Friends getting together over a puzzle

I’ve been a puzzler (some say, I’ve been “puzzling,” and that may also be true) all my life. It started with math, where every day’s homework was a puzzle. For algebra: If one train leaves a station in Chicago going 30 miles an hour . . . For geometry: Given two sides of a triangle …

I loved those problems, which to me were just games and puzzles.

The Cable Guy has his own puzzle blog that features some of the challenges we’ve taken on recently. Check out the latest entry .

We often hear that mysteries are like jigsaw puzzles, that writers and readers enjoy putting the pieces together, ending up with a satisfying solution, much like turning 1500 jagged pieces into a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies.

In a way. But mysteries have to be like challenging puzzles, not the easy kind where all the pieces are piled before us with one brisk dump from the box, and what’s required is simply to sort them by color or shape and fit them together to match the picture on the cover of the box.

In a good “whodunit” mystery, there are many sets of clues that unfold: some are hidden in plain sight, some are subtly presented, some not; some are within the character profiles and arcs, the setting, or the plot. These mysteries are solved not by simply putting a given number of known pieces together, but by first sorting out the pieces that matter from the ones that don’t. Maybe there are a couple of red herrings; maybe there are no herrings of any color.

I’ve seen jigsaw puzzles where the manufacturer has deliberately included extra pieces that don’t belong in the scene. Similarly, there are the crossword puzzles that are diagramless. No black squares give us the word length; we have to figure that out ourselves.

Those puzzles are more like the great mysteries, where the clue is that the dog did not bark or the answer has been in the letter on the mantel all along.

Sometimes I worry that I’m wasting time with the morning acrostic, or the Sunday NY Times crossword, or the countless word games I find in print and online.

Is it enriching my life that I’ve learned a new word (predacious: predatory, plundering) or factoid (molasses is an ingredient of rum)?

I take my response from no less a puzzle figure than Erno Rubik (b. 1944), sculptor, architect, and inventor of the Rubik’s cube (patent, 1975). He has this to say: “The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life, our whole life is solving puzzles.”

Some of us get more practice than others.

This week’s topic on the LadyKillers blog had me dragging out an old piece, published years ago in a baseball magazine.

So, here I am again, talking about an AHA moment in my life. A tough lesson learned early.

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You know me—I’m the one who protests against organized sports. In my Utopia, science teachers are revered more than (name an athlete, any athlete) and no one is actually paid to play a game.

I’m hardly recognizable as the same woman who nearly let the tides of professional baseball determine her choice of college. But following the Boston Braves out west was my only positive thought on the gray day when the headlines announced that my team was leaving Boston and heading to Milwaukee, a city I’d never heard of.

Let me point out that all my school books were covered in newspaper photos of the Braves. Tommy Holmes, Earl Torgeson, Walker Cooper, Sam Jethroe, Bob Elliot. And don’t forget the starting pitchers, all 2 of them: Spahn, Sain, and pray for rain.

My bedroom walls were covered with baseball–the official chart of National League logos, autographed programs, and laminated ticket stubs. My father, an unskilled laborer, had lost a thumb to an electric saw one day, and filled the lost time in construction by working the concessions at Braves Field and Fenway Park. I got to see both the ’46 and ’48 World Series!

Until the Braves left, no team had moved from one city to another, at least not in my teen lifetime. For several months, between the announcement and the actual move, I was in denial. So what if Lou Perini was losing money and Tom Yawkey (the stinkin’ Red Sox owner) wouldn’t share Fenway Park. Baseball is a sport, a game; no one has to make money on it, I cried.

Okay, I can hear your LOLs, but I was a kid, and not nearly as in-the-know as kids are today.

I’d used the Braves to direct the rest of my life, too. I was too shy to talk much in school, but I had all the confidence in the world opening with, “Did you see that third inning catch last night?” or “Who does that umpire think he is, calling a walk?” In other words: Don’t think I expect you to notice me or acknowledge me. I’m just here as a messenger for the Braves. How could I face life without the Braves? Without a way to talk to other kids?

“I guess now you’ll have to be a Red Sox fan.” This from classmates who didn’t understand that existence is not like a baserunner, sprinting from one anchored sack to the next, around to home; it’s like a whisper of wind under a fastball, waiting to be named by the umpire.

“They ain’t nothing ’til I calls them,” says the umpire.

The only remnants of Pre-Aha days: a signed photo of Warren Spahn and a Braves cap.

Eventually, I let the Braves go west. I did even more than that—I let all of baseball go west and never followed it again.

From time to time through the years, I’ve watched baseball games out of the corner of my eye and sometimes allowed the cheers of the crowd and the crack of the bat to carry me back to the old Philco. When friends hear the story of “my life as a Braves fan” they mistakenly think it would take little to turn me into a twenty-first century fan.

But you can never undo an AHA moment: Baseball is a business, not a sport. It’s for themselves—the owners, the managers, the players—it’s their business. It’s not for me.

Besides, I found I can speak for myself now.