I’m not really a fan of jigsaw puzzles. I’ve done several in my time, but I don’t get all goosebumply at the thought of putting together pieces of anything. So that can’t explain why I dropped everything on Saturday after Susan presented me with a box full of the shattered remains of two dishes that have been broken since she moved here to Silver Lake in 1999.
“They were the worst movers,” she told me in a tone whose disappointment hadn’t dimmed in the seven years as she opened the box and showed me the proof in the form of a what used to be a covered blue-and-white serving dish and a green platter textured like a leafy vegetable. Dishes she cherished enough to keep all these years rather than just throw them away.
I may have said something like “Oooo, can I try to put them back together?” that may have come across as me sounding as if I liked the challenge of three dimensional puzzles, but the truth is I didn’t want to do it for that. I did it because I love my wife and I wanted to repair as best I could something that bothered her for so long.
She sorta shrugged and we pulled all the pieces out of the box and set them on the dining room table. Susan smiled as I qualified any potential results by citing my absolute lack of restoration ability. She went into the library and I went and got the rubber cement and got busy.
It’s too bad that I didn’t take “before” pictures because at least then that would illustrate why the end products aren’t much better than I had warned her they would be. So with the “after” pictures that follow, it will have to suffice that the blue-and-white piece was comprised of 29 pieces, and the platter was in 11 pieces.
A couple hours later and with my fingertips coated in dried adhesive, here’s what they end up looking like (click to biggify if you want to destroy the illusion created by the thumbnails below):
While the dishes certainly won’t be used for anything but dust gathering, I hope my efforts to mend her tableware went a little way to mend my wife’s heartbreak over them being so carelessly broken.
I love you, baby!
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