The missing piece

In a fit of industriousness, my sister Lauren and I pulled out a 1,000-piece puzzle on Friday night and set upon it. It was a photo of a lovely woodland scape — various varieties of pink and yellow flowers, brown leaves, birch trees, tall grasses — and we were quite obviously attracted to it because of the challenge of it all.

This Thanksgiving, I learned that I hate challenges.

I don't know if it was the discomfort of having two extremely large dogs laying directly across my body while I was trying to find my border pieces. (And it's not like I didn't attempt to move these dogs — any efforts to redirect Charlie from throwing his considerably large paws across my arms and Henry from lifting his head off my ass and moving his crazy-long arms from under my knees were met with a drooling tongue bath to the face and then a return to the exact same position ... over and over again.) Perhaps it was the fact that as I get older, I get less patient. But I was completely useless in putting this damn thing together.

My youth was spent successfully attacking the most obscenely complicated puzzles. The designer shoelace one? Did it. Scattered crayons? That one too. The iridescent pink one, where the image changed shape and color every time you picked up a piece? Yep. But holy crap, I took one look at the woods and knew I was screwed.

We finished the border (well, all but two pieces, which we have yet to find), I found one inner piece that fit the left-side border, and I sighed. Lauren sighed.

ME: I think I'm done.
LAUREN: Why did you make me do this fucking thing?
ME: You're the dumbass who agreed to do it. It's your fault.
LAUREN: I hate it. I'm in hell.
ME: How did I used to do these things when I was a kid?
LAUREN: [pause] Are we done?
ME: [sigh] Yes. Get rid of it.
LAUREN: [dumping it back into the box] I'm going to bed.

I could call it a day on this little project, but see, I have a serious OCD-heavy completion disorder, e.g. if I hate a book, I'll finish it anyway (except THE CELESTINE PROPHESY and SLAB RAT, cuz suck), and I can't get out of a car until a song is over and it has to be a song I like so it takes forever to get out of said car because nothing I like is ever on the radio). So now I'm determined to finish the puzzle next time I go home. Lauren and I have a pretty decent track record for picking up where we left off: We once sat down to watch "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and finished it ... a year and a half later.

Josh stayed back in Brooklyn for the holiday. Last Saturday, around the time I had to come to the office because HAVE YOU HEARD TOM AND KATIE GOT MARRIED AND XENU GAVE THE SPEECH AND THE CAKE WAS MADE OF THETAN SOULS AND OHMYGAWD IT WAS THE MOST ROMANTIC EVER!!!!!, Gwendolyn lost her eyesight. So I came home from work at 7:30 Sunday morning, we took her to the vet, and found that both of her retinas detached and she's irreversibly blind. It's the saddest thing.

What's incredible is how quickly she's adapted. She found her food and litter box almost immediately. Within two days, she managed the stairs without help, she climbed onto our (very high off the ground) bed, and she's now scaling the arms of the couch. She's still figuring things out — she got in a rough cat vs. curtain fight the other day while she was trying to feel herself around a window (she won) — and I'm certainly projecting, wondering all the time how she must feel, but she's an incredible animal.

I can't finish a 1,000-piece puzzle though I have all my faculties, but my blind cat can tiptoe around the rim of a laundry basket to climb onto a pile of towels on a shelf. She's so much cooler than I am.