Joe's Aggies

In January of 1995, I was still very much new to Houston. After a divorce, I was looking to move to a new city and start over. And typical of moving to a new town or city, I was looking to make a few friends and get rid of the loneliness that had been with me the past few months. Little did I know, I was about to meet people who would my best and closest friends. But I'm starting to get a little ahead of myself.

One of the things I figured that I would do was attend the weekly luncheons of the Houston A&M Club. I figured that getting to know a few Aggies in the area would surely help me to get to know people. When I went to those luncheons, however, what I found was mostly a bunch of "grumpy old men." Now, please don't get me wrong because I love those old guys, but if you are a recent grad., that connection is not always there. I did keep going though, and I was accepted "by the tribe" sort of speak. Ironically, with every passing year, I am slowly becoming one of those guys. In fact, now I've moved up to the front table. The joke is that once you have made it there, there is only one way that you can ever leave. That is to join the great A&M club in the sky.

The real fun, however, began when I started volunteering for Aggie functions outside of the luncheons. There is where I met my closest and dearest friends. One by one, I started to "hang out" with my "gang." And then, little by little, we started to grow in numbers. Within our group we had people like me who had recently gone through their own battles. Just like me, one of the group had just gone through a divorce, another whose fiance had passed away a few months earlier, another person whose fiance had broken up with him, etc. It seemed that everyone had a story to tell.

The great part of the story is that we all found each other at just the right times in our lives. We could all lean on each other and together with love and laughter, we found that we could get through life.

For the next five years we were inseparable. Every event that came along we were part of. Whether it was the A&M Club that needed us, or some event that needed help with volunteers around town, we were there. I don't think so much that it was the fact that we liked volunteer, it was just that we always had so much fun together. Our late friend Joe Mattei '53 once called us some of his favorite Aggies. A title that we have just recently adopted as our namesake.

Every Friday and Saturday night, it was just assumed that we would all do things together. Most of us spent the week planning out what our group was going to do for the next weekend. We even took a very memorable trip to New Orleans together for a birthday party. It was the greatest weekend that I still don't remember.

We were a great team, but as often happens, life moves on. One by one we got married and lost touch. You see, although we were close, we knew that someday the day would come when the group would break up. Hey, if it happened to the Beatles, it could happen to anyone.

The other night several of us got together for a "reunion" of sorts. We try to get together at least once a year.
It's strange to look across the room and see wives, husbands, and kids. It is fun though as I survey the room, to think back to those days when we all single and spent almost all of our time together, mostly laughing. The memories just start "flooding" back.

Yes, life moves on and I guess we all had to grow up sometime. But I want to thank all of the other members of "Joe's Aggies" for helping me become the person that I am today.

Birthday time......again?

Do you remember when you were little and you spent most of the year planning your birthday? For me, it began about the second week of January. Right about the same time my Christmas toys had lost their magic. That same toy that you had waited for since September, all of a sudden seemed to blend into the wall.

You remember how it was. You went to school everyday with a list of people who you were going to invite in your head. The list was revised over and over again, based on who had thrown you the ball, told a good joke, or sat next to you in class. The kid who didn't trade me his oreos for my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.....well, you know he didn't make it.

As the big day drew closer and closer, you laid out the game plan with your parents. I want to have it here... I want to invite these kids...I want this kind of cake....., etc. You could hardly stand the wait until it was your special day! It was hard to sleep the night before the party, you were so excited.

I sometimes wonder whatever happened to those days. For example, Monday night, was my beautiful trophy wife Suzanne's birthday. For some reason, I guess because it is only three weeks after Christmas, it seems to sneak up on us.
I asked Suzanne a couple of weeks ago what she wanted to do for her birthday, her answer was "nothing." Now I've been married for a few years and I'm smart enough to know that "nothing" always means "something."

She did give me a few rules however. The first was no cake. No cake?? Do you know what you call a birthday without cake? A day! I only have cake on somene's birthday, and now I'm going to have to wait for my sister-in law's birthday in February for the next cake eating occasion. This one hurts.
Second rule was that she didn't want to cook. OK, I can handle that one. Restaurant....here we come!
The third rule was that she wanted to take the kids with us. What? Did you just say take the kids with us? Normally, when we take the children with us, we end up at one of those places where they have a special playroom for the kids. You know, like Chuck E. Cheese. Please, don't get me started on Chuck E. Cheese, Mickey Mouse's white trash cousin. But I digress..

However, on this night, we ended up at one of those restaurants where when you walk in with two year old twins and a five year old, they stare at you and pray at the same time that you don't end up sitting near them.
As we walked to our table, or booth, in this case, my wife had that survival look on her face. As in, let's just get through this, or survive..if you will. Never, we have learned, have the look of fear on your face, the children can smell it.

After we trapped our children in the booth, we sat down, looked at the menu, decided what we wanted, and ordered along with our food, an expensive item off of the children's menu that they would never touch. Someday when I'm old, I'm going to insist that my children take me out to eat. When they do, I'm going to order a 50 pound lobster, and the biggest steak they have. When it comes, I'm just going to look at it and tell them that I'm not hungry.

During the time between our ordering and when our food was ready, Suzanne started whipping out the toys like crazy. She had books, cars, crayons, markers, etc. If the television in the bar would have been working, I'm sure that she would have brought along the Wii.

We did in fact survive her birthday dinner and all of us lived to tell about it. I just can't help but wonder what ever happened to the greatness of birthdays. We go from all of the hype, the planning, the dreaming to a night with young children spilling milk on themselves.

Now, if you'll excuse me Suzanne is making me something with her new EZ bake oven....