“We lived in a house in Spring with no neighbors around us. We were there since I was born, so a good 16 years. It was me, my mom, my dad, a younger brother and a sister.

“We were renting from this company, and they shut down. All of a sudden, in the middle of my sophomore year at Klein High School, they told us we had to move out. My dad asked if we could wait until the summer so that we could finish the school year. Luckily, they agreed.

“We ended up moving to Dayton near my grandma. She has a lot of land, and she gave us like half an acre where we built a new home. It was a culture shock, moving away from my hometown, starting over at a much smaller high school, and living out in the country. I really missed the city and all the people I knew. One of them was a childhood friend, all the way from kindergarten until I left.

“Back in January, I was on the phone with someone. We were just playing games or whatever. It was really late, like 4 a.m. And I got this call from an unknown number. I answered, and it was the mom of my old friend. She wanted to let me know that he had committed suicide.

“It was such a shock. It came out of the blue. I had never heard of any problems he was having. I thought he was doing fine.

“It was pretty hard to deal with. It’s like, you feel so sad, and you don’t really want to do anything. You don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to go to work. You just want to stay in your room 24-7.

“Then one day I woke up, and I was just kind of talking to myself. I don’t remember exactly what I said. But it was like, ‘Hey, if you can hear me, know that I will never forget you. And I’ll do my best to impress you.’ So when it comes to work or college or anything else I’m involved in, that’s what I do. I try my best. I try my best.”

— Christopher Hernandez

Christopher is a freshman at Lee College. He is studying business, and he hopes to become an accountant.

The post He tries his best, following friend’s suicide appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’m in what is probably one of the top five oldest fantasy football leagues still in existence. We were all attending Arizona State, where I was a grad student. We were these jocks who played together on an intramural football team. We were just good friends who liked to hang around each other all the time.

“We held our first draft in 1978. We made up our own rules, who got scoring and all that kind of stuff. We started off at $5 a week. Whoever won the Super Bowl got to take a date out for dinner with wine, and bring back the tab for us all to split up.

“It started with 11 of us on that intramural team. Nine of the 11 are left. Two of us have passed. So we’ve got nine, plus a couple guys we’ve added over the years.

“The cool thing is that we all started our careers together. One guy went to the Naval Academy, and we call him The Admiral. We have very successful businessmen. We have educators. We have psychiatrists. We have one guy who’s in charge of all the electricity grids in western America.

“We’ve been through everything together: the birth of our kids, friends dying, businesses going up and down. We’ve gone on vacations together with our wives. We still meet twice a year religiously to do our draft and everything. That’s pretty cool, I think, to have a circle of friends, nine of whom are from the core you’ve known for over 40 years.

“We really never have gone online. We’re so old-fashioned, we still keep notes by hand. We have hard copy written minutes of every meeting. We have an archive of documents that you wouldn’t believe. All we do with the internet is submit our lineups every week, and we use it to communicate.

“We have a pretty special bond. I guess we all just love each other. But we still have a bloody, bloody rivalry when it comes to who wins that trophy, I’ll tell you that. It’s pretty cutthroat.”

— Jeff Butler

They were planning to meet in Las Vegas to hold this season’s draft. But due to the coronavirus pandemic, they will probably do it on Zoom.

Related:

• Robotics team mentor helps other ‘curious’ kids

The post Fantasy football league friends still going strong appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’m thinking about getting dirty.”
— Zoey, miniature Schnauzer, and Mia, Shih Tzu

“Zoey is my brother’s dog. She’s a little spoiled dog, just like Mia. Grandma and Grandpa feed them both scraps of food from the table.

“When one is gone, the other one stands around howling and crying. They miss each other a lot.

“Around the house they fight over this one particular squeaky toy that looks like a squirrel. Zoey doesn’t really play with toys, but I think she snatches this toy away from Mia just to torment her.”

