A guy came to my door the other day and we spent a few minutes engaging in socially acceptable discourse, although with different motives. He was trying to get me to invest in some home improvement products. I was sort of bored that day.

Toward the end of our discussion, when it became obvious to both of us where the conversation was and wasn’t heading, he asked me how long I’d lived in my house. “Since 1988,” I answered, at which point he smiled.

“Funny,” he said, “That was the year I was born,” and I informed him that he was trespassing and then shot him in the leg for good measure.

Wait. That didn’t happen. Weird how it just popped out, though.

Oh, well, of course I’m aware that people born 22 years ago are, more or less, 22 years old now, exploring the workforce and trying to sell stuff. The knowledge also doesn’t make me feel any older or over the hill. It just seemed odd, and it always does when I’m reminded that I’ve stayed in one place long enough for a generation to be conceived and now grown to adulthood. This explains my children.

It also explains my garage. A lot.

And it explains certain moments I experience, wandering my old house and trying to keep the clutter at bay. A forgotten box in a corner contains the DNA of what happened next, and a stray crayon can take my breath away. This house has seen a lot of change.

This was all on my mind, I guess, when I suddenly got a brilliant idea. I was heading for Phoenix, where I grew up, a quick trip but with a little spare time for column fodder. The city has changed drastically but my high school, built in 1963 and from which I graduated in 1976, is still there.

The neighborhood is older, the demographics have changed, but the buildings remain and so do my memories. They’re good ones, too; I would wish my high school life on anyone. I was as active and involved as a student can be this side of pom-poms, and intrigued by possible reactions. How would it feel to return after three decades, walk familiar hallways, run my fingers along the wall and stir up ghosts? Would I be wistful? Sentimental? Nostalgic?

No. Just lost.

That’s what I was told, anyway, by a former teacher. The school was extensively remodeled in the late 1990s; the cafeteria is now where the office was, the office is where the auditorium was, the library is where the math building was and I have no idea where my locker is now. I’m pretty sure it was empty when I left, anyway.

This is best. I’m more interested in visiting friends than structures, and sometimes I prefer my nostalgia at a distance. But this thought experiment led me on an interesting path, one I’d forgotten about.

In the spring of my senior year, I was involved in the production of a student film, a half-hour drama that eventually aired on a local TV station. I was a writer and one of the actors, so I take credit for the ultimate dumbness, a Twilight Zone rip-off that made no sense and no splash to speak of. It was fun, though.

And at the end of the project, our mentor, a local TV reporter, handed me a bulky videotape of our film as a souvenir. I was grateful but surprised. “Not that I’ll ever be able to watch it,” I said, videotape players being exotic and reserved for broadcasters and AV departments.

I had sort of a limited vision of the future.

I’ve said for years that if someone wants a fairly accurate representation of what my high school life looked like, the film “Dazed and Confused” does a good job. So does “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” But for complete verisimilitude? Let’s go to the videotape.

It’s been transferred multiple times, giving it a blurry appearance. Pretty much like my memory, actually. But there’s my locker. There’s the library, and the office, in their original locations. There are my ghosts, teenagers once and forever, alive and well 34 years ago, before VCRs (and fashion sense, apparently, but that could be too harsh).

The film was called “Where Is Everybody,” a story about five students who discover the rest of the world has disappeared, which is now fitting or at least ironic; that world has. Two shots of rotary dial phones are enough.

But DNA is in this box, too, and it was fun to watch again. It’s a unique thing to have, to store in a closet in my familiar house, to remember being that young and unaware of what was to come.

And, again, ironic. Over the years, for some reason, after all those video dubs, the ending has disappeared, and now I have only a vague memory of what was supposed to happen.