Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.—Yoda
My father-in-law, Doug, is a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast. Turning 90 this year and still going strong, this former medical device super-salesman, father, stepfather, grandfather and now, thanks to little Bennett, great-grandfather, will tackle a 1,000-piece puzzle on a card table in the home he shares with my mother-in-law, Linda, and then open another box. (In the background, Rod Stewart is singing “As Time Goes By.”)
Not long ago, Janice and I gave Doug a Vermont-y puzzle that included an image of a red barn. That’s a lot of red pieces that look exactly alike, and I like to think that each time Doug found two pieces that locked in together, there was a satisfying *click* as he literally hit the side of a barn.
I sometimes wonder if I detect a thread through Doug’s long life. As a younger man, he gowned up and scrubbed in to many an operating room to guide a nervous heart surgeon in the proper implantation of one of the early pacemakers, sometimes stepping in to move the procedure along himself. He would be called in the middle of the night to emergency surgeries, and he never said no.
See, Doug was the missing piece. Had he not thrown on a suit jacket, hopped in the car and drove to Columbia/New York-Presbyterian on those on-call occasions, some of those heart surgeries might not have gone as well. When Doug reminisces about those late nights and early mornings, something is clear even though he is too modest to say it: He saved quite a few lives.
What I love about Doug doing jigsaw puzzles in these, his carefree years, is that it is so apropos to the life he has led: Success depends on asking each piece, where do you fit in? Where do you belong? In his younger days, when there was a life on the line, Doug knew where he belonged. Elbow to elbow with leading surgeons and OR nurses, he fit right in. And at least some of those patients got to go on to live a 1,000 piece puzzle instead of a 500-piece one.
Where do we each belong in the gazillion-piece puzzle of life? Where do we fit? Where might we hear that click? Maybe the point is not to overthink it. Just grab a jacket, hop in the car and go. As time goes by, the bigger picture will fill in before our eyes, and we will locate the spot only we can fill. It’s a massive tableau, this tapestry of life. But without us, it’s incomplete.
Love this one, Rob for whom the metaphor of his life fits perfectly (no pun intended).
I suspect it does for many of us. Thank you for this.
Thank you, Rob, for reminding me that I am part of a bigger puzzle. Even in those times I feel like I don't do enough.