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Tag: best friends

February 4, 2022

the clarity of puzzling

i am, as i so often am, late to the game. it’s a game i’ve not played since the long-ago years when a fat-fingered toddler might be plopped on my lap, as he and i searched for the fat wooden pieces, maybe seven in all, and slid them into their hollowed-out shapes on the puzzle board. little boy blue, i remember. and thomas the train. 

but this week, stirred by winter snows and stitches in my paw that kept me from typing too much, i found myself pulling from the cobwebby corner a 500-piece jigsaw sent my way a whole year ago by my very best friend, my friend who spent all of wednesday in surgery. 

i was pulled at first by a faint curiosity, a wondering why she and so many i love seem entranced––almost in meditative spell––bent over card tables of cardboard squiggles and bits, allowing images to emerge out of what starts as some iteration of chaos, albeit colorful. 

sometimes mesmerizing, quite often maddening, it’s a picking-up-pieces sort of a game, a game particularly apt for these times that make so little sense, these times that feel in such tatters and broken-up bits. the whole point of this puzzling pursuit is to make of its maddening and disjointed parts a seamless whole that slowly, serenely comes into view, soul-satisfyingly so.

it didn’t take too many days before i found it all but impossible to stay away from the spillage on the dining room table. in very large measure, i felt pulled deeper and deeper by a wanting to be connected––all these thousands of miles away––to the one who’d shipped me the box. by the time it was wednesday, the day framed squarely in the lens of her surgery, the pieces of puzzle had become some sort of pressed-cardboard prayer bead, an amulet of wiggly edges and bright splashes of color. i was puzzling for something akin to protection, in that way that two very best friends sometimes imagine, wielding shield and sword for each other, willing to leap tall buildings if that’s what it takes.

if piecing together the puzzle she’d sent—a charming illustration of a braided-hair girl reading a book to the birds (its title, en français, charmingly: la fille qui lisait aux oiseaux; in english, quite plainly, “the girl who reads to birds”) from the french illustrator nathalie lété––somehow drew me into the inner sanctum of my puzzling friend, allowed me to slip in like some sort of guardian angel, then the hours of her surgery could pass with certain focus, and most determined purpose. 

as the faraway surgeon deftly excised the cancerous nob, i focused more and more sharply on the pieces before me, magically thinking that my high-voltage zeroing in might somehow guide the hand and the blade of the surgeon. i aimed for nothing short of textbook precision. i wanted my dear and gentle friend, my friend who sends puzzles by long-distance post, a children’s librarian fully fluent in the charmingest of pages, a wonder of a human who knows by heart the storybook hits of all of the ages––i wanted her clean and unbound from all cancer. 

as the long afternoon drew longer, and the minutes ticked numbingly by in my head, i discovered that puzzling is as much as anything an exercise in fine-tuning attention. but that isn’t all. there slowly emerged an even more pressing call to attention. it’s not merely visual, the narrowing field of super-fine focus. there seems, along with the eyes, to be a training of the mind, a sharpening of cognitive mettle, a nifty little syllabus for teaching your brain not to leap to conclusions, not based on scant bits of shape, size, or color: sometimes what you see is not what it is. a squiggle you’re sure is the claw of a bird, just might turn out to be the twig of a tree. and the point, over and over, seems to be some sort of lesson in keeping an open mind. not shoving the piece where you think it belongs. only to find that you’re wrong. that seems a wisdom that reaches far beyond the puzzle corner.

at the start, as the 500 pieces tumbled onto the table, all i saw was a dizzying morass of undulating edges. the first few passes were sieved simply by broad swaths of color: pinks over here, blue-and-white stripes shoved to one side, and whole other piles neatly haystacked all round the table: stippled bits of yellow and brown, the reds of a bird, followed by blacks and browns and golds and blues, and all the greens of the various leaves. 

but the longer i kept at it, i found my focus shifting from broader swaths to barely visible daubs and dots. i noticed the shifts in the flow of the paint brush’s bristles. and soon enough i realized i was teaching myself how to see, how truly to see. and how to patiently wait for puzzling clarity. in time, the puzzles give way to emergent precision. an indecipherable brushstroke of brown suddenly manifests as the branch that it is. what appears an odd variegation of white dashes on black suddenly makes sense as the wing of a towhee. 

