“You scare me,” the woman said. “Not in the creeper-weirdo sense of being scared, but like if I was in a foreign country. Maybe dangerous? I don’t know. And I didn’t speak the language and I was

The mass-man looks at a city, or a bridge, or a building and he doesn’t even begin to ponder how it got there. He never considers what sacrifices, pains, and sorrows went into making that element of

I’ve written at some length about how you can study and learn a lot of history without being tainted by political narratives, revisionism, and the modern cultural need to re-examine history according to the dictates of the

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

This one will take some work on your part. I’ll be back in the next column, if the Lord wills it, with something more light-hearted. Maybe another walk back in time or an excursion around downtown. You

In the old days, Brownwood wasn’t even “blue collar.” It was “dirt collar.” Most of the people downtown at any given time, if they weren’t operating a shop of some sort, were here in wagons or trailers

I walked the downtown sidewalks absorbing the city, soaking it in as I walked. The sidewalks are patchwork now, a running diary of the urban decades and here there is (now, in this time) a handicap ramp

“I need to leave as soon as brunch is over,” I said. “I’m going to the theater.” If you’d bet me hard currency just a few years ago if I’d ever say those words in that order,

Downtown Brownwood, they say, is being “revitalized.” It’s not just they that say it, urban revitalization has become a common phenomenon in middle America today, especially in the middle of Texas. It’s not a marketing ploy or