Old High School ID Cards and This Thing We Call Life

(Originally published 11/17/13)

As a nostalgia buff who has saved countless bits and pieces of my youth, I still have my two high school ID cards. And not unlike The Twilight Zone's Talking Tina doll, they speak to me—not only about the past, but the present, too, and life in general for that matter.

My original high school ID card picture was taken in September 1976, when, sartorially speaking, we were still in the hip, often garish 1970s. This goes a long way in explaining why I am wearing a pinkish-hued shirt in the photo. For the first few weeks of school in my alma mater, Cardinal Spellman in the Bronx, the boys were permitted to shed their otherwise required jackets and a ties. After all, it was still officially summertime for two-thirds of the month of September. In the increasingly colder climes thereafter, I sometimes wore a blue polyester sports jacket with that same shirt, a multi-colored tie from my father’s extensive 1960s and 1970s collection, and gray plaid pants. In a year or so, though, that kaleidoscope of colors and mix-and-match styles completely vanished as the late-1970s morphed into the less distinctive, staid 1980s.

I carried around my first high school ID for two years. At some point during that time, the card cracked in half, and I taped it back together. A second serious crack is also visible. When I first examined it after years in storage, I wondered how such extensive damage occurred. After all, it was made of heavy plastic, like a credit card, and I do not recall having much need for it.

Today, as I pore over this antiquated, peeling, and badly mangled ID card with the tape on it now yellowed with age, I realize it is a metaphor of life. For I, too, am, metaphorically speaking at least, peeled, cracked, and yellowed. And this metamorphosis is not something that was on my mind, or even on my distant radar, when I was fourteen, wearing pink shirts, and consumed with youthful exuberance. In junior year, our high school ID cards took a serious hit and became cheesy, laminated photos with no pizzazz at all—a precursor of all too many things to come. The cheap laminate, however, did not split in half like its predecessor, the ID credit card. It was physically impossible.

Times have really changed—in a big way. I opened my first bank account with an expired college ID card. Imagine that! Nowadays—no matter our age—we are presumed to be up to no good and not who we say we are. I remember, too, in grammar school being taught how to distinguish between the words “principle” and “principal.” We were told that a living and breathing “principal” was our “pal,” which I never quite felt to be the case. Still, I absorbed the lesson. The "pal" on my 1976 high school ID card was—decades later—part of a Catholic Church lawsuit settlement for doing you know what. In fact, when he was our principal, I do not remember him being much of a pal to anyone. He was hot-tempered and disagreeable. The man only received acclaim from the student body when he declared a rare school holiday not on our original schedule—for selling a lot of fundraising raffle tickets, I think.

It is hard to believe that it has been thirty-seven years since that high school ID picture was snapped. In one respect, it seems like it was only yesterday, but a long, long, long time ago in another. It is a bygone era for sure. And who is that kid in pink? My life then amounted to fourteen years in total. Thirty-seven years have passed since then. I do not have another thirty-seven years coming to me. I cannot say for certain that I would want another thirty-seven years. There really is a lot staring back out at me from my two high school ID cards. Consider yourself warned: If you have your old high school ID cards lying around somewhere, be prepared at what they have to say.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)