We locked the apartment and skirted the Tres Leches building and strolled up Brown and then past the gym and up the narrow street toward the courthouse. While some of the businesses are being fixed up and renovated or rebuilt and revitalized, others lie fallow, and you just hope someone will do something with them someday. Everything is someone’s memory.

It was the Lord’s Day and we were walking up to the Red Wagon for breakfast. The Red Wagon is a “diner-diner” at the gateway to downtown, a five-minute walk from the apartment. A “diner-diner” is what I call a specific breed of restaurant that lives in almost every town in America. I don’t have to describe it, even if I will. You know these places because you’ve been there too — a rustic joint with the vivid memory of cigarette smoke alive like ghosts in the walls and the ceiling fans and with the smell and sounds of plates of eggs and sausage and biscuits and gravy sliding across Formica, and the coffee tastes like a memory where your grandma is still alive and things are good.

The Red Wagon lives on this Sunday, and it is where a lot of the old veterans, and new ones too, will be for the inexpensive eggs and hash browns and omelets and peace like a river on Sunday. The diner-diner is a church, too, if you love the Lord and two are three are gathered there. This one has the same soul as the diner-diners I remember back in the day. Like the one they had on that show ALICE, or like the POJOS where I worked bussing tables in Odessa when I was fourteen. Salt shakers and laminated menus and sugar packets and brown, bottomless coffee cups never tired because their work is never done.

Diner joints like these are some of the best portals for time travel you’ll ever experience. I remember meeting my Uncle Tommy and my Aunt Joyce at the Pancake House on Avenue Q in Lubbock a couple of dozen years ago and the place bled history and you didn’t even know Lubbock if you never had a breakfast at the Pancake House. He told me that. And in that weird way where memory fuses and locks in details and connects things in time and space, I never went into a diner-diner after that and didn’t think of Uncle Tommy.

That’s what a diner-diner is to me. A living memory. You know the places I’m talking about, and you feel it when you’re in one of them. Time never really touches them, and the food tastes the same as it did 30 years ago or last August or last week.

I never stepped into a diner after that one time at the Pancake House in Lubbock and didn’t think of Uncle Tommy.

Walking northward toward the diner last Sunday I think of these things, even as I see the history around me. This area around the courthouse used to be ringed with wagon yards and livery stables and then a half century later there were 80,000 or so soldiers down here on the weekends looking for exciting things and trouble and peace, too. I bet there were diner-diners with coffee that made those kids think of home. But it wasn’t all about breakfast.

Most of the businesses downtown during the war years had “doctors” on staff who could write prescriptions for one pint of alcohol a day (for medicinal purposes only,) and the soldiers would stand in line on weekends at the Brownwood Hotel or a dozen other places for their “prescriptions” to be filled. There was a reason that booze was called “courage” back then, and now it really isn’t.

Too, they ate cheap meals at the diner-diners, paid with nickels and dimes and quarters, and they thought about home and where they were going and what it meant to die or to live.

A lot of those kids mobbing Brownwood in the 40s got shipped to Europe or to the Pacific and they died there, or they came back wounded whether they’d ever been shot or blown up or not. And then they just got back to work in the factories or the shops or they started their own businesses like nothing had ever happened. And sometimes they’d meet their kin on a Sunday in a diner-diner and not talk about the war or what they saw over there.

On this Sunday at the Red Wagon, I knew we’d be burying Uncle Tommy come Tuesday. His memory was alive for me in the Red Wagon that Sunday just like the smoke in the walls and the coffee. He was a marine who fought in Korea, and he made it home and he was a great dad and husband and a fantastic uncle who built a business that employed a lot of people over many decades. He was married to the same woman for 69 years. That kind of memory is in the walls too.

I wish I could go to the Pancake House in Lubbock this morning, the day after the funeral, but instead I’ll go to the Red Wagon with my wife and time travel for a minute or two. The 21-gun salute still reverberates in my head and heart and Taps still plays in my mind today. The coffee will help.

Y’all have a great day and enjoy your freedom.

***

Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.