Gassen: When hair was tall, and I was young

Most of my dad’s email subject lines are the same: Stuff.

He and Mom have been cleaning out the basement (no, they’re not moving, he added), and they found a box of photos, letters and, well, stuff that looks to be from high school and earlier. Do I want it?

Absolutely, for the hairstyles alone.

It arrived, a USPS flat-rate box filled with my life grouped into plastic bags of photos, negatives from my disc camera, letters written but never sent and missives from my pen pal Steven in Australia. A photo of my friend Adrienne’s cat, Othello.

The last day of sixth grade at Edgar Road Elementary School in St. Louis, a birthday party in a bowling alley, snapshots of San Xavier from my first trip to Tucson more than 25 years ago. Prom photos, pictures of random dogs, the high school spring break trip my BFF Jenny and I took to visit my family in Toronto.

Pictures of the actor Tim Curry outside the Fox Theatre in St. Louis after a production of “Me and My Girl.” A massive Rocky Horror fan, I was nearly delirious to see and — gasp! — talk to Tim Curry. In the photo, he’s signing an autograph for someone out of frame, and my Aqua Netted-to-heaven hair looms over his left shoulder.

And about that hair — alternately pink, orange, bleached, teased up, shaved — it’s been quite the follicular trip down memory lane. 

There’s a scrap of paper with the phone number of a guy I can’t place scrawled with “let me know if you’re going to go.”

Did I go?

I have no idea.

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An unsigned poem typed on onion paper. My words? Could be.

What does it all mean, this box of yesterday?

Maybe it’s just a pile of mementos on my kitchen table, evidence that who we were and who we thought we were going to be doesn’t always match up with who we’ve become, or who we are.

Or maybe it’s a chance to see the beginnings in what was the present. The Feb. 27, 1987, letter from Mr. H.L. Hall, the adviser of the Kirkwood Call, saying I’ve been accepted to join the school newspaper staff. My first job was as an editorial writer.

The disconnects between the many selves we inhabit as we go through life emerge when a box of the past lands in the mailbox. The reminders of good times, though maybe not always better times.

But definite proof that the best times of your life don’t happen in high school, given the fluid nature of “best times.” Maybe they were times of more possibility.

Many faces in those photos are still familiar, thanks to Facebook. We connect easily now, and everything is so instant. A click and we’re in the present.

But this box of the past —when photos had to be taken on film, dropped off someplace to be developed and picked up days later in those paper envelopes with the gummy seal — is a good anchor. Letters were written on paper in handwriting that’s changed over the years. Pictures didn’t always come out, and your memory had to suffice, because cameras weren’t everywhere.

These snippets of time are welcome, tying the past with the present. Contemplating who we were helps us better connect to who we are — and who we can become.