An Ode to Puzzles

Everything old is new again

The first time I did a puzzle that wasn’t, like, 12 pieces and made for a pre-schooler, I was in the 4th or 5th grade.

I was home with the flu. But my mom had to work, so she set things up for me as best as she could, making sure I had both emergency numbers and food in our freshly painted and carpeted post-divorce apartment, a place I associate with the pretty sheer peach-colored curtains with modern blinds behind them and purposefully placed scented candles (still an obsession of mine; I’ve got at least 8 out around the house currently. Peach and honeysuckle are my favorite “sunny day” scents, but are harder to come by these days).

Anyway. One of the things she gave me was a puzzle. At 100 pieces, it was the first “big” one I’d had, and there were puppies on it, or maybe a horse looking out from a stable. Maybe puppies sitting next to a horse in a stable! In the quiet of our apartment, I put it together over the course of a few hours.

This one was both satisfying and manageable because it was divided into six sections!

That’s the first puzzle I remember ever really paying attention to.

It remained a “sick day” activity, and I didn’t do a whole lot to seek puzzles out, as I had plenty of other fun activities to get to as a teen in the ‘90s, and so few real problems to contemplate.

But as an adult, my interest in and love for them has grown. Nowadays, one of my favorite “for fun” relaxing activities is to turn on a podcast and put a puzzle together: generally, I like to do things that don’t require the listening part of my mind while I listen to interesting things.

I also do this when I paint, which might be why I love painting so much, too. Lately I’ve been listening to a fun podcast called Even the Royals, which has been my go-to lately. (The “tree of evolution” puzzle I did a few months ago is now permanently linked with the two excellent episodes on Marie Antoinette; Coldplay’s Tiny Desk goes with a mural I did in the last place I lived, and an episode of If Books Could Kill is tied to both planting a tree and organizing our tool box and laundry room).

I mention my love of puzzles to people nowadays, thinking they might want to do one with me while we chat sometime. This has made me realize how many people actually don’t like putting puzzles together at all. So far my friend Cynthia does — she brought over a really hard Little Mermaid one last year that provided for hours of fun — and my partner does (thank goodness). As far as I know, that’s about it.

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I have a terrible memory. Ask me what I did exactly one week ago, and I’d have to think real hard about it and possibly consult my diary, which I keep precisely for this reason. Ask me about something I wrote two years ago and I’m liable to have zero memory of it.

My mind leads me down some interesting paths, but hold on to things that are not traumatic or life-changing, it does not.

Except when I’m doing something physical that has an accomplished end result (writing, tellingly, never feels like that). Those stick, and they also make me feel truly happy.

This one was really, really hard and took me more than two months to finish (not in one sitting, of course). But my mother-in-law came and visited for a good chunk of it, and that’s what I think of now when I see it.

And that’s one of the things for me about puzzles: it is one of the only “for fun” activities I do as a grown up that does not serve any purpose or provide any kind of service to anyone. It’s only and exclusively because I want to.

But what I most love about puzzles is that they are solvable problems. And let me tell you, there are a lot of unsolvable problems in this world. They lay me low, and often. Just keeping up with the news can really unmoor a girl.

Puzzles might be hard, but you know that there is a solution, and that if you have all the pieces and keep at it, you will arrive at it. Most things in life are not like that, a fact I find, again, consistently heart-breaking.

But puzzles — puzzles are problems you 100% can and will solve.

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It’s incredible to me that in a couple short decades, we’ve moved from a society of active doers to one of individuals (including me) who can sit or lie for hours on end passively consuming never-ending content. Our ubiquitous devices were tailor-made to be addictive. Where will it end? Or will it end at all, or will it end us?

Part of the key to escaping, I believe, is purposefully doing things in actual physical space…preferably fun things.

Like puzzles! Or painting! I even got my partner to teach me how to play chess the other day, and I’m amazed at all the opportunities for trash talk that no one seems to take advantage of (“neigh NEIGH motherfuckaaaah!” They are going to love me down at the chess club.).

But I think physical, real-world games and activities are our way back, a real-world link to get our brains to hop out of the digital world. Oh! And dominoes, the kind where you have to add up multiples of five! And card games!

Perhaps starting a game and puzzle club is the key to my overall happiness. A quiet revolution taken, step by step, by “Go Fish” and maybe a Cinderella puzzle. Just imagine.