Our morning walks are always pleasant, even when the heat is up the way it is now. We walk just as the light starts to brighten the sky the slightest bit, and usually, there is a breeze, too. When we turn back towards home it is just light enough that the birds have taken over downtown as their province, and they zoom in over the street and alight on the power lines, and swoop down into the park or the green grass around the courthouse, and chase themselves flittingly up to the top of the Old Jail or the Brownwood Hotel.

On Center, the bird denizens chirp in the beautiful crepe myrtles, and every once in a while, especially by Coursey Park, the grackles will sweep by very close to try to startle us. Later, they will all be hiding out from the heat, but in the blue gray of pre-dawn they take over downtown and frolic about.

I talk about the birds a lot in these columns, and I’m not really a bird person, although I do notice them and their behavior. I read a post recently about how pigeons were once “wild woodland creatures” able to survive in the forests and wilderness, but they were once tamed and made (worldwide, I reckon) into little city-dwelling sky rats by evil humans, and the article really tried to play up how sorry we are supposed to feel for pigeons because we screwed them out of their idyllic country lives. But I don’t feel that sorry for them. They could go back to the countryside if they want, but they like it here. They are just city doves, so if times get tough after the politapocalypse, we can have pigeon roasts and grackle pies and start singing the old nursery rhymes again (4 and 20 blackbirds, baked into a pie.) I could never figure out how the blackbirds lived through being baked into a pie in the oven, or how they could still sing and fly about after such an ordeal. Rest assured that in my apocalypse kitchen, the blackbirds will be dead and plucked and stuffed before I bake them in a pie.

And that’s really what the point is, if there ever was one. How has the urban reality changed through time, and what will it be like if things go horribly wrong because we can’t all get along? The movies always picture post “event” cities, big and small, as bombed-out vestiges of civilization, bricks and debris strewn about like London during The Blitz, but I really see a different picture. I think some towns, especially ones like ours, might boom like they did during the war years. Maybe even more. Things’ll be tough, but maybe with some law and order and right thinking, we do alright.

I like to think of Brownwood as maybe a little oasis of sanity in a world gone haywire. Perhaps that is blackbird pie-in-the-sky thinking, and it’ll really get Fallout around here, but I don’t think so.

Find you someone like me – who knows things – and maybe we’ll do alright.

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