Pieces of the Puzzle

Today, after several weeks of guests arriving every weekend and two very long, surprisingly punishing weeks at work, I finally had a Saturday where nothing was required of me until the evening. In celebration of this, I cooked myself a nice breakfast, got a haircut, wrote over half again my expected daily word count, and tried to finish unpacking.

I did not succeed in this last endeavor, but I did make some very good headway—as of right now I have one full-sized box and one small Amazon box to go through before the house is thoroughly unpacked and sorted, which puts me light years ahead of where I was at this point in time at the Granada house. I probably would have gotten more unpacking done, were it not for the fact that one of my boxes was, unexpectedly, full of treasure.

A year or two ago, my parents came to visit me; and when they came they brought two boxes of Stuff, an accumulation of items that had gone into cardboard boxes during either the move from Los Angeles to Mendocino or some lesser move between there and me going to college, and then proceeded to stay there. These were boxes, I thought upon first glance, of paper; loose paper, old character sheets from the febrile and obsessive gaming days, notebooks from college, things like that. But then I got to unpacking them, and I remembered that in my world, very little is just paper.

I found a script from my high school days that I'm pretty sure was meant to encapsulate 1920s slang, about an alien with the superpower of being totally cool; I found another script using a revolt by the students and my English teacher as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. I found half-empty notebooks from a dozen classes; course readers for the classes I loved; a piece of artwork from a good friend now distant but occasionally in touch. I found a creative writing notebook where I talked about how depressed and isolated I was, alongside some kind of prepubescent insistence that my girlfriend at the time was the girl of my dreams. (Yes, because I love being jerked around by teenagers who think they're under assault by a demon...it makes sense when your skin looks like a strawberry and you can't understand where you got all this chest hair.)

And then I got to the physical stuff at the bottom of the box: an old Swiss army knife from my Boy Scout days; a metal slammer for playing, of all things, Pogs; a life point counter from Reaper Miniatures, back when Magic players actually thought life points capped at twenty; and a light blue envelope, clearly in my much-younger handwriting, that just said "Wonder Weasel & Wicked Weasel".

A bit of background: Wonder Weasel was the thing that was going to make me famous, back when I was in middle school and trying to pretend to childhood genius. I drew it on photocopied pieces of paper that I made my dad get me while I was at school, wrote 30-50 page "issues" with all the skill and gravitas of, well, a thirteen-year-old with minimal training. That I was obviously trying to duplicate Darkwing Duck is to only sell me a molecule short. I actually found some pages of the comics, too, and am preserving them in my files for future mocking by hypothetical fans and children.

But this envelope confused me. Its contents were solid, and small, clearly a collection of some kind. Had I made a time capsule for my fictional characters? (Wicked Weasel, by the way, was Wonder Weasel's evil twin; if he had an origin story I do not remember how it went.) Had I made miniatures of them somehow, maybe during Alternative Education Week with my history teacher/fellow wargamer? Or was the envelope convenient and used for something unrelated after it had housed a portrait? Wincing at destroying a piece of the past, worrying it was nothing of interest, I ripped open the envelope.

I had made myself a jigsaw puzzle.

It must have been given to me as a present, possibly purchased after haranguing at some art museum gift shop: a blank white jigsaw puzzle, pre-cut and intended to be decorated with art of your choice. Or something like that. I had clearly used all of three or four colors, and it was clearly from somewhere near the middle of my artistic endeavors, but I couldn't say more. So I just sat down and put it together.

Never in my life have I done something quite like what I did today: assembling a puzzle whose final picture I only have the faintest inkling how to perceive, created by a much younger me and sealed away for more than a decade, forgotten about completely until now. I despaired here and there that I might not have all the pieces, that some had been lost or forgotten or perhaps given to someone else in some weird school-fueled exchange that we both forgot about (when I have flights of fancy they tend to enter low atmosphere). I got confused and turned about when I discovered a piece had broken in half, and had a cool refreshing bit of relief when I determined which rogue pieces fit together and where they went, though it meant physics was against me for the rest of the process of completion. And in the end, huddled on my floor with the innards of a box full of paper all around me, I got it finished:



It's a terrible likeness of Wonder Weasel. And Wicked Weasel too, for that matter (he is, in theory, the smaller black one in the foreground). I think I drew this in the period when I was trying and failing to imitate Jeff "Bone" Smith. But the point is not that the art was great; the point is that getting to sit down and put together something I made years ago was an unexpected adventure, a little visual icon of a trip to the past that I am so glad I got to take. I think, next year, I will make myself something similar, some little mystery or treasure map to be deciphered in ten years time. Maybe I can even make it intelligible to someone else, the way this puzzle was. I wonder if anyone sells instructions for treasure maps...

My whimsy levels are high today; I really hope the friend I am having dinner with can handle it.