My birthday was coming and I was sure John would forget. I was already building up resentment, three days ahead. The embarrassing thing was, if I had taken time to notice, that John's birthday is on Christmas and has been lost in the shuffle every year. If he was looking to me to set the bar for birthday blazing, it was in the corner somewhere under the couch.

 

The actual day of my birthday he began making absent minded inquiries about the van, which was being fixed. We had another smaller car, but he needed the Toyota for some reason. I said it would be ready by four. That seemed to make him edgy, but I was too busy stewing to pay attention. He went to pick up the car late in the afternoon, saying he had an errand to do. Whatever. 

 

When he came home with the car and a very big box, he triumphantly plunked it in the living room. It said Bernina on it. Now Bernina is a company that makes high end sewing machines, ones that I had never even wasted time coveting. But here before me was a Bernina box. I wondered why he had gone to the trouble to get an empty Bernina box to put my present in. 

 

"Now put your sewing machine on it!" he suggested. I ran to fetch my low end machine to set it on the beautiful table, but when I got back there was another Bernina box there instead. Confusion came back. What was this box for?

 

"Open it!" John prodded, as I clearly looked like one of those hoofed animals who cannot cross a grating. 

 

I was stunned to find an actual Bernina sewing machine inside the Bernina box, on the Bernina table. This could not be mine, on the day that I had gotten a running start of seventy two hours expecting John to forget. I threw my arms around him and in vague terms I apologized for unnamed  errant behavior. I thanked him profusely for his extravagance!

 

Little did we know how extravagant. 

 

The next day the Bernina store called to say there had been a slight discrepancy when they went to close the books at 5 o'clock. They had charged our credit card not $1,200, but $12,000. They would be refunding the difference. 

Photo by Jenny Stein

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