Puzzle Piece
©2020 Meg Bashwiner
When I was kid we would spend a week or two each summer at the jersey shore. This shore trip came with lots of traditions: our annual trip to the surf shop, to the mini golf course, to the hobby shop where I was allowed to purchase 1 Breyer horse and as a family we would purchase a jigsaw puzzle. The goal of the puzzle was simple, collectively finish it within the week before we had to leave our rental house and go back to our real lives.
I would spend all day at the beach and then come home in the late afternoon to find a Mets game on the TV and my mom or one of my uncles huddled over the puzzle. I wasn’t very good at it but occasionally I would get a piece here or there. Mostly I just seemed to be bothering the adults as they riffled through pieces in the cardboard puzzle box. I was eventually shoed away, as their frustration grew from not being able to find the piece they needed while being stared at by a sunburned eight year old.
I’m thirty four now and am in no danger of getting sunburned for the foreseeable future. When quarantine started I had the strong impulse to do a jigsaw puzzle. Something about the nostalgia of those beach trips, of leisure time passed while on vacation felt somehow fitting for our current situation which is definitively neither leisure time nor vacation. This quarantine time has the pieces of vacation; free time, no work, but those pieces don’t quite fit together with the other bits — I am in my house and haven't left its immediate radius in over a month, I am unemployed, I am in an almost constant state of anxiety and I have no idea when or how this will end.
I am now on puzzle three of my plague jigsaw puzzling. The first one was entitled Land Mammals of North America and it was a blast to complete—1000 pieces of pure satisfaction. I felt like I was really doing something. I was passing the time in a way that didn't involve me staring into the glowing rectangle panic box in my hand for 18 hours a day. I had something to show for my time. I had Land Mammals of North America.
The second puzzle was Backyard Birds of North America. I excitedly clawed open the box (after it sat in the packages and mail holding pen in my foyer for three days of course). I couldn’t wait for this one. I craved the satisfaction that Land Mammals had provided me. I wanted to put these birds back together. This puzzle proved to be terribly difficult. It took me twice and long and I felt defeated almost the entire time I worked on it, which was many many hours. I wanted to give up a number of times and so did my husband. He would shout “That puzzle is no son of mine!” and walk away in frustration. I would yell back “We have to finish this one before the new one comes or the new puzzle will know we are failures! IT WILL KNOW.”
I had ordered another a new puzzle right after the bird one had arrived because i needed to keep the feelings of fulfillment rolling and now its arrival was looming over me as I rubbed my tired eyes, that could no longer tell the subtle differences of the varieties of green leaves that the backyard birds perched upon. The birds staring back at me, like a sunburned eight year old, taunting me with their freedom, their ability to fly anywhere on a whim, I hated those smug fucking birds. But I persevered. I completed Backyard Birds of North America. I felt dejected but the new puzzle arrived to see that it landed in a home where it will be taken care of.
I am now embarking on the new one: Desert Cacti of the Southwest. It’s just OK so far. I have begun what I like to call the big sort where I pull out the edge pieces. You need to edges so you can map out where the puzzle ends and the rest of the world begins, a line that has gotten a bit blurry for me. As I enter week 5 or 6 of quarantine, I don’t have the same fervor for this puzzle that I had for Land Mammals and I don't have the same consternation that I had for Backyard Birds. I am a bit numb to it. Maybe the way I’m feeling lately isn’t about the puzzle at all, you guessed that though, right?
What is jigsaw puzzle anyway but the promise of a solvable problem. It promises that you have all of the pieces you need to yield an answer. It promises that all you have to do is work hard and work smart and you will be able to assemble a thousand pieces into one thing. One thing that you will feel proud of. One thing feel a sense of accomplishment about. One thing that you are equipped to handle. You know what the beginning looks like- It’s 1000 jumbled pieces and you know what the end will look like 1000 ordered pieces, perfectly fitted together into one by the grace of your own hand.
I had to wait 10 days for my first puzzle to come in the mail. They were backordered. I’m not the only one drawn to the puzzles right now. I’m not the only one who misses solving problems, misses working hard, missing being productive and great at something. Wishing this was all just a long vacation with a definitive end date, a goal post, a deadline for puzzle completion before the long ride back up the Garden State Parkway. We are begging to know what the end of this will look like. We are searching for the promise of solvable problem but no matter how many times we sort through the box, we just don’t have all of pieces we need.
Featured on the Our Plague Year Podcast