After the giant puzzle, I graduated to a 100 piece puzzle of normal size, also of the Ninja Turtles riding in a van with Master Splinter looking on as they shoved slices of pizza into their mouths. The pepperonis and sausages danced in the air as the van went airborne over a bump.
When I was seven or close to it, my brother received a Ghostbusters puzzle for Christmas one year. It was 1,000 pieces and painted with the anti-ghost logo on a black background. The hundreds of black pieces were enough to make my brother abandon the project before he'd begun. I pieced the entire thing together, then, after seeing someone on one of my favorite Nickelodeon shows, Salute Your Shorts, piece together a puzzle upside down, I turned the Ghostbusters puzzle face down and rebuilt it a second time.
The following Christmas, my parents gave me a 500 piece puzzle with Earl, Fran, Robbie, Charlene, Grandma, and the baby from Dinosaurs, a Jim Henson creation from the early nineties. I built and rebuilt that puzzle more times than I can recall. By then, I'd created a system for building puzzles-- I'd start with the border, then break the remaining pieces into piles by color, then piece the puzzle together in chunks until the sections interlocked. Just after my father broke his back, he spent the majority of his days in bed, barely able to roll over to get up for the bathroom. One afternoon, my mother left me home alone with my father to take my brother back-to-school shopping. I sat at the dining room table trying to piece together the Dinosaurs puzzle for the dozenth time to take my mind away from every whisper of the wind which I imagined to be an intruder coming to attack me and cart my ten-year-old body to a dark basement across town.
At 16, I spent time in a mental health center where we weren't allowed anything that could be a detriment to our physical or mental health (except of course cafeteria food). They removed my hood-strings and belt, provided plastic utensils for eating, locked my personal belongings in an off-limits storage area, wouldn't allow me to read the books I'd brought about Edgar Allan Poe or Sylvia Plath (okay, so maybe they weren't the best choices), and would only allow us to create crafts under strict supervision. I spent hours sitting on the window seat in my room, staring out at the gravely ledge, wondering how an orange peel had made it among the rocks on the other side of the double-paned glass. I was told that to escape this miserable institution I'd have to show progress in social interactions with the other residents. The facility for teenagers had been too over-crowded, so I'd been put with adults. My floor mates were mostly elderly, a few were in their forties.
I ventured to the "game room" one night in an attempt to appease the nurses that patrolled the rooms every fifteen minutes. The common area was completely empty. At the far end someone had stacked a pile of games. At the bottom of the pile was a 1,000 piece puzzle of people in a restaurant with a black background. A nurse tried to discourage me from building it, "There's pieces missing," she said, but I ignored her and set myself up at the long table outside of the game room. The table was at the end of a long corridor, past rows of closed doors to patients' rooms.
I began, as usual, by mapping out the large border. Then, rather than separating the pieces into piles, I would pick up a single piece, match it up with the picture on the box and place it down within the border where it belonged. Every nurse came by to say, "Wow, I've never seen someone build a puzzle like that." I ignored them completely.
A few hours in, the fire alarm for the building went off. The nurses began running from one end of the unit to the other while the patients wandered confused out of their rooms. We were on tight security-- only level threes were allowed day passes or time out to smoke on the ground floor just beyond the exit door and even then they had to be back within a certain time frame. I was a level one (the lowest level one could be) for keeping my belt in my bedside drawer over night. I woke up to find the belt missing in the morning. When I asked about it, the nurses refused to give me a straight answer.
Not knowing what to do when the fire alarm went off, the nurses herded all of the patients toward the fire exit door, which happened to be directly behind the table I was building my puzzle on. Maybe they thought being close to the exit, somewhere near the eighth floor of a hospital, would be enough to save us in the event of a real fire. Patients wearing hospital gowns that didn't close, evening dresses, and sweat pants crowded around the table, fascinated by my project. I continued piecing the puzzle together, ignoring the alarm, the gathering crowd, the comments, the staring. Eventually, the fire alarm was shut off and everyone slowly wandered back to their rooms or the TV area for evening snack time. An older woman in a wheelchair who went by Babs stayed behind to tell me that I needed to get out, that I was too beautiful to be in such an ugly place. I hoped the nurses were taking note of the fact that someone was talking to me, surely that would count for being social.
I built the entire puzzle in just a few hours that night. The nurse had been right, it was missing a few pieces, but a surprisingly small fraction of the 1,000 total. When I'd finished, I folded it neatly and replaced it in the box and returned it to the bottom of the pile beneath the outdated board games.
I didn't work on a puzzle again until I was in graduate school. The library on the college campus had set up a puzzle with hot air balloons floating in a blue sky on one of the long common tables. They propped up a sign that said, "Take a study break and de-stress with a puzzle." The simple sign was all the invitation I needed to begin working on the blue sky that everyone before me had left aside.
One of the biggest adjustments to being single was having so much free time. Without having to be a taxi driver, personal chef, or fair-weather companion to my husband, and on vacation from work, I searched for ways to fill the time. I went to a local craft store (some things never change) to look for a project and walked by a display of puzzles. I chose the one pictured above and emptied the pieces on my kitchen table. I quickly remembered how addictive puzzle-building is for me and built the entire 1,000 piece puzzle in two days. I left it on my table for a week (eating alone every night had freed up plenty of extra space) then finally took it apart and boxed it back up. Now, I can afford another puzzle and will not need to rebuild the same one repeatedly as I did for years as a child. I will always find another when the need to study these jigsaw pieces of cardboard for the sake of temporarily shutting down my restless thoughts arises.
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