Canvas columnist Steve Braunias is puzzled by life.
Jigsaws! I never saw it coming. One day I was at large in the world, out and about, someone who saw the big picture. The next I was pinned to the dining room table, silent, intent, my field of vision narrowing to very small points – please, someone help. I'm a slave to the jigsaw.
Jigsaws! It started in Papamoa, that flat, sandy epitome of the pleasant boringness of New Zealand life, with its fantastical street names - Bahamas Key, Riviera Crescent, Emerald Shores Drive, Palm Springs Boulevard – trying to introduce a little bit of excitement. There's no excitement in Papamoa. But it's close to Mount Maunganui, the nearby mall at Bayfair is excellent, and my sister lives there. She has my daughter and her cousins to stay during the school break. They have a grand old time and Minka came back from the last holidays seized with a new enthusiasm. Yes, very well, I said, I'll get you a jigsaw.
Jigsaws! God. The retirement homes, seaside baches and op-shops of New Zealand are crammed with old cardboard boxes that rattle when you pick them up. Pictures of horses, windmills, mountains, meadows, rivers flowing beneath bridges crossed by horses – no, not a great range, although in 1965 hundreds of thousands of Americans struggled to assemble a puzzle of Jackson Pollock's splatter painting, Convergence. It passed into legend as the world's most difficult jigsaw.
Jigsaws! I've never had the patience, never had the time. I'm a very busy person and lead a terribly important life. But I like to spoil my daughter rotten and care nothing for the expense, so I sailed into an SPCA op-shop and coughed up $1. "Look what I got," I said when I got home. "A thousand-piece jigsaw."