The Boys At The Frat House By Just Plain Bob
Stephanie and I had been living in Houston in a rented apartment when her parents died in an automobile accident. In their will they left Steph their house in a college town that I will not name and we flew back to put the house on the market. Once there we found that the job market was good and that work in both our fields was plentiful and so we decided to keep the house and relocate. The house was located on a street that was known as "fraternity row" since two thirds of the fraternity and sorority houses were located on it. Our house was about an eighth of a mile from them and it meant a lot of traffic on the street, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, but that was pretty much the only drawback to living there.
There was one more drawback to having the house, but only from my perspective. The apartment that we'd had in Houston didn't allow pets and having a house meant that Steph could now have a dog. Now, I don't dislike dogs, I just don't want one. Cats are fine because they don't require much in the way of care. Keep the food dish full, the water dish full and the litter box clean and a cat will take care of itself. The same thing can't be said for a dog. Dogs have to be walked, taken outside three or four times a day so they can dump in the yard, which eventually you will have to clean up. If you want to go away for the week end the cat can be left behind at home, but with a dog you either have to take him with you, find someone to dog sit or take him to a kennel.
And then there is the barking. Whenever something bothers the dog, which is most usually in the middle of the night, he (or she) can usually be counted on to bring you out of a sound sleep. All in all, I just did not want a dog, but Steph did and so we got a dog, a big Great Dane and she named it Max.
Steph was a runner and she runs a good five miles a day, usually in the cool of the evening, and she would take the dog with her. She would usually be gone for an hour and forty-five minutes to two hours and that was what I called my 'quiet time'. I t gave me the opportunity to do all the things I needed to get done without Steph constantly bothering me to do this or that. We settled into a routine and over the next couple of years life ran smooth and was good. Then my employer started expanding and I started being sent out to oversee the setup of new offices. It was on one of these trips that I met Charley. Charley was the office manager of our new startup office in Atlanta and on the third night I was there he asked me to join him for dinner. First we talked about business and mutual acquaintances in the industry and then he commented on the fact that his younger brother Danny went to college in my town.