I’ve been looking for my 1968 high school yearbook, and it’s disappeared, along with a great many of the people whose photos were in its pages. I seem to have become a survivor by virtue of the missing.

I didn’t expect to outlive anyone. The people in my high school class have looked young and strong and full of hope for as long as I’ve known where to find my yearbook.

Living in the isolation of Sawtooth Valley for almost twenty years, it’s been possible to give up the idea of linear time for the endless circularity of annual tourist migrations. From the available evidence, I went to high school with people whose youth could be annually renewed by checking out their senior photos.

Now the yearbook is gone, and with it the illusion of immortality. All those obituaries have hit home. My memories are full of dead people. So too, now, is my missing yearbook.

 

I’m trying not to be too morbid. I’m just pointing out that if you have a yearbook, you’ve got a tourist visa to the past. You can go on vacation there. But lose all those photos of people just waking up to adulthood, and fifty years will go by in a flash. You’ll look in the mirror and see a victim of progeria, the progressive disease that ages you prematurely.

But it’s more than that. Since wildfires have begun to ravage the West, we’ve seen images of people fleeing their houses with a suitcase and their photo albums. In the face of an uncertain future, we look to the past to make sure we still exist.

We look at amnesia victims as people who have lost their lives and are having to start over. We look at Alzheimer’s victims as having checked out early. To the extent that a photo can serve as a memory bank, it makes us real.

Yearbooks have one small problem. Photo albums are generally full of happy pictures, taken to commemorate happy events. Yearbooks record high school happy events, which is why so many yearbook pictures look staged and betray an undercurrent of Get Out horror. Unless you were a student council president, varsity cheerleader, Boys’ State delegate, star of the musical, hall monitor, valedictorian, catcher of the touchdown pass that won the conference championship, you may not think that high school represented the best years of your life. It probably did represent the dawn of a painful self-consciousness.

 

A certain sneaky joy accompanies survival into one’s seventies. Waking up in the morning is a nice surprise. Coffee is a nice surprise. Sleeping in, when you can do it, is a nice surprise. Finding nobody you know in the obituary columns is a nice surprise.

It’s possible to say that life can be a comedy if you’re one of those people who can handle surprises.

Of course, by your seventies, you can construct a life story that is purely tragic, simply by picking the events you want to focus on. And it’s hard to think that life isn’t tragic because it always ends in death. And no one escapes the tragedies of a broken heart or a shattered dream unless they refuse to risk anything.

Avoiding risk is an exercise in tragedy in itself, made all the worse because you think you’re being prudent at the time.

But if you look back, say, to the Silurian Age, and recognize that it took several mass extinctions, asteroid impacts, hemisphere-sized volcanic eruptions, and the unconscious couplings of billions of brainless paleocreatures to get you born at all, your life becomes an infinitely improbably comic miracle. Not a cosmic miracle. A comic miracle.

It helps, of course, if you see yourself as the butt of the joke. If you pride yourself on being the refined end product of evolution, you’re probably mistaking yourself for someone you should take seriously, instead of someone who, in ten million years, will be regarded by some entity—probably a descendant of corvids—as a brainless paleocreature.

I don’t know how far corvids will advance in ten million years, but I imagine they will consider themselves the high endpoint of evolution, and humans a distasteful and irresponsible dead end, a defunct species that left a messy layer of radioactive plastic in the fossil record and who never could wrap their minds around the idea that their technology could destroy their biosphere.

If you don’t want your life to be too tragic, look back at yourself from ten million years in the future, through the eyes of an enduring, highly intelligent, cynical breed that didn’t have much regard for humans even before they went extinct.

 

Julie has a wallet-sized photo of me in a small golden frame on her desk. It’s my high school senior picture. I’ve offered to substitute a more recent photo, but she seems to like that one.

It was taken when I was seventeen. I’m in my high school cap and gown, grinning like life is about to turn into a pre-Covid cruise-ship smorgasbord. As hominids go, I’m reasonably benign-looking and could be called handsome, at least by another hominid. It’s a much better picture than the one in my yearbook, which shows me with a humorless smile and hair that looks as if it’s been Brilliantined and eyes that have the slightly vacant gaze of someone wishing he were someplace else. The two photos, taken together, are prophetic, if contradictory.