it’s all in keeping the focus, honing in on the subtlest of clues. working hard to keep open your mind. allowing the truth to slowly emerge.

it took hours and hours. no short cuts in puzzling. no short cuts in seeing the whole.

it finally came, though. where my eyes had been spinning, my pupils near bursting, there suddenly was the deep satisfaction of the whole greater than any or some of its parts. those dashes and dots had turned into fine-feathered birds. the brushstrokes of the yellow and brown, the braids that spilled to the little fille‘s frock.

and now, the last piece inserted, my beloved best friend home in her bed, i’m ready to puzzle again. it’s an insatiable pull, the puzzling clarity that comes in a box, 500 bits at a time. 

shall i go for 1,000?

fini!

do you puzzle? and have you a pastime that teaches the secrets of seeing? and keeping open your mind?

a little bit about nathalie lété:

a one-woman whimsy factory, madame lété. it’s been written that she sought refuge from a troubled family life in the make-believe world of european fables and chinese legends; she was an only child––“sad and solitary”––shunted between a german-czech mother and a chinese father “who did not get on,” as she’s told it. though she now lives and works in paris, the walls of her tucked-away cottage in fontainebleau forest are alive with playful folk-life motifs. it’s a bit alice-in-wonderland sprung to life: a giant papier-mâché toadstool serves as a console table. a door is fringed with ceramic “moss.” a pink bedhead, adorned with hearts and birds, and tree trunks hemming the edge of the doors. it’s all inspired, she’s said, by the bloomsbury group, who painted across walls and floors, over and under furniture, including lampshades, and carpets, and the bindings of books—a palette without end. hers is a hand-painted world filled with “an air of fairy-tale wonderment,” according to the slick world of interiors (she’s also been profiled in harper’s bazar UK, and chinese edition of vogue and cosmo, and of course france’s le monde).

prayer corner: prayers for the puzzler in sunny la, and prayers for sweet P, a dear and beloved friend of the chair, getting herself a brand new ball and socket this morning. xoxox. and giant giant happy birthday prayers for my beloved “baby brother,” the one who was and is my dream come true, born 2/4/68, the perfect pair to my odd numbered 1/3/57.

p.s. quite a morning here, with back-to-back phone calls starting at 7 a.m., including one from my favorite law clerk who called to report that he’d bumped into none other than the real sarah palin (sounding “more tina fey than tina fey,” he reported) as he ambled into the courthouse this morning. thus, the delay. so, so sorry.

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February 27, 2008

talking till the wee, wee hours

i’m thinking slumber parties for grownups are the next big swell idea. or, at least they should be, if we give a dang for the continued tick-tock-tick of that ol’ vessel keepin’ time, just beneath our jammies and our frayed and flannel robes.

oh, i don’t mean yakkin’ the night away with whoever it is you’re shacked up with. that’s all well and good (although there are the toothpaste blobs in the sink to contend with, and company seems to know to refrain from that. or at least wipe ’em down with a wad of toilet paper). in fact, some nights when i find me and the tall-guy-with-glasses laughing ourselves silly at 2 in the morning, i really do think marriage–on a good day–is like your mom telling you your best friend can have a sleepover all summer long. and then, poof, the summer never ends.

what i’m talkin’ here–sorry, boys, you can go play all-night poker, or whatever it is that would float your so-called boat–i’m talkin’ havin’ your best girl friends, one at a time is how i like it best, come knockin’ at your door, with jammies, mouthguard, heck, even pimple cream tucked in some little over-the-shoulder satchel.

i’m talkin’ curling up on the couch, armed with bowls of popcorn to punctuate the most important points–you can bite it hard and loud, if you need to, or let it linger on your lips, for effect; it really is the perfect conversational accessory, salted, greased or plain old plain.

i’m talkin’ whispers when the rest of the house is filled with zzzzzzs. i’m talkin’ getting past the ancillary business and boring straight inside the heart.

