Puzzle time tally

 

Description:

A light yellow sheet from a tear off note pad. Top left corner has musical notes and says “O Sing unto the Lord a New song! Psalm 98:1”  The bottom shows a product number 7263 1-86, and the words "With our Compliments Aid Association for Lutherans"  The old circle-on-a-stand-made-of dots logo, then "Appleton, Wisconsin 54919"

Written in pencil is a three column grid labeled, Start, Stop & Total.  Times are written and a total at the bottom shows 9:20  The 9:20 is written large at the top with a box around it.  There is some calculating math on the side.  There are some soot marks from my house fire. 

Story:

Crazy that I've kept this.  This and a surviving photo of my childhood bedroom with a card table, the puzzle in progress, are evidence of my obsession with the enterprise of puzzles and this puzzle in particular.  Obsession might be too strong of a word.  I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but putting a puzzle together is not just a matter of putting a puzzle together.  Sometimes I challenge myself. There are various things to keep track of.  In this case I was finding out exactly how much time it took for me to do this puzzle.  The puzzle in question was a 1,000 piece Springbok puzzle of a launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia.  I know it was either the first or second launch because those were the only times that the external tank was painted white.  After that, NASA realized they could save thousands of dollars and a lot of weight by leaving it brown.  The picture was taken just seconds after lift off.   The picture shows launch tower, a billow of orange smoke and then a column of white.  The shuttle itself takes up very little of the picture, most of the image is a dark background.  I got the puzzle in the fourth grade.  The same time Sarah my older sister got a Springbok puzzle of the United States that was covered in cartoonish words and landmarks.  Sarah could pick up a piece, scan the picture on the box, and set it on the table in close approximation of where it would end up.  She had a much easier time of it.  I managed to get the shuttle and tower and even the white column of exhaust, but the majority of the puzzle was shades of dark and darker.  In a happy discovery we found that our puzzles had the same cut, so to help things in the end we were able to take advantage of how Springbok puzzles connect tight enough that you can pick them up.  We placed my unfinished puzzle on top of her completed one.  Then I could match the shapes to get it done.  It felt like cheating.  It was the first puzzle I had that was over 500 pieces and the first one where the pieces locked so well.  

In later years I would do that puzzle several more times, without help.  I became more focused on noticing the nuances of shape.  Shape and shade sorting became standard practice.  When I was in high school I decided to see how long it took me to put it together unaided.  Nine hours and 20 minutes speaks to the difficulty of the pictures.  I have some 1,000 piece puzzles that have more colorful pictures that I can put together in an afternoon.  I’m not sure if I have a copy of the log of “mistakes.”  We had a ping pong table in our basement in North Dakota and I often spread out my puzzling endeavor on it.  There was a while I would take all the pieces out of the box and lay them out in a grid, and with simple multiplication know exactly how many pieces were in the puzzle. I would then attempt to assemble it with the rule that I shouldn’t touch the pieces until I was certain they belonged together.  I would keep track of how many times I messed up and then calculate an error-per-pieces calculation.  This shows that I not only enjoy doing puzzles, but I like statistics.  

The emphasis on spatial reasoning: visually moving the pieces in my head before I picked them up, I attribute to my father.  Not that he really had those skills, or set out to teach us to think that way, but we would give him puzzles and he would not let us touch the pieces.  So the only way we could help him was to “make suggestions.”  “Dad, I think that piece might go there,” we’d say, pointing a piece and place. He would pick up the piece and always try it out a wrong way first, and then the right way.  If it didn’t fit any way he’d say “Awk, you’re wasting my time.”  By "we," I mean Sarah and me.  Mom and Rebecca had no patience for such challengers.  There are a few artifacts that pay tribute to my love of jigsaw puzzles, but few that highlight the obsessive ways that I often put them together.

Sadly, my Space Shuttle puzzle is now buried in a landfill, with the remains of our mobile home, lost like mythical Atlantis.