I got my son a 2000 piece puzzle for Christmas with the intention of putting it together with him. It was a metaphor for our lives at the time which were both in pieces in response to my daughter’s crisis.

We started working on the puzzle and I started writing about it here:

2000 Piece Puzzle

I was tracking our progress on a daily basis, commenting on what emerged in this process and you may have noticed I stopped abruptly after just a few days when the puzzle looked like the picture on top there. Reason was, we took a hit.

We had the puzzle in the middle of the living room floor. This was purposeful. This was the thing that my son and I were doing together but we forgot all about Lucky.

Lucky is our dog who ran across the puzzle while on a tear from the kitchen to the window in the front of the house. Apparently there was someone out there he had to bark at.

We came home to find the puzzle smeared all over and although we salvaged what we could we were both downtrodden over this because fact is a 2000 piece puzzle is a challenge.

We responded by becoming somewhat depressed, I think. We set the puzzle on an ottoman in the corner, neither of us wanting to invest for awhile and this was not such a good idea.

It was not a good idea because my son who likes to leap around quite a bit, knocked the puzzle over further destroying our effort. Again, we picked up the pieces… but no one wanted to work anymore so back in the corner it went and some days later the guilt really started to set in.

I told the soldier, “I really have to get back on that puzzle with Vidroid. We will be such losers if we give up!” So I had the intention and of course mentioned it to my son a few times but still days passed and then tonight, Vidroid back flipped onto the board again and when it was all said and done, all that was left of our work is shown in the picture on the left.

“What do we do?” I asked him. “You don’t want to quit do you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. We fell a long way down the mountain, didn’t we?”

He laughed.

“Want to get back on this?”

Long story short, we got back to work and I mean we applied ourselves. The picture on the right shows the night’s progress. We’re packing it in for now. The puzzle is safely stowed under the couch. We are going to finish that son of a bitch.

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