How do you like that shiny new Bluffton?

Call it a snapshot of the state of affairs in the State of Mind.

It was in Bluffton — appropriately in Old Town — where I went to meet old friends. (They were the old ones.)

We were seated outside one of the watering holes that have transformed Calhoun Street. It has gone from a place where dogs, or people for that matter, could sleep in the street to a trendy darling of trendy darlings like Garden & Gun magazine.

Dogs played near our table. It started out innocently enough, but soon looked like they needed to get a room.

A young singer took the microphone and I imagined it was one more dot on her long road of broken hearts to Nashville.

My little group was former colleagues — ink-stained wretches from a newspaper life who can now laugh at the retelling of peculiarities discovered under the hood of a place we call home.

That’s when we noticed the snapshot of the new old Bluffton.

A shiny Mercedes convertible rolled into the parking lot, and squeezed for a moment in between two parked golf carts.

One golf cart had an orange Clemson tiger paw flag on it. A big black Lab, probably named Five Star, waited obediently on the seat.

If it’s like most Lowcountry Labs today, it’s 1/100th actual Lab, and more familiar with tennis balls than ducks. But it looks at home.

On the other side of the Mercedes was a golf cart with a red and black University of Georgia flag. It doesn’t have a dog, but it does have a lot of stickers all over it, like a Yeti cooler on wheels. And it has a University of Georgia license tag, which I understand is the new diploma, suitable for framing.

In all my days, Bluffton has been known as a “State of Mind.” The golf carts are clinging to that like oyster spat.

But at the same time, they’re starting to look like a john boat in Harbour Town.

This ain’t your father’s Calhoun Street, when music slipped out of windows in the home of an eccentric piano virtuoso named after Luke the apostle.

In the new old Bluffton, the Mercedes was lucky to have a parking spot at all.

I couldn’t help but think about the sign that used to be out in the May River. Maybe it’s still there. It warned Hilton Head Island people to turn around because they weren’t allowed any further up the river.

The old ink-stained wretches in my crowd labored over too many stories and headlines and corrections and opinions and letters to the editor and cranky phone calls to wonder how we got from there to here.

We were glad to have a nice place to meet on a beautiful Lowcountry evening. And we still knew how to enjoy a good snapshot when we saw one.

This story was originally published May 4, 2017 at 10:05 AM with the headline "How do you like that shiny new Bluffton?."