A Yearbook to Remember

We Can’t Hold Time in Our Hands, But We’ll Always Have Signed Messages, Funny Photos, and “Most Likely to …”

I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year. This jarring start to a new phase of life set a pace that marked high school milestones strangely.

Now, with graduation approaching, I look back on those milestones—the ups and downs of four pivotal years—and reflect. What can I remember? What should I remember? What will I forget?

This is where the yearbook comes into play.

Yearbooks allow us to slow down and take a look back at …

by Milissa Joi | June 5, 2024

Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator

The Truest Thing About the City: We Are All Just Making It Up as We Go Along

by David L. Ulin | December 14, 2023

Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand …

Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There

How Revisiting a Children’s Book Helped Me See the City by the Bay, On and Off the Page

by Larry Gordon | December 6, 2023

For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would …

Where I Go: Redondo Beach Brings Me Back to Myself

I’m the Keeper of My Family’s Memories. My Hometown Is Where I Uncover the Layers of Our Past

by Jim Hinch | November 20, 2023

Late one afternoon last year, during a troubled time in my life, I took a long walk on the beach.

A day of rain was ending. Watery sunlight shone on glossy …

Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets

The Road to the Inland Empire Is Paved With Good Memories—And Gratitude for Freeways

by Joe Mathews | January 4, 2022

Don’t ever complain about freeway traffic, especially around my mother.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my …

Longing for the Softer Side of Hurricanes

A Continent Away from Horrible Destruction, I Miss the Familial Routines of My South Florida Childhood

By Dulce Vasquez | October 4, 2017

After school, whenever I walked into my family’s home in Davie, Florida, I was always reminded of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, which decimated nearly 64,000 homes some 60 miles away in …

memories