Once when I was six years old, just after he’d returned from an overnight trip to his job in Washington, D.C., my father did something he’d never done before, he sat and watched me as I put together an antique jigsaw puzzle on the floor in the living room of our house. He’d seen me put together puzzles in the past. He’d even watched me for short periods of time, but this was different. He watched me for over an hour, while pretending to read something on his small computer pad.
Actually, that isn’t quite correct. He was pretending to pretend to read something on the pad, like he was doing a puzzle inside of a puzzle. I say this because the pad wasn’t even turned on, so whatever he was reading was flat and he was hiding it behind the pad. I decided to do my own puzzle within a puzzle, and observed him as I pretended to give my full attention to putting pieces together. He must’ve read whatever he was hiding a dozen times as he watched me, and when he was done, I heard it make a slight wrinkling sound as he slid it into his pocket. I’d never seen paper before, so I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Cephas?” he said, to break the long silence. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Most people don’t do anything when they grow up. Most people sit at home and watch shows all day. Is there such a thing as a professional puzzle solver?”
“You could be a scientist, like your mom. Making discoveries is like solving puzzles.”
I wrinkled my nose at that idea. I didn’t like technology.
“Archeologists solve puzzles by piecing together the past,” I replied. “And chefs piece together new recipes and F.B.I. agents piece together crimes. Any job can involve puzzles, if you look at it the right way.”
“I suppose you’re right, but you don’t enjoy just any sort of puzzle do you? You only like puzzles that are hard for you. What would you do if you found a puzzle that didn’t seem to have a solution?”
“I’d create a new solution,” I replied without hesitation.
Dad was sufficiently surprised by my answer that he gasped under his breath.
“But-”
Dad’s voice trailed off. It was something he always did when he wanted to choose his words carefully.
“But wouldn’t creating a new solution make it a different puzzle?”
“Not if the whole point of the puzzle was to create a new solution in the first place.”
I said it without looking up, and heard him gasp again.
“Okay. What if your new solution included throwing away a couple of the original pieces?”
I never looked up, but somehow I knew that his eyes were closed as he asked me this.
“That’s okay. Maybe being thrown away was always their job in the puzzle. That’s a cool idea to make the puzzle harder. Maybe I’ll get a puzzle like that someday.”
“I’m sure you will, Cephas. Someday I’m sure you will.”