THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

My husband, Peter’s, birthday is this week.

Peter does not celebrate his birthday. Peter doesn’t think the day of his birth is anything to celebrate. He’s happy to celebrate my birthday, but he says he should get to do what he wants to do on his birthday. And what he wants to do is not celebrate. So that’s what we do.

“Can I send Peter a card?” my mother asks, as if she needs permission to do a thing like that.

“Of course! You just shouldn’t feel like you have to,” I explain.

Peter will get a card and grumble because it will just remind him that it’s his birthday and he doesn’t like that. But now I’m making Peter sound like a grouch and that is not what I mean to do. Because just last week, right before falling asleep, I was talking to myself and said, “I want to tackle two projects this summer.”

“What’s that?” Peter asked.

“I want to get my fountain running and fix my sewing machine — or get rid of it. One or the other.”

I bought a water fountain made of stones piled on top of one another with water coming out the top. Three years ago — almost immediately after I set it up — it stopped pumping water. The fountain has been sitting beside my desk for three years, and every time I walk by a fountain on my walk, I think of that fountain in my office and wish it would work. I would love to have the sound of it there beside me while I’m writing.

Two days later, I went out to the theater, and when I got back, there was the fountain, sitting on the kitchen counter, trickling away.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“I dunno. I just played with the switch, and primed it, and it started.”

It is making tiny musical water noises as I write this. It makes me so happy.

I bought my sewing machine for $15 at a secondhand store. Regular sewing machines like mine are getting kind of rare. Nobody sews anymore, unless they are quilting, and those machines are much fancier than mine. My machine sews straight stitches and zigzags and goes in reverse. That’s it. It came with every single part, even extra bobbins and the original instruction manual. One day it just stopped working, and I haven’t been able to stitch anything up since. I could never get it fixed for less than $100, so if it was dead, I was going to have to take it to the equipment dump.

Two days later, when I came back from my walk, Peter had it running.

“You did it!”

“I just about gave up,” he told me.

Peter said he looked up the serial number online, and he got a better idea of how it ran, and by the time I got home, my sewing machine was sitting on the kitchen counter, running like it was brand-new.

“Two impossible projects in three days!”

Peter’s birthday is later this week, and I told him we are going out to lunch to celebrate. “You pick the place!” I told him. He made a face, but he said he would. Then I bought him five fancy chocolate bars and wrapped them up for him — even though he insists he never wants presents. He will grumble a little, I imagine. But Peter likes chocolate.

And I get to celebrate, even if Peter doesn’t want to. That’s just what he gets for being such a nice guy.

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