Oh good…my pen pal is coming. And he wants to meet me. That’s…great.
He just looked me up on Visage-Tome all these years later. Looks totally different from when our schools put us in contact, but of course he does; it’s been twenty years. But just meeting him isn’t the part that I’m afraid of. You see, I may have, kinda, sorta, totally lied in my letters. Well, mostly. I got bored quickly, and then just started making stuff up. I said true stuff, like how my Dad did things like outboard motor repair. Melbourne has some changeable weather, also true. But the existence of the Outboard Motor Mafia, who smuggled things in underwater tunnels? Yeah, that was embellished.
And I could get away with THAT stuff, except I may also have mentioned Melbourne as a boating paradise covered in waterways like Venice. I didn’t know he’d actually VISIT. He said he lived on a farm in the mountains of Albajeria, and he actually seemed happy about the prospect of dying in the same house he was born in. I pretty much assumed that he was never leaving his home country, so I could say what I liked about outboard motors and canals because what did it matter? The internet wasn’t really a thing back then either, not for me, and definitely not for a mountain farmer.
I guess I’ll just tell him things have changed. Cars have taken over again. The outboard motor repair business has flourished and thrived, but now everyone just wants to forget the past so we don’t talk about the Outboard Motor Mafia. In fact, we pretend we don’t even remember them. It’s always just been us having a great time in Melbourne, quality outboard motor services as normal, nothing to see here. Well, nothing except the Bolte Bridge, wow! Look at that! Don’t think about any of that stuff I said in my letters, please…
-Ben