My Side of the Story*

I've had so much fun spending time with Mandy in the beautiful mountains of NC. Today we went to her church, and it was amazing! Afterward, we walked to Mandy's seventeen-year-old Explorer which she had conveniently parked toward the exit so we could avoid traffic. We were discussing how similar her church in NC and our church in GA really are. She was in mid-sentence about how the pastor's voice was so calming that she could listen to him all day long, when she stopped dead in her tracks and let out an expletive.

My eyes followed her, and there sat irony -- in the form of a severely flattened back left tire. I thought No worries, Mandy! By the time we're done here we won't have to worry about traffic anyway!

I looked at her and asked if she had a spare.

"I don't know."

"Well, can you open the back hatch? It will either be under the upholstery back there or..." I looked under the car, "...yep, there it is. And it's no regular spare. It's a full-fledged Firestone!"

Time to put my gifts to action. And, no, I don't mean a car-mechanic-oil-under-your-nails kind of gift. I mean the gift of calm in a crisis. This WAS a crisis, right?

I then looked at her and asked, "Do you have a jack?" After all, it was purchased in 1991. It might have been misplaced since then.

Mandy just stared and looked perplexed. "I don't know. Surely a boy will help us."

"Maybe," I mumbled. But I wasn't waiting around to see. I found a compartment in the back of the vehicle and opened it up. The lug wrench was there. Mandy wanted to know what it was. We walked to the front of the car and I checked the glove box. Amazingly, the original manual was still there. I looked in the index and found the directions for releasing the jack. Mandy read them and began to follow them, all the while looking over her shoulder for the prince on the white horse to ride up at any moment.

And believe it or not, he did. He wasn't so much of a prince on a white HORSE as a prince with white HAIR. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed; I wouldn't be able to add "changing a car's tire by myself" to my list of "29 in 29." But, at the same time, it was kind of nice to have someone else do it for us.

On our way home, in the lopsided Explorer, Mandy looked down at her hand. "How did I manage to get grease on me?"

Because, Mandy, it takes hard work to watch a boy change a tire.

*To read the other side of the story, click here. But I must warn you, being a big fan of data myself, you must know that "100% of girls polled" in her blog equals about three.