The Old Yearbook

Since today is Sunday, I decided to post something relatively serious. This is about something that happened to me a few years ago:

It was about the size of a thin book of sheet music, so the book had been placed on the thrift store's music shelf. I was looking through the stack, hoping to find some piano music for my daughter, when the little book caught my eye. I picked it up and saw that it was actually an old high school yearbook. The book was dated 1942 and was from a school in a small town a few miles away. I flipped through it for a moment, then decided I might as well take it home to look at – the price was only fifteen cents.

I enjoyed looking through the old yearbook that day. Things had changed so much since those times. One of the school events mentioned was a special assembly that had been arranged to inform the students about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The school calendar included two weeks off at harvest time, when many students in the rural town were needed at home. Pictures showed smiling young people in the fashions of the time. I showed the yearbook to my husband and children, then set it aside.

Several weeks later, I was preparing to visit a church in a nearby town where I had lived some years earlier. I had been asked to speak in one of their meetings. For some reason, as I gathered my scriptures and other materials for my talk, I picked up the old yearbook and took it with me. When I got to the church, I started to leave the yearbook in the car, but changed my mind and took it in.

I sat down in the meeting and waited for my turn to speak. A middle-aged woman I knew slightly came in a few minutes late, sat down beside me, and whispered hello. As I sat next to her, the thought came to me that she might want to see the yearbook, so I handed it to her and quietly invited her to look through it. A few minutes later it was time for me to speak, so I went to the front and gave my message.

When I returned to my seat at the end of the meeting, the woman was holding the yearbook and looking emotional. "Can I borrow this?" she asked. "I would like to copy some pictures." She pointed to a picture of a pretty teenage girl and said, with a trembling voice, "That is my mother. I have never seen a picture of her as a youth. We have no pictures of her before her marriage." She showed me other relatives of hers in the yearbook and asked again if she could borrow it.

"You can have it," I told her. "I bought it for you." She looked surprised, and I said, "I didn't know why I bought it at the time, but I just found out. I bought it for you."