Puzzlement

Some people are serious puzzle fans. Hard core puzzlers. Addicts, you might call them. There may be, for all I know, a Twelve Step program for them. In its milder form, puzzles are no doubt great fun for lots of people, a way to be doing something without actually doing something, so that the cultural Calvinism which says busyness is a sign of superior virtue can be achieved with an absolute minimum of effort. Puzzles are, in other words, good for you.

The wholesome lady pictured above is a demonstration of how easily puzzles can control us. Ann has never been much of a puzzle person. She'd rather spend her free time painting or reading, but she got hooked on a 700 piece monster (actually, turns out it was a 697 piece monster, but that's another story) that spent several weeks developing, emerging first on the dining room table, reaching mid-life on the living room coffee table, finally ending its life covering half of the breakfast bar. It was always, "Just this one more piece", and we nearly turned the house upside down looking for those three lost pieces. We both breathed a sigh of relief when all the pieces (well, 697 of them anyway) were in place.

Nor have I ever considered myself a connoisseur of jig saw puzzles, or puzzles of any type, for that matter. They always reminded me of golf and its perpetual search of perfection. Mother enjoyed working the New York Times crossword (in ink, yet), but I always stopped in frustration or boredom, whichever came first.

Then daughter Jennifer introduced me to Sudoku, and now I'm the one who's hooked.

It began, harmlessly enough, with the "Easy" ones in the newspaper, ramped up to the booklets in the supermarket checkout rack, and now I download them a couple dozen at a time to print and hold in a clipboard where I do one a day. (Does that sound like the familiar trail to degradation?) I buy mechanical pencils by the 12-pack, work the hardest level I can find, and have been known to ignore phone calls, delay meals, and skip responsibilities in order to finish the darn thing. There are even newer and more diabolical forms known as "Killer Sudoku" and "Kakuro", but that sounds far too ominous. A serious addiction, indeed, and now I'm part of the puzzle world.

Another manifestation of this phenomenon is the publication by the New York Times of "Picture Puzzles", which quickly shot up to #1 on the Best Seller list. According to its promo advertising, it's "the puzzle craze that's sweeping the nation", but as near as I can tell it's a rehash of the old grade school puzzle where you tried to find the differences between Picture A and Picture B. The answers, of course, were always printed in the back.

Where's all this leading? Goodness knows. In its milder forms, puzzle addiction is pretty harmless, I suppose, and maybe it's been around for years and years but I just fell under its spell. Whatever. I suppose we could wax philosophical about the human need to create order, or look for connections with the physicists' "chaos theory". Or, even better, we could go finish today puzzle.