Isn’t there some better way to do this? That thought looped through my mind over and over as, part of a team of five, I helped Daughter Number Two transfer jigsaw puzzles from her old house to her new house. More specifically from the basement of her old house to the basement of her new one. Down the stairs, pick up puzzles, carry upstairs, load in cars. Drive to new house, unload puzzles, carry through garage and house, down the stairs. Leave puzzles, climb stairs, out through house and garage, drive back to other house. Repeat.Bir
D#2 has hundreds of puzzles. At least. She did direct some of them out of the main stream, into various give-away piles. And she still has hundreds left.
She’s particularly fond of Tuco puzzles. Tucos made their debut in 1932. They have pieces made of wallboard, and the pieces don’t interlock. The earliest ones didn’t even have pictures on the boxes to show you what the image was. D#2 is hard core.
We never refined the puzzle-moving process. We didn’t have enough person-power to form a puzzle brigade, and those older boxes couldn’t have taken being tossed from person to person to cut down on all the trips up and down stairs. It took the time it took, and now it’s done.
Daughter Number 1 and I were in a diner, a couple days ago, when the power went out. Silence fell over staff and diners. Then a man called out, “I got my food,” and a woman said, “I didn’t do it.” Our server returned to our table to say that DTE estimated they’d have the power back on inside half an hour. We’d ordered our lunch, at that point, but it hadn’t arrived. We elected to stay and chat.
Time went by. Power didn’t return. Working by the light of their cell phones, the kitchen staff completed orders to the best of their ability, using only the gas stoves. At length, the head of the kitchen crew delivered our lunches, mentioning to D#1 that he’d grilled her toast, as the toaster is electric.
We enjoyed our meals, light pouring in through the wall of windows at the front of the building. People were in no hurry to leave. The power outage had turned lunch at the diner into what felt like a party. There was an atmosphere of all being in this together. Diners, including us, left with smiles, and got farewell waves from smiling staff. We had a wonderful time.
After lunch, D#1 and I needed to put something into the back of her car. She popped open the hatch, and I slid the object in. D#1 was standing just behind me and says that, at the same moment was when the little bird flew through the hatch and into the passenger compartment of her car.
“It looked like it all happened in one motion,” she told me later.
There was a fraction of a second during which bird and people processed the situation, bird from its perch on the dashboard, people outside the car looking in at bird. All three of our thought balloons matched, and read, “What just happened?”
Then D#1 was saying, “There’s a bird in the car!”
And I was saying, “Open the doors, open the doors! All of them!”
While the bird said nothing at all.
It did, however, avail itself of an early opportunity to exit the vehicle, flying neatly out one of the open doors. And, no doubt, rejoining the other sparrows with quite a story to tell. “You’re not going to believe this, guys, but guess what I just did!”
The whole incident took, maybe, five seconds. It was over in a flash. Yet it left us feeling that we’d just experienced something unusual together. We were not the only ones, in the long history of vehicles and birds, to have a bird fly into the passenger compartment of a car. But not only had neither D#1 nor I ever had it happen before, but neither of use had ever heard of it happening to someone else.
Like the sparrow, we had a story to tell our flock when we rejoined them. In fact, the wonder of the event has stayed with us. And our flock. My sweetheart just got back from grocery shopping and reports that, even though he waited an extra beat or two when he stowed his purchases in the trunk, no birds flew in.
Little incidents like moving the puzzles, power going out in the diner, and a sparrow flying into the car, become remember-whens in family lore—happy memories of life together.
18 September 20