I was talking to a friend recently when she shared a story about her thirty-year-old son. He’d run into someone from high school—across the country from where they grew up. That Sunday at dinner, he asked where his old yearbooks were. She pulled one off the shelf, handed it to him, and said with a smile: “It’s a rite of passage—your yearbook just went from high school memories to reference book!”
Two things stood out to me in this story.
First, there’s that subtle shift in how we use our yearbooks. At some point, we stop pulling them out to relive the good times, show new college friends what high school was like, or reread those handwritten autographs. The nostalgia fades into the background. Then one day, you run into someone from high school—someone you knew well, barely knew, or didn’t know at all—but they were there. Maybe they remember you. Their name or face seems vaguely familiar, nagging at you until you finally pull out that yearbook and start flipping through pages.
You find their photo. You might look them up on social media too, but it starts with the yearbook, trying to place them in your memory. It’s happened to me more than once. Someone tells me they went to high school with me—once in college, I had no recollection of him, but he remembered me. Another time, someone who became a good friend mentioned she’d gone to my high school, though we’d traveled in completely different social circles. I had to look her up and see what her experiences were—groups, club activities—did we cross paths more than I remembered?
Even with Facebook and the ability to reconnect with people from our past, it’s still easier to remember them when you can pull out the yearbook and see them as they were—when they were part of your younger days. Finding a photo on someone’s Facebook page that shows what they looked like then isn’t easy. Those photos are either buried deep in their timeline or nonexistent, because most people share who they are now and their journey since high school. Lives change. New paths are taken. You probably don’t look the same, and neither do they.
My friend pointed out that we’re now at the age where we use yearbooks as references for different stages of life. Thanks to Facebook, we can reconnect or check in on people from our past, but in the stages after high school, we only have social media to track those moments. We don’t have yearbooks anymore to capture that history. So our high school yearbooks become both a reference book and a reference point—a moment in time documented in one collective book showing collective experiences. Nothing truly like that exists after high school. After graduation, our lives are captured in scattered moments with many new people, new experiences, new places, new events—all separate and individually experienced.
The second thing that struck me: My friend had moved across the country, purging a lot of things along the way. She’d scanned photos so she had them digitally, then shredded the originals. But she kept her yearbooks—even though she’d graduated more than thirty-five years before. They were important to her, not just for the memories, but for the reference. In this age of downsizing and reducing the stuff we’ll pass down to our children, her yearbooks were worth keeping.
As I was writing this post, I told another friend what I was working on. She immediately sent me a photo—her high school yearbooks were sitting right next to her on the couch. A high school friend had just called asking if she remembered someone, so she’d pulled them out moments before we talked. The universe, it seems, was making my point for me.
So when someone asks me, “Should I buy a yearbook?” the answer is always yes. Yes, for this moment, for the students experiencing it now. And yes, for your future selves in all the different stages of life—as a memory book, as a reference when telling stories about your high school years, and as a way to reconnect with people who come and go unexpectedly in new places and new stages of your life.