From the Top by Michael Perry Page B

issues.
    We don’t mind used. It fits our budget and furthermore, based on the way we’ve treated the one new car we’ve ever owned, used is exactly what we deserve. You drive off the lot swearing you’llnever ever sully the squeaky-clean seat covers and within a week there is loose change in the defroster, snowboot prints on the ceiling, and the heater smells of yogurt splatter.
    Also, I keep saying used car, when in truth we’re shopping for a used mini-v … mini-v … y’know, I swore a long time ago you’d never catch me in one of those, so let’s just call it the fambulance.
    Car shopping is tough for me, because I am just not a car guy. I could give two rips what I’m driving, the sole exception being certain old pickup trucks that are not so much vehicles as loyal companions. Therefore, as with most grownup decisions in our family, my wife is taking the lead, calling dealers, setting up test drives, and consulting a multitude of online car-buying guides. When I started the fire on a recent cool morning, the weekly shopper was laden with circles and underlines and lists of pros and cons. I have done my part by accompanying her on follow-up test drives with salesmen, reconnoitering with Craigslist strangers in Walmart parking lots, kicking tires, looking for oil leaks, and talking the kids down when they realize there’s a pretty good shot that not only will our vehicle not include a DVD player, it may have rolled off the line before DVDs were even invented. Shoot, the first used fambulance we bought had been rewired so you had to run the wipers using a standard electrical wall switch.
    Nearly a month has passed since we started looking. My wife and I are great at talking everything through and weighing all our options. We are not so great at pulling the trigger. We’ve had to borrow a car from a friend to get us through this patch. He has no children, so after he gets the car back he’ll probably roll a few miles before he stops wondering where we put the off-brand air freshener and realizes that’s just what raspberry yogurt smells like after two weeks in the heater.
FIREWOOD FRIEND
    I got a bunch of wood split the other day, which is good because we were down to nothin’ but bark last “spring” when we got one final blast of the white stuff and I had to beg some wood off my buddy Mills. I didn’t actually have to beg, I just mentioned to him that we were caught short, and the next time I came home there was a quarter cord stacked right there in the garage. That’s the kind of friend Mills is.
    Mills and I met about twenty-five years ago back when we were both green EMTs. My first recollection is of him and me down in a ditch in the dark, struggling to extricate some drunk guy wearing a split lip and a bloody yellow tie. Sometime after that we were standing around an ambulance bay at 3 a.m. and he got to talking about how he’d been bowfishing—or, to put it less artfully, shooting carp with a bow and arrow. To a knucklehead of my extraction, the idea of combining archery and fishing seemed about as good as it gets, so I convinced Mills to take me, and before long we were sneaking off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills even took me to his favorite spot, a fallen tree he called the Widowmaker that lay parallel to a channel filled with foraging carp.
    You don’t take someone to your favorite carp-shooting spot unless you’re ready to make a long-term commitment. Soon Mills and I were doing all the things real friends do. I helped him move, then he helped me move. I smashed my knuckles helping him put a refrigerator down the right-angle stairs to his basement; hesmashed his helping me wrassle a vintage stove the size of a Hereford through two porch doors and into my kitchen. We enabled each other’s hoarding tendencies by trading eBay links, buying things out from underneath each other on