Another loose end accounted for

It’s hard for me to stay on track when I write.
I think of tangential stuff that might elucidate or amplify a point I’m making, but I worry that it actually detracts from the piece because it can spiral off into infinity.
So when I wrote the post about my first real girlfriend turning 60 this month and my fondness for connections with my past, I was tempted to throw in this story to illustrate the point:
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for the spring of 1956. (Yes, I know that was almost a half-century ago. And yes, I realize that a reference to the 1960s cartoon series Rocky and Bullwinkle is lost on younger readers. And yes, I know this is one of those parenthetical digressions.)
I was recovering from a broken leg – the consequence of an unfortunate bicycle-car encounter in which my left femur was broken on the front bumper of a doctor’s Cadillac.
I was in plaster from waist to left ankle and spent the final month of my fifth grade year at home.
I don’t recall who it was but some friend of my parents decided I could use a pen pal to occupy my time. They hooked me up with an Australian kid named Winston Sleaford who lived in Kabra, a short distance from Rockhampton, which is situated where the Tropic of Capricorn crosses the east coast of Australia.
It was about as far away as one could be from my small Midwestern hometown – a land of exotic marsupials where everyone except a few Aborigines conveniently spoke English. Being about a year older than I, Winston was born during World War II and was doubtless among tens of thousands of boys throughout the British Empire named for wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
I don’t remember much about our correspondence other than that his first effort was on a commercial note card with a pen and ink sketch of a koala on the cover and that he included about a dozen eucalyptus leaves. I’d never seen or smelled eucalyptus leaves before, so it was pretty cool.
We corresponded for a year or two before he got busy with other stuff and stopped writing.
Over the years, Winston’s name and simple address - Kabra via Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia – popped into my consciousness whenever I thought about that part of the world.
Then, around Christmas 2000, I got an e-mail from Winston. He’d tracked me down with an internet search engine, apologized for being the first to stop writing and was eager to catch up.
He’d had a career with the Postmaster General's Department in Australia, had a wife and kids and grandchildren and was enjoying his retirement. I responded with a catch-up e-mail and photos of myself and my family.
Since then, we’ve exchanged holiday e-mails and I get the feeling that the re-connection has given him the same sense of tying up a loose end that it has for me.
How often do you get to renew a 50-year-old friendship with someone you’ve never met?