Personality of a place: Cobbleheads in Brownsville a fine eatery on a Saturday afternoon

BROWNSVILLE — The mid-afternoon sun sends its gray light from the clouds into the lower lands of the rippling resacas and cocktails and drowsy conversations.

My table is the only table in the front dining room of Cobbleheads Bar and Grill sharing itself with customers. It’s early, so I have a chance to absorb the nuances of Cobbleheads at 3154 Central Blvd. before visitors take their places and disrupt the silence.

I have often said that it is the people who truly define the personality of a place, the people with the continuously rearranging of the dynamics as they shift in place and in the rhythms of their conversations.

Lately however, I think that every moment of a place reveals a different part of its personality. A dining room without people reveals a side of its personality that we cannot see when it is filled with people. And each individual entering a place offers a different perspective on its personality and its dynamics.

So, I sit here now and absorb my surroundings. Duran Duran sings its 1982 hit “Hungry Like a Wolf” while Marilyn Monroe looks seductively in the dining room from a poster on a wall and there is a Scan Code for selecting songs.

A ready waiter attends to me with a menu and a glass of iced water. I set to exploring the menu and all its pleasures. The Cobble Deli list offers the chicken melt and the Italian Hoagie and the shrimp BLT. The Spinach Wraps catch my attention because I have never heard of such things, and the listings intrigue me: The Frankie with chicken, lettuce, tomato and tortilla chips; the Dean with fajita, onions, mozzarella cheese and pico de gallo; the Sammy with eggplant and spinach and cucumbers and feta cheese.

But then I look at the cheese steaks and those especially catch my eye. I consider for a moment the pepper steak which I like very much and have not eaten in quite some time. There’s also the bacon steak and the jalapeno steak. I finally decide, however, on the mushroom steak with sautéed mushrooms and grilled onions and Swiss cheese.

The waiter takes my order and I further reflect on my surroundings. Tom Petty now sings “Free Fallin’” through the sound system and a teenage girl walks by and I wonder if she knows she’s in an intersection of different eras.

“Free Fallin’” and the girl walking by give me cause to consider the passing of an era of change and innovation and the flowering of things. I remember my friends and I riding our bikes in the streets during the day and into the night and someone always carrying a tape player with the music of “America” and “Journey” and “Styx” and “The Eagles” and “The Bee Gees.”

If we weren’t on our bikes we were walking up and down the street with the tape player and perhaps singing along with the music and playing pranks on each other or gathering in the yards in front of our houses.

I think how today our parents could go to jail for allowing the exercise of such freedoms, and how so much of that freedom has been stolen. I wonder, does the girl walking by know what it’s like to be free? She may think she does, but does she? Does she get to hang with her friends at each other’s houses or gather in their front yards after dark talking about friends or spreading the latest gossip about teachers? Can she ride her bike around town?

In the dining room of Cobbleheads, she has walked through the intersecting of many times and places, through the land of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and Duran Duran and Tom Petty. Those icons are now layered with the Scan Codes and the Smartphones with Facebook and SnapChat and WhatsApp and bank accounts. Marilyn Monroe and Elvis could not have imagined such things.

We have become ever more distant from the tangible and the real, and I wonder how the girl and her generation will fare in a world of such distances.

Fortunately, food remains close and touchable and flavorful. The waiter brings me my very tasty mushroom cheese steak and French fries and I eat with the slowness required for such experiences. In this world of speed and brevity, I insist on enjoying my meal nice and slow, they way it should be experienced.

Meanwhile two big screens show cyclists racing through wet streets while onlookers grasp metal rails and stick their heads over the rails to be as much of the event as possible.

Cobbleheads is open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 11 a.m. to midnight Thursday through Saturday and noon to 10 p.m. Sunday.