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| Valentines
Day 1986 fell on a Friday as it sometimes does. For my wife Lorraine that meant
a late afternoon school party with her Special Education colleagues enjoying a
few goodies before heading home. And sure enough, when Mom pulled into our driveway
a little before suppertime, we could see a back seat full of helium filled balloons,
some red ones and a few white ones too. As usual I got excited along with our
two children, Leland aged 10 and his little sister Leanora then 4. In the past
few years any helium balloon entering the Brown household was destined to carry
a small, brief note aloft into the heavens along with childish hopes that it would
somehow circumnavigate the world before settling to terra firma in Tasmania or
the North Pole where someone would find its modest message. Those little notes
always said the same thing scrawled in Sharpie, encouraging the finder to phone
us. They inelegantly read, “If You Find This Balloon, Please Call Us, signed The
Browns of Austin, Tx.” followed by our
phone number. Of course this never happened but we kept trying. So as the sun
was setting on that particular Valentines Day we quickly tagged the two biggest
but plain latex balloons left over from mom’s Valentine party with the messages
taped to short bits of ribbon, We then let them go out front before sitting down
to dinner. A cool front passed that evening in a westerly to easterly direction
so we had certain hopes that one of them would somehow find its way to Nairobi,
New Delhi, or at least to the other side of town. |
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The
following day being Saturday, after breakfast we all piled into the family car
and went to do next week’s shopping, by then having completely forgotten the long
gone, red and white balloons. Returning a few hours later with bags of groceries,
a few odds and ends plus loads of library books as usual, we got home just in
time for a most surprising telephone call. The wall phone was actually ringing
and ringing as we drove into the garage then quickly came through the kitchen
door.
I grabbed it and said “Hello”, a bit out of breath and was immediately
asked, “Is this The Browns of Austin, Texas?”
I answered “Yes Sir It Is, and Who is This?”
A gentleman replied,
telling me that his name was so and so and he was calling from Wadesboro, North
Carolina. “My friend and I were coming back from fishing about noon and saw this
red balloon coming down in a pasture,” he told me, and “We hadn’t caught anything
fishing, so we figured we’d catch a balloon. I thought it was a hoax but figured
it was worth a long-distance call.” |
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Then I said, “Who
Is This Really? Assuming that somebody was pulling my leg. I too thought it was
a hoax at first but after chatting with the gent for a few minutes, I later telephoned
the National Weather Service office at old Mueller airport here in Austin and
told them what had apparently happened. One of the weather guys took my info then
called back a little while later.
He said, “It’s a little hard to believe,
but it could have happened. The wind directions are all pointing that way.”
Then
he added, “… if the balloon reached 10,000 feet it traveled at 40 knots in zero-degree
weather, which would be 800 miles in 16 hours.”
Somebody at the Weather
Service had phoned the American Statesman about the balloon and they sent out
a reporter to get our story. They even sent along a photographer who shot a few
frames of the kids with our leftover balloons. The story ran in the next day’s
Sunday edition and the Browns basked in the glow of new found fame as friends
and neighbors called to say that they had read the newspaper story and how neat
it was. Alas, no photos actually accompanied the minor news tidbit and while it
wasn’t exactly a Man Bites Dog bulletin, it was a real and very special moment
for The Browns of Austin, TX.
©
Mel Brown
Please send comments to: melbjr@earthlink.net
"They
shoe horses, don't they?"
February 10, 2011 Column
More Columns
by Mel Brown
More: Texas
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