The post Best dog friends practically joined at the hip appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“This man wanted to get back at his wife, who had been living in my apartment complex. So on a Fourth of July, he decided to throw a Molotov cocktail onto her porch. I was home at the time. I was about to go to bed when I hear this banging at my door. They said, ‘Get out. There’s a fire.’ So I grabbed what I could and got out of there. The fire burned four or five apartments, all because this guy was mad at his wife. The worst part was that she didn’t even live there anymore. She had moved a couple days before he did it. She knew he was going to do something like that, I guess. It was a little scary. It was 11 o’clock at night, and I had to go to work at the hospital the next day. The apartment people put us up in a hotel for a few nights. Then I had to move all my belongings to a different apartment. 

My unit didn’t burn up, but there was a lot of smoke damage. I had two pet cockatiels named Pretty Boy and Jackie. One was white and the other was gray. When I opened my door after the fire and went over to their cage, they were both at the bottom because of the smoke. They were dead. That made me so angry, that somebody would do this for no good reason. But I have so many friends at the hospital. Everybody donated money, and I was able to get two new cockatiels. They were Buddy and Pretty Girl. I’ve since lost them, so I’m birdless now. But I’m thinking about getting one or two more. 

“Cockatiels are great pets. They whistle. They chirp. They make wonderful sounds. And they’re really good company. The thing I like most about them is that they’re just really good friends.”

— Roger Roosa

Roger worked at Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital (formerly San Jacinto Hospital) for 40 years. He is now a volunteer there.

Related:

• Volunteer feels like ‘very important person’

The post Apartment fire claims his cockatiel friends appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We met in high school. I had him in a couple classes, and we just started talking. Before long, we became real good friends. We would hang out together, usually riding around on our bicycles or playing video games. It was the ‘80s. If you didn’t have a car, that’s about all there was to do.

“Well, I didn’t see him at school for a few days. His mother worked there. So when I finally saw her, that’s when she told me. He committed suicide. He used a shotgun.

“It was about a girl, of all things. You know how people get so wrapped up in a boy or a girl, then they break up. When you’re so young, it can be pretty traumatic. Or, at least, you think it is. But at that age — he was only about 16 — you really don’t know anything.

“When you’re close to somebody like he and I were, it’s just difficult to comprehend why they would take their own life. It was pretty hard for me for a good while. It put me in this real low place. I kept thinking that if only he would have said something like, ‘Hey, I’m going through this. Do you think you can help me?’ But I guess some people don’t realize that their friends and others are willing to help. So when they’re going something and decide to keep it to themselves, then it’s too late.”

— Richard Vargas

The post High school friend’s suicide continues to haunt him appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I struggled with depression in high school. I was bullied. I was having problems with my family. It was all really weighing me down. So my counselor referred me to this website where I could talk to people. It’s this one-on-one thing where you type in the topic you want to talk about and it matches you with people dealing with similar issues. I did it a couple times over a few weeks, and I began meeting some really good people. Then we decided to get off the website and continue communicating on our own. Through that, I developed some great friendships with people all over the world. I discovered that it’s easy to talk to someone overseas because they have no connection with the people around you. So talking with them about your problems, you don’t have to worry that it’s going to come back to bite you later.

“One of my friends lives in Portsmouth, England. Another lives in Australia. I have a friend who’s a soldier from Canada, and he’s in Israel right now. Then I have another friend from England who’s in France right now. We talk on Skype all the time. Sometimes we send each other packages. We’re all different ages, but I can honestly say that I feel close to these people.

“The whole experience has really opened my eyes. We may seem different, but in many ways we’re very much the same. They may live in another part of the world, but they deal with the same problems that we do.”

— Michaela Jones

Related:

• She sets her sights on international business career

The post Overseas friends help her win depression battle appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We’re friends. We’ve known each other about three months now. We’ve been on the streets for a while.”

“You would not believe how many homeless people are out here. We’ve got to kind of watch out for one another.”

“I’m sleeping in her car. Thank God we’ve got a vehicle.”

