Essay: The Yearbook

Part of the charm of this book lies

in the repeatability of the experiment

described. Not that each yearbook replicates

the previous year's, but we see how each role.

is-more or less-filled: class clown, best dressed,

most likely to succeed, those who join chess club,

those who take shop, and, always, those who remain

unphotographed. We envy these last, the children

who leave only their names, as if to say

"We are not a part of this." Whether failures

or revolutionaries is hard to say, our concepts

of failure and revolutionary being vague

at best, each one melting into the other in such

a society where failure is itself revolutionary,

a rejection of history and culture. But it is

with fondness we recall these deviates, their

unchanging names where their faces might have been,

these fools and outsiders with their leathers or

snap-on ties, drug-bent minds and bleached blond

girl friends from another school who wore too much

make-up and turquoise jewelry, these daughters of

alcoholics and hill men, beautiful in the way

outsiders are beautiful, the stray dogs who snap

and yip and come, finally, to our hands, the child

who watches us from the far corner, scribbling

with crayons a picture of exactly who we are.