Why to Get a Scanner

I noticed my junior high school (eighth grade) yearbook in among some stuff on a bookcase in danger at Valerie level, so I rescued it to put up higher.  The pictures are in pretty good shape, but the paper is faded and the staples are rusted to the point where it’s falling apart.  It’s your basic 42 page 8 1/2 x 11 stapled volume with a heavier but still basically paper exterior.

As I was telling Deb little stories about some of the people pictured in it, I realized that what I need to do is scan the whole thing for posterity… and to enable me to post pictures from it should I desire.  It was totally the seventies, if there’s no other reason.  1975, to be exact, which means the pictures are at least partly from fall of 1974.

It’s my favorite of the yearbooks I own, from the most pleasant overall point in my entire school career.  It’s interesting to see the pictures in my high school yearbook, and in the prior year’s, which I bought because that was when my friend Peter Daly graduated, and I knew or was familiar with others in that class.  I was too detatched from the college atmosphere to really appreciate the one I bought that corresponded to the year I should have officially graduated, which was the year after I originally would have graduated, and was spring of the year I did in fact finish my last classes in the fall semester, throwing me officially to the following year’s class.  Even that, though, I can point to some of the people and spout remembrances.

My doing that prompted Deb to observe that I have a good people memory.  Which is true, in a sense.  I first have to get past remembering your name and sometimes your face.  But then I will remember your birthday, where you were from, what you were taking for a major, specific incidents common to us, things you said, personal details like religion, marital status, job, kids, interests, whatever.  I don’t use it very often, and like my tendency to end up leading any group of which I am part unless I pointedly hold back, I can quash or enhance it, but when it’s on I can impress the hell out of people.  Or alarm them when I remember too much.

A picture in the yearbook reminded me of an incident of memory.  A gal named Pam Bearse moved away after Jr. high, whether it was right after or a little into high school, I forget.  My last awareness of her was probably the first part of 1975.  In 1984 or 1985, covering a night shift at a Christy’s Market (convenience store) in Hyannis, she came in the store.  I think it was for diapers or formula.  Anyway, she looked familiar, we got talking and I utterly shocked her by remembering her name. 

I don’t think my memory works that well anymore.  That Christy’s was a good example of each one having a unique traffic pattern not necessarily at the time of day you’d expect.  It was across from the Cape Cod Melody Tent, so when there were concerts, there’d be a massive burst of traffic, the highest of the day, from around midnight to 2 AM.  Then not much the rest of the night.  Wareham also had a lot of late night traffic, but more steady rather than a mob scene, and all too much of it was Mass. Maritime Academy students shoplifting and being threatening so they’d get away with it.

Anyway, I digress.  Seeing the yearbook makes me want to scan it in before anything can happen to it.  That and I can pack it away as safely wrapped as I can manage, using the digital version if I want to careen down memory lane.

Posted by on 06/15 at 03:58 PM

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