My Dream Came True.

I've always wanted a VW Bus, one of the models from '66 or '67. We were leaving Trick Dog to go to the back parking lot. A man and his girlfriend were just leaving, about to get into the VW Bus. My mom stopped them, saying, "My daughter always wanted one of those. What model is that?"
He said, "1967," and my heart skipped a beat. Then he said, grinning and pushing his forehead bandana up and shaking his long hair out of his face to peer at me, "If you want to get a VW Bus, you have to have this." He got out and dug around in the back of his car, then pulled out a large and obscenely beat-up book. Cover falling off, pages sticking out at every imaginable angle, bent pages, ripped pages, faded pages, stained pages; this book was in bad shape.

We stared a second, and my mom commented, "Looks like you use it a lot."

"Yeah," he grinned, setting it down in the dirt and paging through it. "How to keep your Volkswagen alive for idiots," he announced jovially, showing us page after page of the book, a manual I had never seen the likes of before. It had cartoons and illustrations!

"This book is for the complete idot," he proclaimed with a grin. "If there's something you need to pull your hair back for, it will literally tell you, 'Pull your hair back for this project.' It's by John Muir."

I immediately pulled out a paper and pencil and wrote it down.

"Thank you," my mom said.

The man squatted, gathering up the pages and cover of the book in a haphazard pile. "You're welcome, it's nothing," he said, waving it away.

And that was the end of the matter, and I am going to buy that book if I have to search the bottom of the ocean to find it. Or eBay.