Growing up in College Station meant a life governed by the tides. Waves of students would roll into town each August and then recede again the following May. As the adolescent sons of members of the Texas A&M faculty, in those pre-internet days, my friends and I would eagerly await the annual spring exodus so that we could comb the dumpsters of the emptying apartment complexes for discarded girlie magazines. We’d stash them in our clubhouse, which we’d built from construction scrap salvaged from the sites of the first sorority houses.None of the students in charge stopped us twelve-year-olds from attending the annual science fiction convention on campus, where we saw R-rated movies like The Exorcist and Flesh Gordon. The A&M campus was our amusement…