“Yeah, it’s paid for. But that’s about all I’ve got. When I started sleeping in it, it kind of freaked me out. You’ll do this 20-minute thing where you’ll sleep, then keep waking up because you think somebody is going to sneak up on you. A guy freaked me out the other night. He came to ask me for a cigarette. I was like, whoa, where did you come from? I was already lying down with the seat back, and all of a sudden he was in my face.

“We’ve just been trying to hustle to make a little money. We’ve been at McDonald’s just sitting there with a sign saying, homeless, please help. Some people do give us money, so we manage to get gas and food. That’s how we’ve been surviving.”

“We hold the sign, and we don’t even make eye contact. We try not to look at people. I’m ashamed. But we still sit out there and do it. You have to.

“Before I became homeless, I remember being judgmental of people. But now I get it. Now I’m living it.”

“Yeah, you never know what situation someone is in. You don’t know what they’ve been through. It makes you think, and then one day you find yourself out here.

“As long as you can take a shower or bath somewhere at least once a week, you feel kind of normal. When we can scrape together enough money, we get a motel room for a day. We get the room as soon as they’ll let us check in, which is right at 11 o’clock, and we keep it until 11 the next morning. We get a hot shower. We get a nice place to sleep. And it’s cool. Believe it or not, it makes you feel so much better. That one day of being in AC, being able to watch TV, not being harassed, and not having the mosquitoes trying to eat you alive, it makes all the difference in the world.”

“It’s hard to think about your future. You pray to God that life just has ebbs and flows. It might be a low now, but there’s got to be a high coming somewhere. At least, you hope so.”

— Kenneth and Pat

AUDIO EXTRA: Pat describes how she lost her job because of her age

The post Homeless friends thankful for small pleasures appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We have seven kids, ages 28 to 3. He had three from a previous marriage, and we have four together. The best part about having a big family is that you have plenty of friends.

“Once they’re grown, it’s awesome. My oldest daughter and I are best of friends. When she was younger, though, I didn’t know if we were going to make it through those teenage years. She was a wild child. When she hit about 15, she decided to see how much trouble she could be. It’s something that we’ve talked about so many times.

“But now she has two kids of her own. She has a daughter who is just five weeks younger than my youngest here. And they’re best friends, which is very nice.”

How do you explain the transformation?
“I don’t know. Growing up, I guess every kid realizes at some point that their parents were right about a lot more stuff than they thought.”

— Janice Christine

The post Big family means that you can have lots of friends appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“At this point in the game, I just do whatever makes me happy on a daily basis.”

What makes you most happy?
“When I’m at work with my friends. In my job, I get to talk with people every day that I know pretty well and have developed a relationship with. Some of them have been my clients since I started cutting hair more than 30 years ago. I cut their hair, their kids’ hair, and now their kids are grown and married and they have kids.

“I have a tendency to stop working my hands whenever my mouth is engaged. I think that’s OK because with a lot of people, I feel like they came to visit. We catch up on things: their lake house, their grandkids, whatever. I guess my hairdressing and socializing all kind of blend together. Most of my clients enjoy that. I hope they look at it like, I’m not just going to get a haircut today, I’m going to see Paul.”

— Paul O’Banion

(Update: Paul passed away in October 2017.)

The post Hair stylist enjoys visiting as much as cutting appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We became friends this past school year. We taught math and science together, and our kids are about the same age. We have so much in common.”

“We have matching personalities. Actually, not really.”

“We’re like yin and yang.”

“Yeah, she’s really outspoken and organized, and I’m non-confrontational and have no concept of time. I’m always late.”

“I’m always like, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ We work pretty well together.”

Unfortunately, their friendship dynamics are about to change.

“We’re moving to Shanghai, China, for my husband’s job. We kind of thought we were going to put down roots here because we’ve moved around so much. My in-laws even bought a house here. But you have to do what you have to do. I figure there’s a plan. We just have to trust in it.”

“And I’m very sad. I finally find a friend who I can tell secrets to and know that she’s not going to say anything. And the kids have a lot of the same interests. We’re really going to miss them.”

— Sonia Ramirez and Kris Shelley

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