I love jigsaw puzzles. I have fond memories of many late nights spent with my mom, usually during Christmas vacations, hunched over a folding card table trying to find that one last piece before calling it quits and heading to bed. We didn't talk much, or about anything that really mattered. We just worked, side by side, trying to find that oddly shaped piece with the little bit of treeline or the missing edge piece to complete the frame.
Sometimes I think working on jigsaw puzzles is just a colossal waste of my time and an excuse for me to check out of life for a while. Put my brain on cruise control and just handle the oddly shaped pieces while ignoring important work that needs to be done. But there is something comforting, soothing, addicting about surveying the mess and putting it back together the way it was meant to be.
As I take tenative steps into the writing world, I've wondered if there are other writers out there who enjoy a good jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps they're more like quilters. Once, an instructor of a writing course I was taking asked us to describe the kind of writing each of us did. I wasn't quite sure how to describe what it is I'm trying to do. I said it was sort of like quilting, or at least my pathetic efforts at quilting. Buried in the bottom of a closet are scraps of material which, theoretically, will become a quilt. Someday. I collect scraps and pieces of stories, knowing that there's some value to them. Knowing that they matter and ought to be preserved and assembled into something that is useful and beautiful and good. I'm not exactly sure what to do with my scraps and pieces of stories, but I'm working on it.
In the title essay of her collection Twelve Baskets of Crumbs, Elisabeth Elliot wrote about the process, after the death of her second husband, of gathering up the fragments of his life. Clothing, wallets, golf clubs, diplomas, letters--all important pieces of his life. She then talked about Christ, after feeding the multitude, sending his disciples to gather the fragments of bread and fish, that none of it be lost. Somehow, the leftover broken pieces matter.
I think the value of writing, of quilting, and even of putting together a jigsaw puzzle, is in seeing the value of the fragments. It's about recognizing something that hints at something larger and greater and more important. About assembling pieces and bringing order out of chaos.
Or maybe I'm just trying too hard to justify the hours I've spent putting puzzles together.
2 comments:
Another memory jog - visiting my grandmother who almost always had a jigsaw puzzle on her dining room table. I watched my father's diligence as he would study the pieces and just as he could always spot a four leaf clover in the grass, he would find the difficult piece, place it precisely and walk away with a satisfied smile to chat and visit.
I probably have the same pleased look when I find a link to someone in my family history search. Just two days ago I found a reference to a lady I am sure is in my family posted in my high school alumni newsletter. A fragment, but my mind is busy thinking of how to get an introduction, will she agree to talk to me, what does she know, can she identify faces in the old photographs? Perhaps she will bring a little more order to the story.
A colossal waste of time? More so than the hundreds of hours Americans spend in front of a television "vegging out"? I don't think so. It is often during those mindless tasks that clarity comes- that gives us the greater picture. How wonderful to have found a way to shut out the noisy chatter of the world, to free yourself from distraction, resting mind and heart- sounds like a shadow of Heaven. Besides, I've heard doing puzzles helps to ward off dementia- that alone is a good enough reason to spend an hour or two with 500(or more) pieces of the Swiss Alps or Mt. Rushmore.
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