Picking up the Pieces

Last weekend, I returned to an old pastime that I visit every now and again: the jigsaw puzzle. It requires no batteries or electricity (other than the required lighting). And it takes up a corner of my dining room until it is completed.

Stacked willy-nilly in my basement are puzzles ranging in age and complexity. Some are 3D. A couple are murder mysteries that are solved when the jigsaw is complete. I chose one that featured old cereal boxes, and it wasn't as easy as one would imagine.

Curious about the origins of this particular hobby, I went to my go-to online resource. The Google told me that jigsaw puzzles will be celebrating their 250th anniversary next year. The first puzzles were maps pasted on wood and cut out by hand, used as tools to educate young minds. In the 1920s, wooden puzzles were all the rage at weekend parties of the smart set, and retained their popularity even through the Depression. Eventually, the puzzles were mass produced using cardboard instead of wood, making them more affordable and thus accessible to the masses. Advertisers used them as giveaways as a means to keep their product in front of customers for hours at a time. (Oh, those wascally advertisers!) One more fun fact: early puzzles did not interlock, and no picture was supplied, just a description of what was depicted. (Now I feel like a total wuss when I complain about how hard my puzzle is.)

I'm such a weirdo, that when I work on my puzzles, analogies run through my head about life: pieces fitting together, trying to force the wrong pieces into one another, etc. Puzzles free my mind to decompress and focus on something besides the train wreck of a week I just experienced.

There are those who would argue that jigsawing is a waste of time. I would argue it's no more a waste of time than sitting in front of the boob tube. (There's a throwback phrase for you.)

And yes, I'm one of those people who sit up until all hours of a weekend morning in search of "just one more piece."

I can blame part of this passion on my predecessors. In the wintertime, my grandmother always had a jigsaw puzzle going. And at my house, we often pulled out an old chestnut and assembled it on the card table, with the extra pieces spilling over to an old board we had. (It was the lid to a toy box which was made by my grandfather, I believe...it had ranch symbols on it. Paul, do you still have that?) Sorry, I'm digressing again.

Last night, I chose the cat-with-huge-eyes-sitting-in-an-alley puzzle. It has just 500 pieces, but the colors are not very distinctive, so it's going to be a challenge. Also, since it's a used puzzle, there are probably missing pieces. (There's a special place in hell reserved for people who give away puzzles with missing pieces with no indication of same on the box.)

Okay, so I could be doing something useful, like cleaning or paying bills or saving the world, and here I am doing some stupid jigsaw puzzle.

If I could just find that one piece. It's got a little bit of white on it, and it's shaped so weird it has to be easy to find...