By Jim Hagarty
2015
My wife and I are different in many ways. She loves doing puzzles, I’d rather sit naked in a pot of honey and then go find a bears’ den to moon than do a puzzle. I don’t see the point of sitting for hours flipping over little pieces of cardboard to try to reassemble what was a perfectly good picture till some demented soul with a bunch of goofy cookie cutters blew the whole thing apart.
The same brain that feels satisfaction piecing together a cruelly dismembered depiction of some sort or other also enjoys endless knitting sessions or hours of playing solitaire on a computer. If I ever play solitaire on our computer I sincerely hope the police will come and arrest me and put me to work breaking rocks in a remote rock pile in Siberia.
My point is, how can anyone find joy in sitting down at a table covered by 2,000 randomly shaped puzzle pieces with an eye to reconstructing something that should have been left alone all along?
So when I hear the telltale flip of the puzzle pieces on the table, I go out to my garage and tinker. The thing I love to do most, and it is a very engaging task, is to sort through the chaos out there and try to bring some order.
For example, I was recently given several cardboard boxes and mutliple plastic bags all full of screwnails. Mixed in among the drywall screws, decks screws, fence screws, metal screws, and concrete screws, are assorted nuts and washers. Also, there are dozens of common nails, spikes, ardocs, concrete nails and finishing nails. Also sharing containers with all these screwnails and old-fashioned nails, are various sizes of plastic drywall plugs, plastic electrical wire connectors and hooks of every description.
I love to dump the containers of goodies out on my workbench and I can spend hours isolating items according to type and size and dropping them into empty peanut jars I have collected. When I accumulate new jars, I like to dump all the full ones on the table again and sort them into finer and more specific categories.
I have enough of this inventory to build a space shuttle or at least a really fancy sandbox for kids. But I will never use 95 per cent of all the material I love to sort and I know that going in. Very little is actually accomplished, therefore, by all this activity, but my mind is strangely calm and satisfied at the conclusion of each session.
But you wouldn’t see me put together a puzzle if the executioner said he wouldn’t give the riflemen the signal if I could complete, in three hours, a 200-piece puzzle showing a horse standing in a field. I would look him straight in the eye and yell, defiantly, “FIRE!!!!”
Yes, my wife and I are so different. It’s a wonder we’re still together after all this time.
