Will you sign my yearbook?

My errant junior yearbook. Thanks, Mark.

My parents moved away from the town I grew up in when I was a freshman at college. It wasn’t a small move – it involved relocating from the Midwest to the East Coast (two very different cultural places, and I’m not just talking about the accents. For two years I was asked, “Where the hell are you from?” - like I was the one with an accent. I still get that sometimes, but that’s a different post). It was a great opportunity career-wise for my dad, but it was painful leaving a place where our roots were very, very deep – still are.

There’s something special about coming home to the house you grew up in when you’re in college. I had tried explaining this to my son, and this year, as a college freshman, he understands. You’re independent at college. When you come home, you’re still independent, but there’s a feeling that you don’t have to be the one making the major decisions and being responsible for yourself all the time. It’s fun seeing your friends and how they’ve grown and changed in the months since you’ve last seen them. And your bedroom remains a kind of a time capsule of the last 18-22 years of your life – full of swimming ribbons and dried out corsages and mixed tapes taken from Casey Kasem’s Countdown and Duran Duran posters and ballerina jewelry boxes and varsity letters and pom pons.

I threw all that crap away before I moved, thinking it wouldn’t fit in our new house. So when I went “home” on breaks, my room felt more like the adjacent guest room. The furniture was the same, but the layers of personal history had vaporized.

I would talk on the phone with my friends from home – who they had seen over break and what they were doing – and I felt cheated somehow. I’d never be able to slip away from Thanksgiving dinner to meet up at Wiesler’s. I’d never run into people I grew up with by chance at the bank or post office. I would no longer see the people at church, and I’d no longer be greeted by name at the grocery store.

My first break at our relocated house, I arranged all of my books on my bookshelf, and was frustrated to find that my junior yearbook from high school was missing (I’ll attribute some of that to OCD, but the majority of it was for sentimental reasons). I combed through my brother’s closet and the boxes and the basement and never found it. I held its place on the bookshelf and it stared back at me like a missing front tooth.

I learned to live with the move and I lost track of lots of people, at least until Facebook came on the scene. And I thought I had learned to live without my yearbook, until a package arrived in the mail about a year ago.

I grew up with a guy named Mark whom I adored. Not as a crush – more of a deep admiration. He was funny and kind and had neat parents and a cute older brother and a beautiful and wonderful older sister. He exuded a goofy self-confidence that was unusual among high school students. His laugh was contagious and he always had something funny to say. He was the first person I called when I was babysitting one night and found a mouse in the kitchen. He had a beautiful tenor voice and a band that played at dances and small venues during and after high school. To this day, Bon Jovi is one of my favorite bands, and anything Mark sang by them is burned on my brain, particularly “Runaway.” We were in plays and musicals and swing choir together, and oddly, we had the same hairstyle the last two years of high school (blonde, long and curly – hey, it was the 80’s.)

Anyway, Mark and his family were among the friendship casualties of my family’s move and we lost track of each other. Until Facebook came along and he sent me a message asking me for my mailing address.

I didn’t think anything of it until I picked up the mail one day. I opened the Priority Mail envelope and found my junior yearbook. I had given it to Mark to sign over 26 years ago and somehow forgotten about it. But now, Mark had returned it to me, and he signed it – not as a 17 year-old boy, but as a 43 year-old man.

I won’t write everything he wrote here, but the gist of it was the sentimentality that tends to hit us when we think of those years. High school wasn’t a picnic all the time, but memories of laughter remain.

What moved me to tears was Mark’s gratitude that we had been friends and that we had made a difference in each other’s lives. Since I moved, I have felt forgotten - not in a mean spirited way, but in the way that memories fade and not being present speeds up the process. But knowing that I’m still part of people’s footprint means more to me that I can ever express. When it comes down to it, we all want to matter – in both big and small ways.

Mark’s gift of returning my yearbook filled a place on my bookshelf, but also a little hole in my heart that I wasn’t aware was there. It was a wonderful, wonderful gift.

He was always like that.