I’ve always liked jigsaw puzzles. Well, always is a long time, but as long as I can remember. In high school, I did puzzles on the floor in our family room. One of my parents found me a big sheet of cardboard to work on, so the pieces wouldn’t be scattered all over the floor, and because the rug, tightly knotted Ecuadorian wool, wasn’t much of a surface for a cardboard jigsaw. One memory I have blends the television in the background and a puzzle of brightly colored hot air balloons.
We had a poster of hot air balloons, it’s framed now in my parents’ downstairs bathroom, two houses and forty years later. Am I sure there was also a puzzle? No. I am not sure.
But memory is memory. I have a memory of hot air balloons taking shape on the family room floor and a soundtrack backdrop of the Winter Olympics. Ice skating, ice dancing—that’s all I really watched, along with a teeny bit of luge (so fast, so frightening), and biathlon—is that the one? The multi-event sport that had people cross-country skiing as hard as they could for some terrifying distance and then dropping to the ground to fire a rifle, presumably at a target, though that’s a detail I no longer remember. As I said, I really only cared about the skating.
Still, that lingering connection of jigsaw puzzle and Winter Olympics. My parents were more willing to countenance the TV being on if I was doing something constructive. I folded a lot of laundry under the same dispensation; more accurately, watched a lot of television with a laundry basket in front of me, the two halves of a pair of socks in either hand, waiting to be properly rolled at the next commercial break.
Important, too, is the effect of repetition, of duration—a many pieced puzzle, a long athletic event. A long novel, a seasonal treat—Anna Karenina inextricably linked to the taste of a Cadbury creme egg, the slow nibbling of the chocolate shell in tiny bites, the gooey filling with its smear of yellow against white. So I know what time of year I read the book, though I don’t know what year it was.
I remember a few skaters’ names, but don’t know who placed.
I have never been up in a hot air balloon.
