My Favorite Thing to Do on Facebook
Thinking about the first pictures of one season of my digital life.
Both of the photos above were taken in June 2007 and are the first pictures of me to appear on Facebook. It took a total of 15 seconds for me to find them. I went to my profile, clicked Photos, clicked again on the most recent, and then hit the left arrow key. Four easy steps, and I was transported back 17 years to my final days as a senior at Bayonne High School.
Nostalgia hits me hardest when I’m either alone and bored online, listening to throwback songs from my teenage years (the kind of songs you’d find on burned CDs in your old bedroom or dance to at weddings), or watching movies released in theaters before I left New Jersey in 2011 at the age of 22. That mark serves as my personal border between the past and present. And because I was on Facebook in 2007, I have four years of digital memories to go back to when I look to bridge the gap between the childhood photo albums in my parents’ dresser and the more recognizable version of myself as an adult.
I’m embarrassed to read some of my ramblings from those early years on Facebook. In that early age of social media, our parents and grandparents were still watching cable TV and the community felt small and safe, as I’m sure every social media platform, be it Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, seems before you realize that its core purpose is to build an attentive user base whose data and habits it can sell to advertisers. But that’s neither here nor there.
My point is that, unlike old statuses and notes, photos can’t talk. So I click through mine with pleasure, starting from the very back through the more recent of a Me more like the person who’s writing this today: a boring, married father clinging to his dreams by his fingernails. I flip through them like I do old photo albums, trying to discover or reconnect with the person from all those years ago.
The photo on the left is from the night of my high school graduation. An hour after the ceremony in the ice rink (the same one from my Paddlehands saga) had ended, hundreds of us recently graduated seniors packed into coach buses and went off to some location I can’t remember for one last night of hanging out together before, in many cases, never seeing each other again. I was tagged in this one by Molly, a teacher’s daughter and popular girl I’d known since fourth grade at PS #14. I met her the same day I met Mickey and Jeremy (also pictured), and we’d gone through honors classes together at BHS, though our cliques—hers the more spirited crowd of high-achievers, mine the weirdos eager to grow beyond the confines of our school and city—rarely intersected. I’m sure now that we took the photo to show how we’d grown up since first being classmates a decade earlier. The tall guy, Felix, slipped in because, at that time, he was an inseparable member of the crew Mickey, Jeremy, and I had formed years earlier. Senior year, we even started to go by the name the Core Four. I wouldn’t see either of them much after that night. Molly organized our 10-year PS #14 and BHS reunions in 2013 and 2017, and Felix and I briefly attended the same Hoboken church while in college. But that’s all. They’re relics now.
I have flashes of memories from that last night as a high school student: of playing soccer in the gym, challenging Eddie Finck and his cronies to ping-pong doubles matches they refused to participate in, hanging out by the jacuzzi ogling at the pretty girls my friends and I had always been too scared to talk to, thinking how different it would all be once we built up new images for ourselves at college.
The photo on the right was taken a few days earlier, though much further up on Interstate 287, where urban New Jersey disappears into forests and suburbs. With no real work left to do before graduating and starting the first real summer of our perceived adulthood, the Core Four had cut school and headed north to a suburb where Jeremy had a friend who attended the same Polish Christian camp in Eerie, Pennsylvania. Felix had a crush on the girl, and since she had female friends, we ventured up there a few times that summer to try our luck flirting. This time, we stopped in only briefly before heading out to fish at a pond she’d told us held lunkers. None of us knew much about bass fishing, though we had joined the Fishing Club at BHS and gone out, a single time, to catch bluegill with Mr. Dunn (the quirky Anthro teacher/world traveler from “Creating Yanzek Hestal”). On the way out of Bayonne, we picked up Ishan, a Gujarati kid Mickey and I invited to sit at our lunch table that year. Ishan was new to America. Since fobs stuck out like sore thumbs among the American-born people from their countries in Bayonne, we did our best to befriend kids like Ishan and Steven the Kenyan, not so much out of benevolence but because we wanted to ask them questions about their countries they weren’t American enough to realize were inappropriate (To Ishan: “So, do all kids in India smoke cigarettes?” “What do Hindus really think about Muslims?” “What would your mom do to you if she found out you ate a chicken sandwich?” To Steven: “Did you have a pet lion in Nairobi?” “Do you eat gazelle and, if so, where online can we order some?”).
I don’t remember having any luck with girls or fish on that day trip. I remember dozing off in the front seat of Felix’s green…what was it…a Ford Explorer? Then looking back and seeing Ishan, Mick, and Jeremy also passed out. I remember getting back to Bayonne and Ishan telling us not to say anything to his mom about eating hamburgers when we dropped him off on First Street. I remember still feeling like the whole world was out in front of us then, and that this was just a single, short trip of a million yet to come. Later that summer, Mickey, Jeremy, Felix, and I headed up in my parent’s golden GMC Yukon to the Adirondack Mountains for two nights of camping, then down to see Mickey’s aunt in another part of upstate New York, over to see Felix’s brother in Connecticut, and then stopped to see the suburban Polish girl and her family with the human-sized portraits of themselves that hung along the staircase of their mini-mansion before driving home to Bayonne.
So much has happened since these pictures were taken. And despite what I think about the choices I’ve made since, the places I’ve been, and the people whose memories and friendship I’ve lost, I still think it’s good for me—for all of us—to remember.
For the next months, I’ll be sharing old pictures and memories with members of my Attic Club, who support this Substack with both their attention and money. I’ll probably share a few of those out here, too.
I’d love to see some of your first Facebook pictures and know the stories behind them. Email or text them to me.
Until next time.
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