Puzzling

When my brother Larry and I still lived in the same house, back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, we used to sit in the “game room” at my parents’ house with the t.v. on and build jigsaw puzzles together. It probably wasn’t your most usual way to bond but we had a lot of good conversations and told many jokes while sitting at that little wooden table. We had a system, first we turned all the pieces over to show the picture, then we built the border and then we got to the meat of the project. I miss those times.

A year ago, last September, when my father had quadruple bypass surgery, my family rallied around him and crowded into the small-ish hospital waiting room in the cardiac ward. At one point there were nine of us in there together. I had my phone and some random magazines sat on a table. I believe I even had a book in my purse, however we were in for a long (7 hour) wait. Plus, we were all a bit nervous. Our father, husband, father-in-law and grandfather had just been wheeled away for major surgery. Just the day before he was only supposed to get a stint and here we were, sitting idle as virtual strangers were about to crack his chest open.

In the waiting room was one small, wooden bookcase and on the top was a round, wicker basket. I took it off the shelf and noticed it was full of puzzle pieces. My eyes and brain lit up. I now knew what I was going to do with all that extra time. There was a round table right by the line of chairs we planned to claim for all those hours, so I put the basket down and challenged my brothers, nieces, nephews, sister-in-laws to put this puzzle together. Only thing was, it wasn’t just one puzzle. Instead, it contained four or five puzzles, the pieces all thrown in there together. No boxes, no pictures. It was a mess.

But if there was ever a puzzle-building competition, I could be a contender, so I got to work! As did my brothers and my nieces, and even my mom found a few pieces. The time to wait for my father to be fixed went by much faster because those puzzle pieces were in the waiting room. Plus, we bonded and laughed and teased each other all day long. We helped each other and told stories and greeted those who came and went. Then, by the time we were able to see my Daddy in recovery, we had done quite the work on those several jigsaw puzzles. Later on, we left to have dinner and then came back to check on him again. At that point some kids were continuing our work. It was so cool.

Thankfully the time was well spent  in the operating room that day too, and my father is doing well since his surgery. I am glad I only had to spend the time figuring out which pieces go where, instead of making sure a man’s heart was good to go. So thankful to the doctors and nurses that helped my dad that day.

And SO very thankful for my family, who I will see next week for the holiday. Hopefully my mom still has some of those old puzzles that Larry and I used to do, because I plan to build at least one. I will admit, four at a time is a bit much…