Recently I was shooting the breeze with Wanda Omdahl of the Albany Fire Department about some old photos of her that her sister had posted on Facebook.

In one of them, Wanda said, she was about 12 years old.

“Twelve?” I said. “I would’ve guessed 16 to 18.”

“It’s funny,” said Wanda, who is roughly my age. “When I was younger, everybody thought I was older. Now that I’m older, everyone thinks I’m younger.”

That’s pretty much how it’s been for me too. Once I turned about 17, for example, I could grow a decent beard, which was a big help in that time-honored, underage-guy activity of trying to round up beer. Most of the time, I could walk into one of the semi-dodgy small groceries in the greater Milwaukie area and walk out with our case of Bohemian or whatever we had enough money for that day.

And just for your amusement, here’s a pic of my 18-year-old self, taken at my sister Deb’s house right after an American Legion baseball game (she was just about to give me a haircut, btw; why we snapped this photo, I have no idea):

7-16 Young Steve

In the almost 30 years since that pic was taken, I’ve grown a handful of beards, including one over the past several months that I’ve kept sort of at stubble length, a la Brett Favre. I went for the beard mainly because I’d gotten tired of shaving, as I am prone to do from time to time, but I have to now admit the look has sort of, pardon the expression, grown on me.

And it doesn’t even bother me that some of the whiskers are, euphemistically speaking, a bit lighter blond than they used to be.

“Hey Steve,” my big brother Duane said a couple weeks ago, “I’ve got two words for you: Grecian Formula.”

Then there’s my kid Bob. “No play for Mr. Gray,” he’s fond of remarking to me, invoking the Keith Hernandez/Walt Frazier commercial of a few years ago for Just for Men.

Here’s a self-portrait of my grizzled self, snapped Sunday during a hike in the OSU forest (my aim was to photograph my dogs, but they were too rambunctious, so I shot myself instead). What do you think: Too gray, or OK?

Lundy self portrait