Is this who I am now? A holiday puzzle master? Or puzzle dork? And an injured, hobbled, doubled-over one at that.
The things we find ourselves doing over the holidays …
I’m not normally a puzzle kind of guy. But it had been raining. My daughter was getting over being sick. We were all cooped up in the house a couple days before Christmas, watching so much television that I could literally feel my brain cells snapping like popcorn.
“We need to play a game,” I finally said.
But there are only so many times that you can be beaten by a 13-year-old kid before you either resort to bourbon or throw in the towel.
So my wife offered a suggestion in her chipper way: “How about a puzzle?!?”
And that was when it all started to spiral out of control. When I was swallowed deep, down into the belly of the beast. Consumed by a monster. Overtaken and addicted to the thrill of fitting all those oddly-shaped bits of cardboard together.
It was a 700-piece, 3-foot long puzzle of Times Square. There were so many billboards and lights and different colors that the box warned if you stared too long, it could induce a seizure. Most puzzles I remember as a kid were of bears, pastel scenes or mountain landscapes. You could bundle little piles of matching colors together and work on it strategically thanks to gentle transitions and easy-to-spot patterns.
Not Times Square, though. This looked like a paint factory that blew up in a fireworks display, and then they poured confetti on top. None of it made any sense at all because … well … the actual Times Square makes no sense. It’s like a mad scientist built it as some grand experiment to test whether sensory overload would cause normal people to drop tons of money on photos with Elmo and Empire State Building shot glasses they will never use.
And this? This wasn’t a puzzle. It was a sadistic torture chamber of wonderous doom. Seven hundred over-stimulated pieces in a spasm of light, color and out-of-control humanity.
I was hooked!
Well, hooked is a nice way to put it. Hooked is enthralled, excited, captivated. It’s mostly harmless. I swung a little more to the insane side – crazed, delirious, feverish, bats in the belfry. Prone to saying things like, “Where are you, little demon?!? Tell me your secrets. Where do you belong?” and “Honey, do we have a chamber pot?”
I stayed up until after 11 that night, hunched over while identifying pieces and trying to make sense of it. I dreamed of it in my sleep, and then jerked awake at 6 a.m. to get back to work. Nerves in my back started to sting me like bolts of lightning, and my eyes screamed for mercy. Around 10:30 a.m. I realized I was still in my pajamas, hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t showered, hadn’t brushed my teeth, and had no intention of doing any of it until I was further along.
But the thing with puzzles is there’s always one more piece to identify. One more pile of pieces to sift through. “Further along” is all relative, and the more you find, the more it sucks you in.
Around 2 p.m. things really started hurting. Going downhill fast. I was dehydrated. I was having caffeine headaches from all the coffee I was drinking. My eyes hurt from the straining and staring through a magnifying glass. EVERY-thing was starting to hurt. My family had turned from quiet amusement to seriously considering calling the authorities.
When I finally found the final piece and slotted it into place that afternoon, I crumpled to the ground, coughing. Wheezing. Sweat pouring down my body. Unable to straighten my back. But … a victor!
“What’s wrong with dad?” my daughter asked as they stared at me.
“He hurt his back puzzling,” my wife said, and both snickered.
“I didn’t hurt my back!” I snapped. “It’s my sciatic nerve. From leaning over the table too long.”
“What’s a sciatic nerve?” my daughter asked.
“It’s his butt,” my wife replied. More snickering.
The price we puzzle-masters pay for our art. Our sport. Our conquests.
But it’s done, and it’s a masterpiece. It sits on the bar now, all 3 feet of it. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. What I do know is I can never break it apart. Not my great accomplishment. It caused me so much pain and delirium and hardship. And the worst part: I can’t even look at it because staring too long gives me seizures.