A lot of puzzling memory and behavior problems cluster under the dementia umbrella. So far, science knows too little about most of the variations and nothing that can cure any of them.
On a day-to-day living-with-it level, my husband’s memory issues are baffling to both of us. He’s always liked to do crosswords, and still brags about the time 50 years ago when he won the London Times Sunday crossword challenge. He does the daily crosswords still, but I’m not sure how well. He enjoys jigsaws too, and recently resurrected a 3D castle puzzle.
So I got out several Christmas puzzles we’ve worked many times over the years. Among them, a tiny one depicting a mouse dressed as Santa. I sorted the edge pieces from the rest. and laid out the one small section that was still stuck together. The whole thing is quite small. He got into it quickly. Ten minutes later I went back to see how he was doing. There were a lot more white background pieces than before.
“Where did these come from?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and muttered something about “needing more.” I picked up a piece that had green pine needles as part of the design. “Oh, these don’t go with this puzzle,” I said, “they go with this one.” I showed him the larger puzzle I’d set aside. It pictures wild birds on a feeder that hangs from a pine bough. It was partially put together in the box.
Peter doubled over laughing at himself. “Well, when I couldn’t find the pieces I needed, I thought they might be in that box,” he explained. He realized how silly that sounded.
“We’ll do that one separately,” I said. “Finish this little one first.”
“There aren’t enough pieces,” he said, grabbing for the bigger box again. He’d instantly forgotten we’d had that conversation, that he’d laughed at himself.
As often happens, I tried to make sense of how he can work on an intricate 3-D 620-piece jigsaw one minute and the next try to fit a 500-piece 12″ x 36″ puzzle into a 100-piece 7.5″ square frame.
Header: Tiny puzzle puzzles.
2016 National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ contest finalist. 
