Anytime I hear a song by Chicago, and specifically from albums 16 or 17, I am carried back to my sophomore and junior years in high school.  I think this is in part because both albums had singles in heavy airplay as either new releases or recurrent singles during those years- Chicago was hot to a 16 year-old discovering life and love and all that.  But I also think specifically of my junior year when I hear a song from them because it was at the start of school in 1984 when I met a new kid who was a transfer to Eldorado from a school in the southeast corner of New Mexico.  I remember meeting him in our anchor English class.  He came into a full classroom, look confident, and when he spoke, he had a Texas twang to his voice.  His name was Brett.

Brent  was friendly and made friends easily, and I remember he had a casual coolness to him, coming into a giant school and he looked ready to fit in.  He had come to Albuquerque from Hobbs.

In time, I learned he loved basketball, and that he had played in Hobbs, which was an automatic endorsement of his abilities.  Hobbs High School was a perennial New Mexico basketball powerhouse for four decades under two-time National Coach of the Year and 11-time State Championship winner Ralph Tasker, who was head coach there when I was at Eldorado. In the fall, we both went out for the team and we both ended up on the JV squad. Brent was a lean, taller guard with a great outside shot.

During our junior year, Brent made a lot of friends, and I also remember him dating a gal from our class who he really was stuck on.  I think Brent, behind all of his casual coolness, was a steeped romantic who, like me, waded in melancholia from time to time.

Several times, I rode with Brent to one of our away games during the year, and inevitably, wherever we were driving to play at within Albuquerque, he always had one cassette tape in the deck that we listened to along the way: Chicago 17.  To this day, any time I hear “Hard Habit to Break”, I think immediately of Brent.

I saw less of Brent after high school, although we both went on to attend UNM. Still, he linked himself to Chicago forever in my mind.