#garelli

(I don’t know what Maggie envisioned, but it’s my headcanon so it’s a 70s Garelli.)

In my town, there's a scooter club. I think it started as some sort of ironic joke, but nowadays it's extremely popular. People of all ages have joined, digging out 80s Honda Sprees, Kymcos, and even worryingly-unobtanium Garelli mopeds and scoots from their attics, garages, swamps, ditches and trailer-park estate auctions. Just a few weeks ago, I was waiting at a light downtown when a gang of Genuine Buddies pulled up next to me and started aggressively revving their 50cc thumpers.

It looked like fun, so I decided to go online and see if I could pick up a couple five-hundo screamers for my very own. I still had visions of café-racing my tiny-engined steed along the river as bicyclists screamed at me to stop driving on the bike path. And I still held those dreams until they were dashed by the complete lack of listings. Yes, there still was the “I know what I got” contingent, reposting every week on Kijiji with their eternally-optimistic $10k 80s scooters, but everything else was long gone. I thought up possible reasons that this could be. We’d had a long winter, which - paradoxically - is when people usually buy more scooters to work on over the course of the White Death, but that couldn’t possibly explain why even the eBay single-use scooters were gone as well.

The only conclusion I could come to was that my particular brand of insanity had finally taken root inside the population. Our hills were alive with the sound of two-strokes, and I was unable to participate. There was just one thing left to do.