Puzzle-Pieces

When Things Fit Together

I have been house-sitting, cat-sitting for 3 lovely kitties these past few weeks.

Pet-sitting has been a great new addition to my post-pandemic, back-to-the-road-but-not-full-time existence. It allows me the luxury of having a place to myself, which I could never, as a full-time artist, afford “in real life.” I love the peaceful quiet of solitude that allows me freedom of creative-thinking and reflection, that can accommodate my bizarre and random sleep-and-work schedule, and I love that there are living creatures around me to love and care for, which is grounding, and sweetly entertaining. They remind me that even when I’m on my own it’s not all about me and I appreciate the humbling.

If someone were to observe me in this space, they would often see me at my laptop sending and responding to messages, booking tours, applying for grants, creating posts, posters, video editing, or they might also see me at the piano, (there is one here!) or with my guitar in hand (both unfortunately in low proportion of my actual time) - They would see me doing some puttering and simple cooking, and a fair bit of coffee drinking.

But they would also see me staring vacantly. A lot. “flaked out” and staring. I have to remind myself frequently that I am technically still working. Half of my work requires picturing and envisioning. I am not doing nothing. I am preparing by visualizing, which reminds me of the details I need to take care of in my planning. My dreams and schemes become fuller when I have some uninterrupted silence to conjure them. Even the train rides between cities I will be in, the what to pack, the various permits I need - without this visualising, I’d be a disaster.

There is so much advice about living in the moment, but a full-time-artist with a self-managed career must spend quite a bit of time in the future, because without that future envisioning, nothing is going to happen. Day dreaming is part of the job.

Interestingly, picturing of the future is closely intertwined with picturing of the past. Especially when it comes to touring, it’s the past connections I’ve made, the friends I’ve stayed with, the people who have helped me find shows, the venues I’ve loved, that make up the desire and the templates to plan for more. It’s also the things that went wrong that allow for self-correction. Remembering what I enjoyed and didn’t, what went smoothly and didn’t, is helpful information.

So I find myself mentally meandering between future visions and past reminiscence. I also have that layer-of-thought that works “above” all that, analysing and reflecting about my process, a layer that produces this kind of writing, which you are now reading.

This is what I need the quiet for. Even as I do dishes, or prepare food, if I have the quiet, I can do this kind of thinking.

And even though it the silence of solitude that grants me all of this, one thing is always quite striking to me:

None of what I have done would have happened without other people’s help. Staying in people’s graces is imperative. That said, I have learned over the years to gracefully acknowledge that I am helping too. We are filling each other’s needs by these glorious interactions that make forward motion happen. We can’t all be everything. And thankfully there are people for the “somethings”. The very practice of pet-sitting is a perfect example of such exchanges. I need quiet space. They need a pet-sitter.

This afternoon I was taking the full-to-the-brim recycling box outside to dump it into the larger bin. And just as I was about to turn into the house again, I heard a man’s voice and looked out to where the sound was coming from.

It was an elderly man, and he was standing in front of the little puzzle library that the owners of this home have outside. You know, those little wooden boxes with cupboard doors that people usually put books in, on the edge of their front years, so people can take a book or leave a book – only in this particular box, instead of books, it’s puzzles – something I have never seen before.

He said, “you know, it’s the darndest thing, I’ll tell ya!”

The man was holding a box which had a picture of the Canadian train on it. “The Canadian!!” – The same train I rode over 50 times back and forth across the country, singing to the passengers in exchange for my passage? That train. He was holding a box with a picture of “MY” train!

You can only imagine my heart skipped a beat seeing its picture. It has so much personal meaning to me, so many moving memories. I hadn’t looked inside the cupboard to know which puzzles were in there, so it was a surprise.

Immediately, the man became “one of my train stories.” I was personally invested in whatever it was he was going to tell me, and so I stepped toward him to hear it. It turned out he had the exact same puzzle at home, only some of the pieces were missing. He had it in a bag, he explained, and was intending to throw it out to the trash for a while now, but kept postponing it without knowing why. When he found the same puzzle in this puzzle library, he took it home and discovered it too had missing pieces. But not the same ones.

He was finally able to complete the puzzle in its entirety, which made him very happy.

And then, instead of taking the ones he needed for his and keeping the complete puzzle, he took the ones out of his own set that the public puzzle needed, put them in the box, and was bringing it back as a whole for others to enjoy. He was just in the act of doing that when I had stepped outside.

The very thing I had been reflecting about was manifesting in almost an absurd and uncanny reversal of “from the concrete to the metaphor.”

This story didn’t need to have anything to do with me. It could have all happened ten minutes before, or after I stepped outside and I would have never known. Or I could have stepped outside and he could have been holding any other puzzle, and I would have enjoyed the story of finding missing pieces after a long time, a story of the neighbourhood, community spirit of a puzzle library helping the man, and him helping it in return. I would have enjoyed the metaphor becoming concrete just fine, had it been any other puzzle. But it was “The Canadian,” an iconic train in the history of me, and so the story belonged to me too, as if it was officially inviting me in.

I didn’t utter a word to him about how big of a deal that train has been to me. It wasn’t necessary for him to know. I didn’t tell him how much I think about the puzzle pieces of our lives, and how we all have missing pieces and need each other to be more complete.

I simply said, “this story makes me very very happy, thank you for telling me!”

And he smiled big and said “well alright!”

We don’t even really need to know what pieces we might be offering someone else’s puzzle.

Maybe we just need to know and remember we all have missing pieces. And we all have some to spare.

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