i’m talkin’ saying things you can’t say out loud to barely any other soul on earth. but you can when you’re with a best friend, because she knows it all already. and she can fill in blanks no one else would every guess.

what makes me think all this is i had a slumber party just the other night.

one of my oldest, dearest, wisest friends was in town from california. she stretched her trip just to spend two nights, one day, with me and my boys. once again, i was humming as i readied her room, blew up the air mattress, put out a little vase of white tea roses in winter, laid yummy soaps and lotions on her tall stack of fluffy towels. i even plunked a toblerone chocolate on her pillow. there is nothin’ like spoiling your best friends.

the first night, after fish soup and black cherry pie, we stayed up for hours, accompanied by the boy i call the manchild. he adores her too. she is pretty much his auntie to the world. she knows more about everything than most anyone i know. she’s hip. she’s cool. she wears her hair in dreadlocks (not a lot of which you see around this leafy shore). and she’s the one who taught him how to take whatever’s in the fridge, add rice, one egg, and call it “ghetto fried rice.” a dish he could eat five times a day, swooning every time.

oh, and besides, she went to the school he’s set his sights on, so he had hours’ worth of questions. right down to subway stops, and profs.

that night, as you might figure, it was all PG, content approved for family audience. (with just a few racy winks and nods, perhaps, since after all, he’s a manchild now, and she was easing him into the club.)

the next night, though, once home from a rousing dinner with old newsroom pals, we paid no mind to the clock telling us–in no uncertain terms–that anyone with sense would be in bed, tucked beneath the puffy covers.

nope. we were two old, old friends who’d had to keep the lid on all the really pressing stuff the night before. so this night, we were all but yankin’ that old clock right off the wall. it ticked, we talked. ignored its insistent gongs, every quarter hour, like a toddler tugging on our sleeve.

we got down to business. we got down to girl talk–and i’ll not spell that out. you’re either of the double-Xs (i’m talkin’ DNA, not ratings, here), and you know of which i speak. or else you’re not, and forgive our exclusionary ways this one time, but there’s no translator in the house.

here, though, are some hints: dreams, drama, heartache; repeat, repeat. how’s that for what it was us girls were digging into, besides the mound of exploded kernels that stoked our late-night talking binge?

oh, yes, there was something to the sleepiness that crept in, as that ol’ clock kept burping up its teeny-tiny numbers. not unlike wine, it made the room all gauzy, almost blurred. i was bleary-eyed, all right, but that only oiled, loosed, the conversation.

like a stream that rushes, sends its waters down and in, rinsing ’round the rocks, bathing every crevice, that late-night hour propelled the words, the thoughts, down deep to all the nooks and crannies of our souls.

we went to places the daylight does not allow. only the long blank slate of night, with dawn the only end in sight, still miles out beyond the eastern sky.

in fact, at one brief synapse, when some wayward thought was trying to take the leap from nerve to nerve, i did think, oh heck, let’s just go all night. let’s watch that rosy-fingered dawn reach out and try to tap us on the noggin.

but at last, when every chamber of our hearts had been unlocked, laid bare, when eyelids were truly slipping, and yawns distorting words, we succumbed.

we did what grownups do: we got off the couch, and sensibly climbed the stairs (if 2:30, maybe 3, has any sense at all, what with a whole sunday just ahead).

we kissed goodnight, for that’s what best friends do.

and then we dreamed. of the next night when we’d unspool our hearts and souls, join hands and sail to places that can only be discovered when it’s dark and quiet and you pay no mind to midnight chimes on busy-body clocks.

have you had a slumber party lately? with your oldest bestest friend? or with, perhaps, the ones who shared your dorm, or house, in college? or, maybe, you lucky duck, you have a sister who brings her jammies for the night…
to mix it up here, do you ever think of being married as the longest lasting slumber party in the world? oh, one other thing, i hated slumber parties as a kid. hated the way it made me feel the morning after. hated being the only one who wanted sleep, and didn’t like to get in trouble, despised the scary movies. did you like ‘em? or were you, like me, more inclined toward the one-on-one, more tame, sleepover?

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