Jun 10, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Neil Crone
My headlong slide into middle-aged nerdiness continues unabated. I have discovered jigsaw puzzles.
Once you start closing in on 50 you have to be very careful. Things sneak up on you. Your Geek radar begins to wear out, sometimes malfunctioning entirely. As a teenager or even a young thirty-something, the mind and body employ a razor-sharp set of measures and counter-measures designed to make sure one does not, even inadvertently, resemble or behave like an idiot. Those mechanisms, however, break down over the years.
Just the other day I caught myself walking to the post office in Birkenstock sandals, white socks and a sweater vest.
There was a time, and it was not that long ago, that I would've sooner worn a thong down main street than commit such an offence. Still, it seemed OK at the time.
Likewise, at 49, does it seem OK to wear that shirt/pants/underwear for just one more day than is probably hygienic. I mean, they're not that dirty. And who's looking anyway, right? Again...the radar is badly out of whack.
Which brings us, sadly, to the jigsaw puzzle.
I really didn't see this one coming at all. While moving my mother-in-law out of her home of 40 years, we came across, amongst a horde of other paraphernalia dating back to the Lindbergh kidnapping, an unopened 500-piece puzzle. I thought nothing of it at the time, but, as it was pristine, decided to bring it home rather than toss it out. A decision, I would soon realize, that was not unlike the Trojans opting to wheel that cool-looking horse inside the gates.
A week or so later, when, just for a lark, I opened the box and poured the contents onto the kitchen table, I released much more than just 500 maddeningly similar pieces of cardboard. I opened a Pandora's box of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
What I had failed to understand is that to a control freak and a completion addict, a jigsaw puzzle is like the very purest heroin. Remember, I'm the guy who, for years prior to therapy, could not set aside a book once I'd started reading it, no matter how egregiously bad the writing. I just had to finish it. An uncompleted puzzle, spread across the kitchen table, is irresistible. I'm like a teenage boy trying to walk by a half-open Hustler magazine on the sidewalk.
"I'll just see if I can't pop in a piece or two" very quickly turns into "The Roses! The Roses! Dammit, I must finish the roses!"
And before you know it you have become, as my 14-year-old son derisively labelled me... a "buff."
I suppose I am. I must be. I'm now on my third puzzle. And, as much as it pains me to admit it, I have already visited several online puzzle stores, covetously planning my next challenge. No one's been able to eat a meal at the table for the last two weeks. I am haggard, bleary-eyed and prone to irritability. I have been known to snap angrily at people who say hurtful, thoughtless things like "Haven't you finished the Clown yet?" or "Boy, that sky's taking a long time."
On the upside, a person sitting inside, doing a puzzle for hours on end, doesn't really need to change his shirt, pants, underwear very often. And no one cares about the sandals, socks and sweater vests. The only thing that matters, is the roses...
Durham resident Neil Crone, actor-comic-writer, saves some of his best lines for his columns.
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