ASSEMBLY REQUIRED:

I had never done puzzles, not even when I was a kid. The part of the brain associated with shapes (unless in the shape of persons) is deficient in my case, extremely so, more than you can imagine. As a boy, and long thereafter, I loved games, but puzzles were collaborative rather than competitive. Still, I found myself, for the first time, working on puzzles with Wendy.

We started with 1,000-piece puzzles, some of them gorgeously made and literature-themed: there was a series ("The World of . . .") that included Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen (that one a gift from my brother, Rick) and, yes, Ian Rankin (whose books I admire; Mark Noll is also a fan). But Wendy began to find those puzzles a bit daunting, and partway through "The World of the Brontës" we decided we'd better shift to 500-piece puzzles. Though now and then we take on a 1,000-piece one, as we just did with our eldest, Anna, here for a visit; she inherited Wendy's spatial intelligence.

On a visit to the blessed Morton Arboretum several months earlier, Katy and Wendy had stopped at the gift shop. A 500-piece puzzle there, "Butterflies of North America," from an outfit called Mudpuppy, caught Katy's eye, and they brought that one home. It was wonderfully colorful, enjoyable to assemble, a nice change of pace. When we sadly had to abandon the Brontës, we decided to try another puzzle from Mudpuppy.

Since then, Wendy and I have done a whole series of them, as well as puzzles from other outfits. Many of these are "family puzzles," pitched to a range of users, young kids very much included. Many of them, unlike the butterfly one we started with, are humorous (people allergic to "cuteness" wouldn't like them). Others show serene landscapes; others still feature layouts in which postage stamps or travel ads ("Come to Italy!") from around the globe are artfully and wittily juxtaposed in delightful profusion. Each puzzle has its own personality, its own color-scheme and method of organization (some puzzles are divided into a grid of distinct blocks, for instance, while others are not).

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