Finish This Puzzle Now

This is the third morning in a row my daughter has come down and requested a grilled cheese sandwich.  ‘Give a man a fish he can eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish . . . ’  No, she’s not interested in learning how to prepare the sandwich.  I fry some onions and an egg to go with it so it’s more like an egg-McMuffin.  We all seem to be in a bit of suspended animation here, riding out this quarantine.  People wake late, go to bed at totally different times. I’m up early.  I am certainly glad we have a yard, and supplies, for now.

I wasn’t interested in an egg-McMuffin myself, and instead took the last of the burritos that never got eaten from two days back  This had been my lunch two days running and I decided to unwrap the squat bomb of a package and go at it without the tortilla which is no longer fresh and will just fill me up and put me to sleep, anyway.  Our local taqueria is often lauded as exceptional, but this nothing like Le Taqueria on Mission St.

Puzzle time is time suspended.  Has it really been two hours since I sat down here to get ‘just one or two pieces in.’  It’s the final central section of the Garden of Earthly Delights.  In the foreground there are so many people.  So much white flesh to discern and place properly.  I have a whole piece-pile of faces, over on the top of the desk.  The grass has a very dry quality here as well and I find myself scanning the desk over and over to find just that particular quality of color. 

My little one joins me at some point, and I am glad for the help.  She starts to complete the blue orbs in the lake at the top of the Garden.  She makes good progress.  I do as well.  There aren’t many pieces left, perhaps only two or three hundred to look over and the pace starts to quicken.  Soon it’s clear that we are going to finish this puzzle now.  Pieces are laid two and three at a time.  It’s all rather obvious now that there are only fifty pieces left.  Achingly, and as suspected, we reach the end of effort to find that one piece is missing.  That piece on the right triptych that I’d spent an hour of my life, certainly, looking for simply isn’t here.  We check the couch, under the carpet.  The woman, standing beside the large rabbit, will never have her bear breasts added. 

I'm glad to be done.  I will never look at this painting the same way, again.

Wednesday, 03/25/20