Yearbook Signing Day

Abstract

from class for yearbook signing. seniors first, then juniors and down the line. About every twenty minutes, Jery one of the vice principals, comes over the PA and says, Will teachers please release the next class to pick up their yearbooks and accompany their students to the football I have juniors, American Lit, in the afternoon. We all troop out together. At the field, the atmosphere is festive. A clear, sunny day, and the counselors have opened the concession stand and are giving away sodas. Cross Country coach is selling ice cream to fund his program. Wrestling coach sells suckers. Debate coach-candy bars; the Drama club-jawbreakers. Two boys in the press box are playing music over the loudspeakers, and it drifts to every corner of the field. I have papers to grade-poems actually, the last set from my Creative Writing class. I head for the highest, farthest corner of the bleachers. From up there, the whole place sprawls before me. It isn't long before I'm not grading, but watching. kids wander and gather in clumps on the grass. clumps, themselves, flex and move, taking in some kids, letting others go. From where I sit, these circles remind me of chemistry class-molecules-attracting atoms, losing atoms. In those circles, kids sit cross-legged or lie on their bellies in the green grass and sign each other's yearbooks. They promise never to forget. They haven't yet learned the impossibility of that word-never. I try to remember all the people, places, times that I swore I'd never forget-all the things I've done that I'd never do, things that happened that I'd never let happen. They write, Best wishes, to each other, and Good luck, Wasn't it a rush, Class of 95 rules, Hey man didn't we kick ass. They write, Remember, Remember. Nearly two thousand kids writing words they mean so much at this moment-words that they believe and want to make true-so perhaps they are. They write lines of poetry, sentences, paragraphs-everybody writing furiously and saying what they mean. I wish the back to basics crowd could see it-all this writing. Already these kids are looking back with nostalgia, remembering mostly what was best, games and dances, parties, friends, falling in love, a class or two I hope, a poem perhaps-something by Frost, just The Road Not Taken. And they are looking ahead, outward, past the chain link fence around the field. They are looking through the weave of wire to the future waiting out on the horizon. It still seems far off to them-that future-college, careers, marriage, their own children being born, going off to school, one day signing yearbooks. But the future comes faster than any of us imagined, becomes the present in a breath. past in another. I want to shake them, tell them to be ready, but it's better if they are surprised. I'm watching a little girl, a tiny child, barely five feet tall in a white maternity dress. Her belly full of the child that will be born before Independence Day. She's at least into her 8th month, but I wouldn't be surprised if she went into labor at any moment. I keep expecting water to break. She's so small and thin to begin with that she'd look comical like a black and white cartoon character from the 40s-if it wasn't so damned serious, this business of bringing life into the world. She rests her spread hand on her belly, perhaps feeling the baby shift, kicking, as all of them are kicking to be born into the world, kicking to get out there, take their place, be part of the joy and the grief. Between looks, I try to grade the poems, to find words that will matter as much as the