Ink Tea Stone Leaf

On my table there is jigsaw puzzle, depicting a romantic view of the famous Italian village of Manarola. My wife Ariele and I have worked painstakingly to assemble this image, in fits and starts, for nearly a year. The box advertises its contents at 2000 pieces, though by counting the edge pieces I’ve determined the true total is 2,028.

Four of those pieces are missing, and it’s driving me crazy.

Not that crazy, though. We bought this puzzle years ago at a garage sale, and anybody who’s done that can tell you that any number of pieces disappearing is to be expected. We’re lucky we only lost four; that’s less than 0.2% of the total! We could have been missing whole blocks of the town, we could have had huge gaping holes in the mountainside. There could have been huge, terrifying voids of nothingness in the seas and skies. Instead, there are just a few tiny voids. You hardly even notice them at first glance. The good residents of Manarola should count their blessings.

The point of a jigsaw puzzle, however – the reason we did this one, and the reason we have several others on the shelf, ready to go – is to complete it. Complete means total, which means one hundred percent, and 99.8% is just not the same thing. In place of admiring a truly completed work, which I will again emphasize we spent nearly a year working on, we’re left to grin sheepishly and admire the best we could do under the circumstances.

Sometimes that’s how it is in life, but it shouldn’t be with jigsaw puzzles. If anything, a jigsaw should be the one endeavor in life you can be certain you’ll see through to the end, if only you have the determination to push through the monotony of sorting through fine gradations of sky blue for as long as it takes. Alas, some puzzle experiences don’t live up to this ideal. This puzzle was a tease; our relationship remains tantalizingly unconsummated. We do not behold the Manarola we were promised on the box: we behold Manarola with holes in it.

And maybe that’s not such a big deal. Did we not visit the real Italy less than three months ago? If we haven’t seen Manarola, isn’t it our fault for not putting it on the itinerary? Yes, and (arguably) yes. But we only had a week to see the most amazing sights in that beautiful country, and we couldn’t have known the puzzle would betray us. We might have guessed, but we couldn’t have known!

Most likely, the four missing pieces are long gone. But as we contemplate the moment when we will disassemble our work, and send the remaining 2,024 back into the box to await their ultimate fate, we are nevertheless haunted by their absence. What will we do if, for example, we should find them under some furniture in a few days? Do we pull out the box, and dedicate as much time as it takes to reassemble the whole thing again, bit by bit, and capture the glory that first eluded us?

Personally, I think it would be more worthwhile to fly back to Italy and see the real Manarola. It looks lovely, with or without a few tiny voids.