This was a weird week, but a good one. Autumn has finally arrived and on Sunday we headed out in the cool of the morning for a walk around downtown. It’s mostly empty of people downtown on Sunday morning and there were some early fallen leaves blowing across Lee Street as we crossed over, harbingers of the season. It’s not cold, but it’s cool enough that I’m wearing a light pullover and that is saying something after this brutal summer.
We stroll down Center Avenue to Adams and then over to the Railroad Museum. Later in the week (actually last night) they’ll have the Corks ‘n Caps festival and the parking lot will be lit up and packed and rocking with music, but on this Sunday morning, it is quiet. North we go to Baker Street and then up Fisk and over to Shaw’s Marketplace and then back home.
It is a wonderful time of the year when the weather finally turns, and the hint of fall is in the air. Things smell different, crisper, and the summer waves goodbye though the grass is still green(ish) and there are still flowers in Coursey Park.
I got a voicemail and then traded emails with a man whose great-great-something grandfather built the bank building that now houses Lucille + Mabel Kitchen and Libations on the bottom floor. He doesn’t live in Brownwood now, but he grew up here and he told me stories of the building and of the town. He even told me the names of some people to look up during my next trip back through time.
As a child he played in the bank and in the basement and rode the steam-powered elevator up and down. He reminded me of Arthur (or was it Arnold? I think it was Arthur) in that movie Somewhere in Time. One of my favorite all-time movies. In it, Christopher Reeve travels back in time from the late 1970s to the early 1900s to the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. In the hotel, he meets young Arthur who is the son of the Hotel clerk. In the present day of the movie, Arthur is the aging bellhop Reeve met when he first checks into the hotel. Time-travel Reeve befriends the young Arthur (back in 1912) who likes to play in the hotel lobby with a ball and is often scolded by his father. Anyway, the man who is telling me about playing in the bank reminds me of young Arthur.
This next tidbit really stoked my imagination because I wrote a novel once, (commissioned by Amazon and approved by the estate of Kurt Vonnegut,) that was the sequel to Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. I’ll give you a quick answer to what happened to that novel here in a bit, but…
In my novel, there is a time travel elevator that is run by a friendly, cackling old black man. The man and the elevator perfectly fit the description given to me of the real-life elevator in the bank:
“At the time, there was no such thing as an automatic elevator, and there was an old black gentleman in a uniform (including a cap) that ran it. He had a small circular seat that folded out from the wall, and a control wheel with a protruding lever that he used to move the car vertically. It was up to him to get the car aligned with the door on a floor, so when he opened the door on the car, he could also open the door on the floor. When times were slow, he got a kick out of teaching me how to run the thing. When the bank built a new 2-story building across the street in 1960 (which is now being used as classrooms by Texas Tech,) there was an elevator, but it was modern/automatic and had pushbuttons. That didn’t keep me from playing in it.”
Anyway, I found all of that history interesting, and I hope you do too. I’ll be doing some more time walking soon, but for now it is all about falling back… and elevators… and the changing of the seasons.
What happened to my beautiful novel – the one that is the sequel to the Vonnegut book? The subsidiary of Amazon Publishing that commissioned the novel and paid me to write it, well, Amazon closed them down. I re-attained the rights to the book, but in doing so lost the right to use the elements of Vonnegut’s original book that made mine a real sequel. Copyright and whatnot. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make the book (in its present form) unpublishable. It’s a great book so I’ll be republishing it after some rewrites under the new title: ICE NEON.
That book is my favorite Time Travel novel and my wife’s favorite Bunker novel, period. I’ll try to get to it soon.
In the meantime, fall is here. It’s October. Cool temps and gorgeous mornings and walks are in the offing. I hope to see you around downtown.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
