How Do We Handle Mom's Old Yearbooks? | Michelle Ule, Author

I’m stymied by the old yearbooks.

We moved this summer, in an unexpected way and fashion. I got to do all the packing.

But which one is Mom?

Our former home is built on a hillside and I had no idea how much storage space we were using under the house until boxes and boxes of items I didn’t know I owned arrived at the new house.

And because we’ve been storing things for 12 years, that included my late in-law’s possessions as well as my own late parent’s belongings. I’ve had to go through everything.

Because you never know what you’re going to find.

There amid a box of ancient maps–ancient in that we got them from AAA in 1991– I found the bulletin from our wedding.

Who knows how it got there or why?

So, I’m paging through all the yearbooks-just in case.

How do you avoid the emotional minefields while sorting memories? Click to Tweet

The filing cabinet was stored in a closet far from my everyday life. It’s beside my desk in the new house and I need it. So, I started culling one Sunday afternoon.

Some of it was easy, but then I stumbled on my father’s death certificate. I pulled up photos and newspaper clippings of my grandmother’s aunts and uncles.

I found a letter written in that same grandmother’s pristine handwriting. A Christmas note from my mother, dead for more than 20 years. Wills for seven people (three still alive).

I pushed the door shut with a rolling thud. I was crying too hard to continue.

The other night while my husband used our brand new shredder, I opened a box of photo albums. The top books were my mother’s high school yearbooks, her name embossed on the cover.

I don’t recall seeing them before–how could that be?

I knew she loved high school. I’d heard plenty of stories. The first page of the 1945 yearbook opened to her good friend Alice’s scrawl giggling about that “private and sergeant we met last summer and couldn’t get rid of.”

My mother was 15 that year. What was Alice talking about?

In the 1946 yearbook, Alice mentioned a sailor.

They lived on chicken farms hours from the ocean. Hmmm.

It was fun to look at the photos and see life so very different from my own. I just wish Mom had been sitting next to me to tell the stories–and to explain a little bit. 🙂

Watch for the gold mines!

My father only had two yearbooks. I can hear his explanation: “we were too poor.”

Not my dad, but nice try, Baron!

I laughed to see him described by a friend as a “young Charles Boyer, a swank dresser and smooth operator.”

That was my dad.

Or at least how he wanted to be seen.

The eureka find was in the back of the yearbooks: four essays scribbled on browned notebook paper, assignments for an English class.

My heart quickened when I saw the titles: “My Daily Stroll” (C+); “A Lover’s Enigma” (B+); “Integrity” (A); and “A Description of Home” (B).

My father could not have left me better gifts–each one a reflection of who he was.

“My Daily Stroll” was unexpectedly dull, but sounded like his interests–traveling and reflecting on the people he saw with a critical eye. (He visited over 100 countries before he died).

“A Lover’s Enigma,” combined with references to himself as “Baron” and the Charles Boyer reference, reminded me of his boastful tales of trying to make himself suave and elegant–a man about town, even if the town was in the suburbs 1947.

He came from a poor family and struggled to overcome his mundane background. He succeeded, but that yearning for popularity and fame never left him.

“Integrity?” That was how my father ran his business. He may have been a “squirrely naval officer,” as a young man but he always remained an honest gentleman.

The best essay among his yearbooks only merited a B but it brought me to tears.

A simple assignment, “A Description of Home,” described him walking up the porch steps and through the shotgun house, making comments here and there, describing family arguments, and being smug: “My mother sat in the overstuffed chair, reading as usual.”

Of course, my grandmother had a book in hand.

He continued:

“On my left stands the symbol of my mother’s personality–a piano with several photographs on it. There was a time when our home was rent by a mighty struggle–to decide on a new car or a piano to be purchased by the funds acquired by mother’s labor during the war.

“She cannot play it, although she takes weekly lessons at night school, unless you call ‘playing by ear’ musicianship. But she persisted and this persistence has a reward which now rivals a radio which was purchased under similar circumstances several years ago.”

No, I argued with that essay. He meant her organ, she never owned a piano.

Don’t make fun of her music!

Then I realized, she retrieved the organ from her Utah family ten years later.

I’d never heard this story before.

In his high school scrawl, they were alive again, standing before me, arguing about a car or the piano. I can hear my dad, his father, and my aunt and uncles taunting her, with Grammy remaining steadfast.

My grandmother never learned to drive. But she always had her music.

And I know, now, why she fought so hard for me to get a piano and take lessons.

We needed the music.

I needed the memory.

Can I throw away the yearbooks?

Maybe.

But not before going through them all first, thanks to that cocky teenaged boy’s essays nearly 70 years ago.

How do you determine what goes and what stays when you go through old photos, yearbooks, memories?

(Help me!)

(My brother ended up wanting the yearbooks–so he’s got them now. Everyone in the family got copies of the essays.)

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