Now that Ben's got his own bike here, I've also been looking for a bike so I can keep up with him. I found somebody selling a used bike online, and he happened to live just a street away. Ben rode his new bike over and I walked. The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a loose-gravel driveway in which were two parked cars. The gentleman was extraordinarily cordial, and we got to talking a little while Ben rode his bike around in the street.
As we're talking, I see Ben entering the far edge of my field of vision, moving at an incredible rate.. He rockets past the two of us, bulldozes through the gravelly driveway, crashes hard head-on to the gentleman's front hood, and flies over his handlebars and lands square on the hood of his car."Whoah, that was fun."
"Oh goodness! Are you alright? Are you alright?" the man runs over to Ben, not knowing what I know (that it takes a lot more than that for Ben to get hurt). I hide my face, which is slowly turning purple, as I notice that Ben has clearly scratched the front bumper of the gentleman's car.
"Oh-my-goodness.. I'm so sorry sir! Please let me pay for the damages," I beg.
"Don't be silly! There's no damage a'tall!"
"But sir, he clearly scratched your car here.."
"Oh don't give it a moment's notice! I was just going to take it in for service anyway, see these other scratches on it?"
"Are you sure I can't pay for this? Would you please let me know if you find any other damage?"
"Oh it's nothing a'tall!"
Rather than accept compensation for his loss, the gentleman instead asks to see Ben's bike. He notices the brakes are pretty poor, so he then tells us he used to work on bikes for a living, and offers to fix Ben's bike, "Otherwise, you might go around town running into the fronts of cars!" He ended up installing new brake lines and performing a general tuning on Ben's bike.
Hi, I'm Clark W. Griswold; we're the grand prize Pig-In-A-Poke.
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