Puzzle Pieces
In my vacation house there are puzzles. The two-dimensional kind. Cut from paper board. They come in a box. The picture on the box represents the finished product. That’s how it works. You dump out the pieces into a heap and at some point they aspire to become that picture on the box.
That kind of puzzle.
One of my vacation habits, when I lived through the fat part of the vacation season of life, was to work on the puzzle. The house full of my family, alternately napping, complaining and eating – I with draw to a corner and methodically work through the simple heuristics of puzzle assembly.
There is something about puzzle making that is a bandaid to the fresh wound of enforced vacation inactivity. Something to do that has a discrete purpose and that is more than nothing.
Some people have seen this vacation activity of mine and wrongly assumed that I like puzzles or that I possess the puzzler’s mind. They then gift me dastardly, difficult puzzles with multiple dimensions and complex geometries. They assume the puzzler’s mind is afire with the lust for more and unique challenges.
It is not.
I do kindly accept these gifts and discretely pass them on to the second hand or charity markets, hoping they will ride karmically to find their lovers. I do not need to have my tactical intellect mocked by these impenetrable 3D monstrosities. I get not thrill from the impotent chess of it.
No, my lane is the 1,000-piece puzzle. Difficult enough require some effort. But can be safely and satisfactorily solved with 8 – 10 hours of concentrated sorting. Simple heuristics. Brute force pattern matching.
As each new piece is found, tested and locked into its rightful, predetermined place, my reward is a small puff of chemical satisfaction to the neocortex. Having pulled order from chaos. Having made things right. And, having usefully exhausted a small patch of vacation wasteland.
Then as the last piece is locked into place you have the ennui of completion. What to do? Now you have this thing that took hours to build and represents, as it were, the product of your vacation. Can you simply and cavalierly break it up and chuck it back into the box? Would this not be a profanity of the time spent?
No, you must put it into a frame and hang it on the wall as an icon to the holy theology of vacation.
And so it is that the vacation house is home to these framed monstrosities of pithy sayings and Saturday Evening Post spectres. Not art, but test tube preserved memories of a time, years ago where a family sweated over a hand-me-down table on which were assembled chrysanthemums and cherubic faces and banks of fathomless clouds.
…
On the wall hangs one such puzzle. Enframed, one such moment. The scene is a rabbit curled sleeping under a characterized oak tree with oversized acorns. The scroll reads “Friendship is a Sheltering Tree”.
Which indeed it is. One might attribute a tone of A.A. Milne to the scene. There is s woven beehive in the archaic European style under the tree and meandering bee, as oversized as the acorns.
That’s not what is important about this framed puzzle. What is important about this puzzle is that it is missing a piece. You would not be able to find the missing piece yourself, but I, who was there at the end without that last piece, could point it out to you.
Only god’s infinite chaos knows what happened to that piece. It’s not an important piece. Just a piece of the muddy background sky behind the tree, above the beehive. Did the puzzle not come with that piece?
Or did some trickster at the puzzle factory in a malignant fit of pique snatch the one piece away? (If I worked in a puzzle factory I might consider such action a very fine joke. I might picture the poor puzzler getting to the end and missing that nondescript piece of background sky. I would giggle slyly to myself as I, perhaps, tossed that one piece of sky into the box of a dancing bear or a carnival scene.)
More likely the piece was lost in the melee of family vacation across the 2-3 days of construction. Somehow stuck to someone and traveled out of bounds.
Of course, we swear it could not be so. The construction quality standards in a vacation house being quite high. It must be fate or malfeasance or an alternate universe. It could not be our neglect.
And so the puzzle hangs enshrined and if you know where to look there is a piece missing.
The interesting thing is that the missing piece is extremely hard to see. Not because it is physically hard to see, but because our puzzle-making, pattern matching minds refuse to see the missing piece. I struggle to find it and I know it is there. Once you see it it is glaringly obvious and you can’t un-see it. But, go away for a minute and come back, and it is gone again.
Somewhere in our hard-wired brain algorithms the missing piece is filtered out. The eye sees it, but the brain does not. In the human mind the whole pattern is more important than the pieces. We see the forest, but not the trees.
The missing piece in this way has a special Twilight Zone power to impress upon us that sometimes what our eyes see and what are brain tells us is nothing more than a convenient truth. A spackling over of the missing pieces of life.
How many other things in our day to day life do we unquestioningly absorb without looking at the details? How many truths in this world are poorly assembled pieces of fact and circumstance? How many of these truths are just sandcastles built by our minds to save us the difficulty of dissemination?
The late afternoon sun lances through the window to en-halo a sleeping rabbit on the wall with fat harmless bees and cartoonish acorns. The birds sing in the real oak trees outside the open screen. Vacation traffic in hot and sated cars head home to their patterns.