Faces Of My Youth...

I suppose each town as a building the defines it, that represents more then the collection of homes and business, streets and trails. In our town that building has to be the Rock Church. It's on Main street and has been there for over a century. It's the first church I can recall attending and I'm attending still, forty-five years later.

And found within the building are photos of children, hundreds of children. Their faces, along with their leaders line the upper hallway. There are two sets of pictures, some taken in 1978 and another set taken twenty-five years later. It's the photos taken almost forty years ago that makes me stop and look and remember.

The church building is semi-famous in Mormonism. Back in 1887 the first meeting of its kind took place there, a program for the youth of the church, from twelve-years old and younger. Had I been born a few months later, I would have been included in the picture. Instead, many of my friends's faces are forever preserved and hanging on a wall in an upstairs hallway of a century-old building.

I imagine that to my children the picture might as well be from the 1930s or 1940s. It's black and white and no one dresses like that anymore. But I see my youth--there's no other way for me to see it. I see friends with whom I played, on baseball teams, after school at their homes, in the undeveloped lots in town and on the mountain to the east. We played, we endured school and church together, we grew up in Farmington. 

Sometimes I feel as if I'm the only one who remains. Many have moved from here and are creating traditions with their own families, their own children growing up with their friends, spending times in their friends's homes and playing on baseball and soccer teams with kids that will one day grow up and move away.

Yes, each Sunday I have the chance to see faces of my youth, the ghosts of memories. I wonder how long those pictures will hang in that hall.