More Than Life
Entry by: rclayr
29th May 2015
Photographs and Memories
Not long ago, I learned of the death by natural causes of a man I knew as a friend in high school. Although I’d not had any communication from him whatsoever in nearly fifty years, the news of his death awakened my own sense of mortality, as such news always does. But a more shocking reaction followed quickly: I realized that even though his name was as familiar to me as anyone’s I’d ever known—we were the same age, grew up together; he was one of that close inner circle of friends every child develops, particularly in a small town. Yet I could not “see†his face in my mind. It bothered me.
After a few weeks, the problem moved from nagging to annoying. By coincidence, I had to return to my home town on a personal errand. I seldom go there, as it’s out of the way to anywhere I usually travel, and it requires a deliberate reason to draw me back. It’s a four-hour’s drive from where I presently live, and on the way, the notion that I still couldn’t conjure the face of my deceased childhood buddy began to bother me more and more. In spite of the fact that I was in something of a hurry to complete my errand and return, I decided to stop by the town’s public library and to spend a few minutes perusing old high school yearbooks, seeking to restore a countenance to the name of my long-ago friend.
I easily located his “mug shot†in our high school annuals. The youthful and somewhat smart-aleck face that peered into the camera’s lens did more than recreate an image to match memory of a name. It also uncorked a veritable flood of other recollections I had of him, of us, during our youth. I don’t know what happened to him after we parted company so many years ago. In truth, I can’t say that I’ve since thought much about him at all. But there was something strange about looking into the grainy black-and-white image of his eighteen-year-old face, something almost surreal. When I saw it, I instantly understood that in my mind he will always be as he was—at eight, at twelve, at eighteen—for I have no correspondence with him from any later time. He is, in a sense, frozen in place, as, I assume, am I to any number of people from that time and place who possibly have not cast more than an occasional thought my way over all these years.
Another odd thing happened, though, as I sat there in that small town library and flipped through the pages of those old year-books. Time and the urgency to depart dismissed, I found myself wandering through a thicket of long forgotten faces and names. And like most thickets, it was full of painful thorns and twisted, misshapen limbs that refused to conform themselves into a comforting scene. Each photo recalled a personality, and I was overwhelmed by a wilderness of wonder and impossible questions about what became of them. I know what happened to some, naturally, as my family and what few of them I continue to keep contact with keep me informed. But apart from that comparative handful, I had no knowledge of the fates of most of these people at all. There were images of girls I had terrible crushes on, even brief romances with. There were images of bullies who terrified me and hounded me for much of my youth. Teachers who I vaguely recalled as being either warm and wonderful or cold and cruel. At one time in my life they were, for better or worse, more important to me than any other group of people in the world. I knew all of them—loved some, lusted hopelessly after others, desperately envied or felt superior to many, hated and feared more than a few. A number of them struck me as being people I always planned to get to know better but somehow never did. And now, nearly a half-century later, I realized that I had utterly forgotten almost all of them, shut them away in a vault of memory that has been rarely if ever opened.
It’s a natural thing, of course, to recollect such people and wonder what they became when they grew up, to wonder if they married, divorced, found careers, achieved wealth or went bust, realized their ambitions or found themselves broken and disillusioned. Many I remembered as individuals with firm convictions and sound ideals, the sort of folks who exuded confidence in the rightness of their visions, however wrong they may have been, and the certainty of their beliefs, however erroneous they were ultimately revealed to be. Our generation was brought up to have convictions, to develop them and nurture them, and never to surrender them for caprice. In most ways, I was just like them, and like most of them, surely, I soon found that the world was a far larger and more difficult place than I ever imagined when I was an emerging adult. Life, I eventually learned, was primarily made up of lies and limitations. Visions, beliefs, convictions, I later discovered, were subject to as much sudden and violent change as the weather.
At the same time, there was so much that seemed so right in those faces, so self-assured and courageous, so alive. Blemishes were, naturally, carefully concealed, and even the candid shots of ourselves going about the all-too-important business of being adolescents seemed to exude a kind of surety about where we were, who we were, and who we were sure we would become. So for several more hours than I truly had time to spend, I found myself flipping those glossy pages and confronting myself as I was, one of many long-forgotten faces and names, and I was constantly stung by how quickly the vitality slips away from a time and place and people, how rapidly it passes away into dusty memory.
Once, I wrote a line about the imaginary setting for one of my fictions. I said, it was a place more or less stuck in “a time when hope had promise to bolster it.†The phrase came back to me as I turned those pages and felt myself falling helplessly backward into a time and place that existed some fifty-odd years ago. Apart from the youthful and eager faces of my contemporary adolescents, I also saw how many were posing in front of places that no longer existed. The buildings, businesses, and concerns that provided a backdrop for the yearbook photographs are almost all gone, now, some not even well remembered. A few of the houses that provided scenic stages for dressy group portraits have fallen into dereliction, or have been torn down entirely. Some have been victimized by fire, but most others have merely become victims of changing times, new technologies, altering economics. Even the high school building itself is long forgotten, razed to make way for a more modern structure that, today, is showing alarming signs of age. Our school we thought, was huge, solidly old-fashioned and substantial, and it was dear to us, our “alma mater.†Now, its image is relegated to a faded color photograph on the library’s wall, just as so many places have been filed away as grainy impressions, gradually slipping into the past, gradually being woven in to the fabric of memory.
In way, it’s as if my entire history like the history of all those images in those yearbooks is fading away, as well. Memory alone can’t sustain it, because, like any fabric, it wears thin with overuse and is subject to decay. Facts are too easily patched into a quilted collage. Too often, we only remember the names, not the faces, and too often we’ve forgotten the hopes that we thought were impervious to change so long as there was a promise to bolster them.
