Brak's School Daze: Yearbook

I guess it always happens at around this time. In June of 2009 it will be 20 years since I graduated from high school. Talk of reunions is floating around. Most of us are scattered far and wide. But now there's this thing called Facebook.

It's only in the last few months that they have been finding me. It's not that it never occurred to me to look for them. I'd only reluctantly joined up because of my friends Skip and Jazzie who live in England. And then because Benrik instructed us to. So I've been using it mainly to keep in touch with those who were far away in miles, not in time.

Then Joe Furno found me, followed by Melissa Workman and Hina Sherwani. Gerry Cooney, Rubin Santiago. Friends from high school that I hadn't seen or heard from in 19 years. And soon the network expanded, some people I knew through them, and then through others. And then even further back. People I knew since grade school. Felicia Cono, Sintera Graham and Diane Maheu. Each day it seemed there was a new piece of nostalgia appearing on my monitor.

I was adding other friends too as I went along. Those from all the different parts of my life. College, grad school, the language school I taught at in Belgium. The internet communities where Skip and Jazzie and Katrien and Jules and Mandy and I all crossed paths. And Lucy and Shady, the Benrik folk. Then some of the friends I've gotten to know here in Vegas and don't get to see much for various reasons. Sometimes thirty miles can be as great a distance as 3000.

Along with these names come pictures of course. It is called facebook afterall. So I see them, familiar faces from the present, recent past and long ago. Not just their faces, but mine too. The yearbook picture from my 6th grade class turned up recently. My 11 year old face obediently looks at the hand signal of the school photographer, not knowing that many years later, this picture will end up on the internet. Back then the internet was just a seedling growing from its roots as ARPANET into the first Internet Protocol wide area network and was not yet known to the public much less to school children.

Those of us who were in the same region or still near enough to easily travel and meet up began having impromtu mini reunions. I was too far away being out here in the West. But many of the remaining east coast residents ventured into Manhattan and got nostalgic together in person. And the feelings came back, not that they had ever gone away completely, just like in school, I wondered how do I fit in? Am I a part of all this? Does anyone remember me aside from the fact that I appear on the same page in the yearbook?

Wall posts exclaim "I remember you...we used to chat in the library...your kids are adorable...wow you still look exactly the same..."

I think of how I've moved around so much. I left New York for good in 1995, after the Army, and before college. I've lived in many states, even a couple of different countries now and somehow I've landed here in Las Vegas. (If you'd told me this back in high school I would not have believed you.)

Along the way, I've had many friendships that lasted different lengths of time. A couple of years here, a few months there. I kept moving on and starting over each time. But then here are these people I grew up with. We went through the formative years together. In 19 years, I've met many others whom I've spent bits of my life with. Maybe the same 2 or three years that I had with Hina, but is it the same? At that age, we were doing it all for the first time. Three years is nothing now, but then, it was a huge chunk of our lives. It was forever. And forever ago.

So I look back at that 11 year old me and say "I think I remember you." And I wonder what she would think if she saw me. Would she be proud? disappointed? or would she fall over laughing never imagining that she would ever get so old? The yearbook pages may be faded and yellow while the computer monitor in front of me is crisp, clear and bright. It makes little difference. The faces still peer from the page. Can we ever really know what they see?