As an old girlfriend and I were driving into town one day in her 1998 Toyota, a passing gravel truck dropped a bit of its carelessly-secured load right in front of us. Several golf-ball-sized pebbles bounced off the road. Before we knew what was happening, one of them flew up toward the grille, smashing the passenger-side headlight.

She was just starting a new job, and dropping what it cost for a new headlight assembly was simply out of the question. On top of that, her work schedule conflicted with the business hours of local junkyards.

And so it fell to yours truly to help her out of this dilemma.

I took a box of tools, some mine and some hers, and ventured on a rainy morning to the biggest of the three local junkyards. I spent over an hour in that cold mist going down row after row of junked cars, checking out one after another. Even though my girlfriend's car was an older model it seemed as though I'd never find a suitable replacement for her headlight. Every car seemed to be either the wrong year or the wrong model, or was missing its lights entirely. On the verge of calling it quits, I finally did find just the right headlight assembly for her car. I spent about 45 minutes extracting it, and took it to the junkyard's front office to pay for it.

My girlfriend and I spent a few hours the following afternoon removing the damaged headlight (rusted bolts are murder!) and installing the new one. But when we were done, it worked beautifully.

The point of this story is to say that if you really love a woman, getting all wet and dirty for her counts for much, much more than flowers, candlelight dinners, chocolates and greeting cards ever could.

(This story is Creative Commons 2012, The Fuddler. Non-comm., attrib., no derivs.)