Not long ago, I learned of the death by natural causes of a man I knew as a friend in high school. Although I’d not had any communication from him whatsoever in nearly fifty years, the news of his death awakened my own sense of mortality, as such news always does. But a more shocking reaction followed quickly: I realized that even though his name was as familiar to me as anyone’s I’d ever known—we were the same age, grew up together; he was one of that close inner circle of friends every child develops, particularly in a small town. Yet I could not “see†his face in my mind. It bothered me.
After a few weeks, the problem moved from nagging to annoying. By coincidence, I had to return to my home town on a personal errand. I seldom go there, as it’s out of the way to anywhere I usually travel, and it requires a deliberate reason to draw me back. It’s a four-hour’s drive from where I presently live, and on the way, the notion that I still couldn’t conjure the face of my deceased childhood buddy began to bother me more and more. In spite of the fact that I was in something of a hurry to complete my errand and return, I decided to stop by the town’s public library and to spend a few minutes perusing old high school yearbooks, seeking to restore a countenance to the name of my long-ago friend.
I easily located his “mug shot†in our high school annuals. The youthful and somewhat smart-aleck face that peered into the camera’s lens did more than recreate an image to match memory of a name. It also uncorked a veritable flood of other recollections I had of him, of us, during our youth. I don’t know what happened to him after we parted company so many years ago. In truth, I can’t say that I’ve since thought much about him at all. But there was something strange about looking into the grainy black-and-white image of his eighteen-year-old face, something almost surreal. When I saw it, I instantly understood that in my mind he will always be as he was—at eight, at twelve, at eighteen—for I have no correspondence with him from any later time. He is, in a sense, frozen in place, as, I assume, am I to any number of people from that time and place who possibly have not cast more than an occasional thought my way over all these years.
Another odd thing happened, though, as I sat there in that small town library and flipped through the pages of those old year-books. Time and the urgency to depart dismissed, I found myself wandering through a thicket of long forgotten faces and names. And like most thickets, it was full of painful thorns and twisted, misshapen limbs that refused to conform themselves into a comforting scene. Each photo recalled a personality, and I was overwhelmed by a wilderness of wonder and impossible questions about what became of them. I know what happened to some, naturally, as my family and what few of them I continue to keep contact with keep me informed. But apart from that comparative handful, I had no knowledge of the fates of most of these people at all. There were images of girls I had terrible crushes on, even brief romances with. There were images of bullies who terrified me and hounded me for much of my youth. Teachers who I vaguely recalled as being either warm and wonderful or cold and cruel. At one time in my life they were, for better or worse, more important to me than any other group of people in the world. I knew all of them—loved some, lusted hopelessly after others, desperately envied or felt superior to many, hated and feared more than a few. A number of them struck me as being people I always planned to get to know better but somehow never did. And now, nearly a half-century later, I realized that I had utterly forgotten almost all of them, shut them away in a vault of memory that has been rarely if ever opened.
It’s a natural thing, of course, to recollect such people and wonder what they became when they grew up, to wonder if they married, divorced, found careers, achieved wealth or went bust, realized their ambitions or found themselves broken and disillusioned. Many I remembered as individuals with firm convictions and sound ideals, the sort of folks who exuded confidence in the rightness of their visions, however wrong they may have been, and the certainty of their beliefs, however erroneous they were ultimately revealed to be. Our generation was brought up to have convictions, to develop them and nurture them, and never to surrender them for caprice. In most ways, I was just like them, and like most of them, surely, I soon found that the world was a far larger and more difficult place than I ever imagined when I was an emerging adult. Life, I eventually learned, was primarily made up of lies and limitations. Visions, beliefs, convictions, I later discovered, were subject to as much sudden and violent change as the weather.
At the same time, there was so much that seemed so right in those faces, so self-assured and courageous, so alive. Blemishes were, naturally, carefully concealed, and even the candid shots of ourselves going about the all-too-important business of being adolescents seemed to exude a kind of surety about where we were, who we were, and who we were sure we would become. So for several more hours than I truly had time to spend, I found myself flipping those glossy pages and confronting myself as I was, one of many long-forgotten faces and names, and I was constantly stung by how quickly the vitality slips away from a time and place and people, how rapidly it passes away into dusty memory.
Once, I wrote a line about the imaginary setting for one of my fictions. I said, it was a place more or less stuck in “a time when hope had promise to bolster it.†The phrase came back to me as I turned those pages and felt myself falling helplessly backward into a time and place that existed some fifty-odd years ago. Apart from the youthful and eager faces of my contemporary adolescents, I also saw how many were posing in front of places that no longer existed. The buildings, businesses, and concerns that provided a backdrop for the yearbook photographs are almost all gone, now, some not even well remembered. A few of the houses that provided scenic stages for dressy group portraits have fallen into dereliction, or have been torn down entirely. Some have been victimized by fire, but most others have merely become victims of changing times, new technologies, altering economics. Even the high school building itself is long forgotten, razed to make way for a more modern structure that, today, is showing alarming signs of age. Our school we thought, was huge, solidly old-fashioned and substantial, and it was dear to us, our “alma mater.†Now, its image is relegated to a faded color photograph on the library’s wall, just as so many places have been filed away as grainy impressions, gradually slipping into the past, gradually being woven in to the fabric of memory.
In way, it’s as if my entire history like the history of all those images in those yearbooks is fading away, as well. Memory alone can’t sustain it, because, like any fabric, it wears thin with overuse and is subject to decay. Facts are too easily patched into a quilted collage. Too often, we only remember the names, not the faces, and too often we’ve forgotten the hopes that we thought were impervious to change so long as there was a promise to bolster them.
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