Bowling in Petoskey

Friday Morning
Michigan, on the road to Petoskey

So who knew you were supposed to put lock nuts on a tow bar to ensure that the bolts didn’t come unscrewed and cause your car to roam free as you were driving. Obviously the mechanic that fixed our last episode of wandering Jeep, that’s who.

This time we were on an interstate, but fortunately pulled over in time to stop anything more serious than the car hitting a reflector to happen. Of course the reflector put a huge dent in the bumper, and the bikes on the back of the bus scratched the Jeep’s hood all to hell, but who’s counting.

So after dropping the Jeep for repairs and spending another $2000 to buy a better towing system, we headed up to Traverse Bay in Michigan for a lovely few days. Nice place, Traverse.

We’re back on the road now, and heading to pick up the Jeep before going on to Petoskey, which is actually the subject of this blog.

Petoskey. I have no idea what to expect, but I my mind’s eye, it has lots of bowling alleys. No particular reason, but I just think Petoskey Bowlarama is a likely building.

I suspect that the locals gather there of an evening, especially during the frigid Michigan winters. As I imagine it, there will be several red and black buffalo-check shirts over T-shirts and jeans. And that’s just the gals. They would, of course, be called gals and not girls, the kind of good-time, funny gals who play like guys and drink beer out of the bottle and are great to have around because they have hearty laughs and nice figures.

I can just see these gals and their guys on the alleys of the Petoskey Bowlarama. Marylou is saying, “Jeez, Fred, you’re getting that cheese from your fries all over the score sheet.”

Fred, being a good guy, scoops up the errant cheese with his finger and licks it away. “Humph,” she says, not really caring that there’s now a pale orange smear on the edge of the sheet. “Food coloring,” she thinks, idly.

Of course if the alleys are computerized, all this will have happened on a computer screen and not a sheet of paper. Now that I think about it, Petoskey would not be behind the times in this respect.

There are a total of seven kids at home, the product of the three couples, and they’re all at Fred and Marylou’s house for a night of movies and cheese popcorn under the care of the local babysitter. You’ll note that cheese is a minor theme here in Petoskey. It’s comfort food, you see, and Petoskey would have no shortage of comfort food.

In the next alley, a group of teenage boys is making a fair amount of noise as they bowl, a fact that annoys a few of the older patrons, but not Marylou’s group, who figure their kids will get there soon enough and if making noise is the worst thing they do, their parents will consider themselves very lucky.

Everybody will be home in bed by eleven, the noisy teens included, and naturally the old folks will have been in bed for at least an hour by then. It’s not that it’s a school day, or a workday. It’s just that the babysitter has a curfew. Marylou realizes that even though she’s a grown woman with children, she still has to abide by an adult’s curfew rules. How ironic.

She tiptoes quietly from the bedroom of her sleeping, cheese-fry-sated husband, checks on the kids, then goes through the kitchen to the garage, where she grabs her bowling ball out of the car, brings it inside, and using a damp dish towel, polishes the Bowlarama dust off, then puts it back inside the new blue Plether case she got for Christmas. Not good to have a dusty bowling ball in Petoskey, where everything is neat and clean and the people are nice and bowling is fun and life is good.

Or so I imagine.