high school friend from time to time. We've all moved out of state, but now and then we'll find a way to all converge at someone's home for a special get together. We talk about the old times and our current lives. Their friendships have taught me to laugh at my previous follies and appreciate youth with all its up and downs.
Through these friendships, I can see how I have and haven't changed after so many years. I have, perhaps, become more jaded than when I was a teenager, but I also feel wiser and calmer.
When we organize a get together, sometimes several of us have to fly in from all over the country! We get out all our old high school yearbooks and slowly page through them, gossiping and talking and sharing just like we did back then.
