"You're our Japanese guy now," a man told me. "Be ready when we call." I laughed. He did not. Here that sentence is not a joke. It is a job you already have. The first call was Deb's rice cooker. Garage sale, eight dollars, every button in Japanese. For two years her husband Ron had been making rice with a sequence he worked out on his own. Two presses, wait, one press, hold. It worked most of the time. A man who builds a system with no manual has my full respect. I pressed the button that says "white rice." Ron looked at it for a long time. "Huh. I was close." He really was close. The second call was Curtis. He had bought a Japanese pull saw and wanted to know why it cuts on the pull. I have never used a saw in my life. I told him that. He said, "Come over anyway." So I went, and we stood in his garage with two beers for an hour and worked it out together. I still could not explain to you why it cuts on the pull. Neither could Curtis. It cuts beautifully. Then Earl called. Earl has forty acres past the county line, and a mini truck imported from Japan. Tiny. Right-hand drive. Every switch labeled in Japanese. I have rarely seen a man love a vehicle the way Earl loves that truck. There was one switch he had never touched in fourteen months. I asked why. "A man doesn't flip a switch he can't read." I think about that sentence a lot. I read it for him. It locks the rear wheels together so the truck can pull itself out of mud. Earl looked at the truck. Then at the low spot by the creek where he had been stuck twice since spring. "Well," Earl said. "Hell." He flipped it, drove straight into the creek mud, and drove straight back out, honking the whole way. The horn on that truck is small and extremely polite. He leaned on it like a church bell. He paid me in venison. A cooler, already wrapped. Out there it is not pizza. Out there the rate is deer. Before I left, he called somebody on speaker. "Bill. I got a Japanese guy here. You still got that Kubota?" Bill's Kubota has an English manual. Bill's Kubota does not need me. I am going Saturday.

Anti-gun critics claim an armed American citizen with a concealed pistol will only panic when a mass shooter opens fire. On Father's Day, June 17, 2018, forty-seven-year-old pastor and EMT David George stood in a Washington Walmart with his family. Suddenly, a convicted felon high on methamphetamine shot open a glass ammunition case with a revolver and ran toward the front exit. Because George had trained with local police, he knew drawing a pistol inside a crowded store before seeing a clear target could cause a tragedy. First, he made sure his wife, daughter, and granddaughter escaped through the exit according to their family safety plan. Then he followed the gunman into the parking lot, where the killer had just shot father-of-two Rickey Fievez in the neck and chest and jumped into a woman's car while she crouched terrified behind the bumper. Approaching within seven feet on the passenger side so his line of fire would never endanger the woman, George drew his Glock 19 as the killer turned his revolver toward him. George fired five shots into the gunman's chest, ending the rampage in two seconds. Then the pastor holstered his pistol, dropped to his knees on the bloody asphalt, and used his EMT training to keep the paralyzed father breathing until ambulances arrived. A shepherd carries a staff to stop the wolf, and bandages to heal the flock.