From the Top by Michael Perry Page A

society, and yes, we neutered.
    So the cat became a familiar fixture, rubbing at our ankles on summer evenings when we ate supper on the deck, bringing fresh gophers to the children as they played on the swingset, and infusing the sandbox with a whole new treasure-hunt element. As I am tender of heart, I arranged a large pile of oat straw in one corner of the old granary, where the cat quickly took up residence, his food and water close at hand and the granary mice delivering themselves right to his paws as conveniently as if he had ordered them by phone.
    Then it got cold. There were several additional rounds of blue-eyed beseechment. I returned fire with tales of the barn cats of my youth. I spoke of their vigor, I spoke of their thick fur, I spoke of their obvious disdain for the hearth as a place for a cat of any character. On that last point I admit I may have been overspeaking on behalf of the cats. I also omitted the fact that they lived in a barn filled with Holsteins and in fact so loved the warmth of the cows that when a cow stood after lying down, the cats quickly curled up on the toasty spot for a nap. Sadly, when a cow decides to lie back down, she does so with a mighty flop, and it was not unusual to raise a cow for milking only to discover a cat that had been pressed like a daisy in a dictionary. Pancake kitties, we called them.
    Oops, there we go, five bucks to the humane association.
    Then it got really cold. Okay, fine, I said, but just until it gets back up above zero, and during the day out he goes.
    There are times—mostly when I am home alone—that I look in the mirror and assure myself that I am the man of the house. Of course this is true by default, as I am the only male in residence and thus hold the position by chromosome rather than qualification and am perhaps more accurately described as odd man out in the sorority house.
    Nonetheless. A guy is a guy. He’ll stand there in front of that mirror, right in front of the six square inches of counter space he’s allowed, and he’ll say, You sir, you are king of this castle, and he’ll hitch his man-pants and head down the hall, and there he will see a cat, somehow stretched out about three feet long on the rug in front of the woodstove, absorbing heat generated by firewood the man cut, split, stacked, unstacked, hauled to the house, restacked, and got up before dawn to light, and what that man will do is gather up that cat, carry it to the recliner, put it on his lap, and when his wife and daughters return they will find both of the men of the house fast asleep.
USED CAR SHOPPING
    We’ve been shopping for a new car. Well, not a new car, a different car. We want a different car because the transmission in our current car has reached its teen years, and right on schedule it got all moody, then it began to sulk at stoplights, and now it simply grunts and refuses to engage with the rest of the power train, meaning we basically have four options: raise a canvas sail, tell the kids to get out and push, cut a big hole in the floor and hit the road Fred Flintstone style, or get a different car. Of course we could replace the delinquent transmission, but that would frankly triple the value of the vehicle in question, so now we’re back to different.
    And of course by different I also mean used, a term that doesn’t bother me in the least, especially since the alternative euphemisms—including previously owned and previously driven —are part of an ongoing stealth campaign to camouflage all of reality with two parts spackle and one part sparkle, although neither of that pair comes within a three-thousand-mile oil change of the recently deployed term reprocessed vehicle, a real neologismic toe-curler that is the equivalent of sand in in my mental gearbox and sounds as if it was composed by a committee including a cold-hearted prison warden, an expert on industrial food extrusion, and, well, a used car dealer with denial