Julie also has our wedding photo on her bedside dresser. It too has achieved the status of prophecy. In it, our hair is sunlit—Julie’s golden, mine already silvered by all the times in my 20s and 30s I took myself too seriously. Julie looks like she’s seventeen. I look somewhat older.

We’re smiling seriously at the camera, as befits our awareness that we’re embarking on a seriously comic endeavor.

 

I told Julie this morning that I couldn’t find my yearbook and she asked if I wanted her to look for it. I said yes, because she can usually find things that I’ve lost, and quickly, usually by looking in places I’ve already looked. But this time she couldn’t find it in its usual place on the shelf or anywhere else, and I think that it may be lost forever. Those pages and pages of photographs of beautiful young people starting out in life are all gone.

I didn’t expect, in 1968, that I’d ever get married, or look in the mirror and see a white-haired old man. I didn’t expect that any of the girls I had crushes on—I can name most of them, even without my yearbook—would get older than seventeen, or would start looking tired and thickly maternal, or would settle for something other than the marriage, the career, the family of their dreams.

I think that most people, once they’ve had children, settle for something less than their hopes and dreams, usually by placing said hopes and dreams on said children’s unsuspecting heads. We defend, more or less successfully, against the deep realization of our own eventual death.

Children can be a big part of that, as our bodies become like the picture of Dorian Gray. They show the mark of every sin, every blow, every plan gone wrong, every unexpected grief.

Eventually, to find the person under all the scars and wrinkles, we return to a yearbook.

A couple of years ago, I insisted Julie and I cancel our Facebook account because the photos of Facebook friends kept updating the past. I was starting to fear that the people I had dreamed about in high school were growing older just like me.

 

For a good part of my life I remained a terribly shy and awkward person with a tendency to walk away from difficult situations. If I had had a modicum of self-confidence, my life would have been different and probably less miserable and hurtful in those brainless years before I turned forty. But then I wouldn’t have met and married Julie, and we wouldn’t have had all these years of romantic comedy, and life, by comparison, would have turned out tragic.

For me, at least.

Which brings me to the idea that we succumb to an illusion when we think we’re the same person as time marches on. Time does not march. Our lives are more like movies where a succession of still photographs is projected on time’s blank and unmoving screen, and the star of the movie keeps getting replaced by understudies.

Because our minds don’t work as fast as our eyes, we imagine continuity, and fool ourselves into thinking we’re in a movie about getting older. Not true.

As the latest understudy, I can look at Julie’s and my wedding picture and see people I recognize. They played their parts well enough to get us to this point, where scenes are still being shot and the producers haven’t told us to wrap things up.

 

Sans yearbook, I seem to have lost my access to the far country of the past. I’m not going to get through customs.

Stuck in the present, I am. Out the window, the sun is shining on yet another morning’s new snow, and I should be outside wandering around in it. Instead I’m inside, wondering about the latest weirdness of the weather.

We need the moisture, but it’s not normal. The snow usually melts by evening. In India and Bangladesh, people are dying of the heat. In the American southwest, it’s dryer than it’s been in a thousand years. The deep oceans are warming, still in the process of sinking the climate’s excess heat until they become heat-saturated.

The weather, too, seems to have abandoned any idea that the past will connect with the future.

If you want a weather forecast, look out the window. See if there’s snow.

 

In an alternate universe, high school students, in the spring of their senior years, are given a yearbook of the future, a volume that contains all the photos of their selves-to-be. Each volume is embossed with a smiling mask or a grieving one, depending on how life will go for the new graduate. At the end of each yearbook is an obituary.

Not surprisingly, these alternate universe young people reject the idea that there’s any connection between the people they are and the people they will be in the book. While they typically enjoy the nice things said in their obituaries, they also note that the stupid yearbook publishers got it wrong yet again.

What a racket, they all say. I have to buy this book, and it’s useless. I should have spent my money on a class ring.

But the books really do predict the future, because in those universes, too, time stays the same and the people change selves.

 

My yearbook probably won’t stay lost in a household where one person is really good at losing things and the other person is really good at finding them. But if it is lost, it won’t be a tragedy. It’s a false document, one that fools me into thinking I can step backward in time, and show up on the day yearbooks were distributed at Wood River High School in May of 1968, and I can sit there in that warm sunlight and, by doing things differently, change the unchangeable, and become a person that could never be.