I found my 10-year-old grandmother in an antique store. We hadn’t lost her there or anything. She just appeared one day out of a cloud of dust. You see I was thumbing through boxes of ancient photographs, one stiff pose drifting into another, all of them in black and white, all their expressions bordering on blank, when I made eye contact with a little girl. A flash of familiarity met disbelief. I looked closer at the piece of heavy black card stock. The blond haired fairy leaning against the severe looking older woman was my grandma. That picture was on my mother’s mantle. Those were my great-grandparents and their five children.

It cost me $9 to get that picture back into my family. Now it’s safe on my mantle, but I’ll never forget that feeling of rescuing it from the hands of strangers, from life in a packing crate. Maybe that’s what drew me to the orange scrapbook.

Roaming around the same store, about a decade later, I noticed a large spiral notebook, frayed and barely hanging together. I opened it up and a half sheet of lined paper floated to the ground.

“My name is Robert Harold Day … I was born on Monday morning on April 6, 1925 … I moved down to Whittaker on a farm. There I got pneumonia. Then I was in a mess. But now I am living at 39 Hewitt Road safe and sound … I have been in a few messes, but that isn’t much.”

Fifth grade was written in the left-hand corner. “I have been in a few messes, but that isn’t much.” I trembled at 11 words of unassuming toughness in the wobbly cursive of a little boy. This could be important to somebody. I tied together the orange covers with my scarf, paid $5 and adopted the memories of Robert Day.

I tried to find Robert or his family, but every trail online and off, never even warmed up. No veterans’ records, addresses, obituaries, none of the Robert Days matched my Robert Day. I could find nothing that proved he existed except I knew he did. I had his 13th birthday card from his grandparents. I had the Civil War report he’d written in fourth grade with the purple construction paper cover. I had a stack of bird pictures that he’d colored, always staying meticulously inside the lines.

At least once a week for the past six months I’ve carefully turned the pages of his book, looking at the magazine cutouts of faraway landscapes Robert had surely not seen at that point in his life. I wonder if he ever saw them. Pictures of dogs peek out from between pages and are glued into corners. I like to think that Robert had a dog.

There are no photographs but plenty of newspaper clippings. The Dionne quintuplets, the Gosselin kids of the 1930s, occupy a full page. I discover that Robert and I likely watched the same movies when we were kids, 50 years apart, through the publicity stills of Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland he’s pasted in his book.

I can only guess why he saved an article instructing mothers how to entertain children while they’re quarantined with scarlet fever: 10 a.m. scrapbooks, 12:30 p.m. bath, and 4:30 p.m. radio program the directive read. Aside from the scarlet fever part, that doesn’t sound like such a bad deal. He had pneumonia. Did he have scarlet fever too? The more I pour over the clues, the more questions I have.

Bank robber Benny Dickson, a folk hero celebrated for his lawlessness by a struggling country, sneers from the left-hand side of the scrapbook while on the right is an artist’s rendering from the Detroit Times of the electric chair awaiting Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann in 1936.

One article is folded into a square. It crumbles a little more every time I read it. It’s from January 1938: “Family Fed by Strangers on 102-Day Journey” is the headline. There’s a picture of six children ages 2 to 9 on a wagon. A quote from their father explains, “The wheat dried up; dust, grasshoppers, rust, everything went against us.” I’m reminded that these are the mementos of a boy living in brutal times. His scrapbook is a record of the innocent, the criminal and the desperate. What did Robert Day think about these things?

As he gets older more birthday cards from his grandparents appear. There is never a hint of other family. Soldiers, sailors, flags, “The Star Spangled Banner” written on a piece of scratch paper, dominate the last pages, evidence of a boy-man living in a patriotic nation on the cusp of war.

On the last page is pasted a small square of white paper with the words “God Bless America.” After that there are blank pages and no matter how many times I see it, the first empty page hits me like the jarring tone of a test pattern. It’s the end, and it’s all I’ll ever know. Does anyone miss him? Does anyone remember him?

Robert Day, if you’re out there, I want you to know that even though we never met, I miss you. Even though we never made one memory together, I remember you.

St. Paul resident Alexandra Kloster appears each Sunday. She may be reached at alikloster@yahoo.com and her blog is Radishes at Dawn at alexandrakloster.com.