I received one more item in the mail from the state department today, my old passport book, and also the court's name change document, which they don't keep. Certified copies are $5 each, I can use that one again for some other thing that needs documents to change!
I put the old passport book away with the rest of my old ones, taking a look at them all in the process. My first one, from 1985, with a little-kid photo. Looking at that photo now, I just think, if I could have had longer hair, worn a cuter shirt, how different I could have looked.
The 1990 one I was a very young semi-adult with a weird mustache in the photo. I didn't actually travel using that one. I didn't renew it until four years after it expired, but you get five years after expiration to simply put in the renewal paperwork instead of the more complicated process of a fresh application. It seemed like the thing to do. And, indeed, I ended up using that to travel to Canada and Germany. That photo was a young bearded man. The renewal from 2014 had a somewhat older bearded dude. I didn't actually do any travel with that one. I did use it as my ID for voting one time, when ID for voting was introduced, just to be different and difficult. I think they said I was the second or third person all day to use a passport as ID.
And now I've got one with a photo of the woman that little kid got to grow up to finally be. And a slightly different name that doesn't confuse people who see the woman.