Forty (40) Years Later

Twenty-four hours after we arrived home from the U.P., after visiting Mackinac Island, I turned around and drove three hours south to meet an old friend at Pentwater, where I lived one long-ago summer. Back then, coming directly from Lansing, Pentwater seemed tiny to me. Of course, it's grown a lot since then, but looking at the length of the downtown main street and experiencing it in comparison to Northport and Leland, where I've lived for the past 15 years, I don't see Pentwater as all that small any more. Wonder how big their school is?

I'd been through a couple of times in the decades since that brief residence, so I knew about the condos and other new development. But just this past spring the old Nickerson Inn, where my friend Jeanie was a waitress back in 1967, burnt to the ground. Now a big billboard at the front of the empty hill reads "Thanks for 93 years of memories." And only this past Saturday the old Gustafson's gift shop closed for good, the beautiful big old three-story corner building now for sale. Those are big changes for the town.

This past weekend was the "Fall Festival," with a huge craft fair and even a Deep Fried Twinkie wagon, but a more permanent (or as permanent as such things are) sign of the new, upscale Pentwater is this little tiki bar where Laurie and I lunched on Sunday. It's like Florida with birch trees instead of palms.