Wednesday - 03/17/2021 — Are you a jigsaw puzzle kind of person? I’ll bet you are. I’m not talking about whether you like to put together jigsaw puzzles. Some folks love them; other people hate them. My dad used to get a puzzle completely put together. Then he’d take it apart, every single piece, turn them all over—and work the puzzle without any picture showing. I think he approached life in much the same way. He was rule-follower, and his life had a great deal of structure. His puzzles always fit together.
So, why would I say I think you’re a jigsaw kind of person? Well, it’s just that I think everyone is. Think about it. We’re all made up of so many variables. We have our families in which every person has their own way of looking at an event: one family gathering, say four family members, and you’ll get four different stories. That’s one reason I have so much fun teaching the memoirs classes online. If there are siblings or spouses taking the course together, we get to see just how different those memories turn out to be.
We also have our friends from all the different stages of our lives. Are you lucky enough to have friends who knew you way back when and who love you anyway? Are you someone who gathers loads of friends wherever you go, or would you prefer to have just a few people in your inner circle? Just like a jigsaw—you can have a thousand pieces or only 500.
The pattern of your life can be a very straightforward picture or it can be those hard-to-put-together amorphous swirls of color. My sister had a jigsaw once that was completely white, but some areas of it were off-white, some were creamy white, some were stark snowy white, some ere closer to light grayish.
My jigsaw life has its moments of flowers (like the puzzle in this photo that Callie helped me put together), its moments of confusing uni-colored confusion, its moments of exuberant glee, its moments of boredom—thankfully few of those since I’m an avid reader, so I’m seldom bored for long.
