Family time in the modern era, with boys

I love working a good jigsaw puzzle now and then; when we were kids, my brothers and sisters and I spent lots of hours with a big puzzle spread out on a card table, and for several years now, our family gatherings have featured at least the sisters (including the sister-in-law) seated around a puzzle while we chat about events since we last gathered.

This year I had found a silly puzzle titled "One Hundred Chickens and a Worm" that was mostly white with line drawings of mostly white chickens (and a few reds and blacks and purples), mostly dressed hysterically: one was a stripper, one was Bat Chicken, a couple appeared to be the Blues Brothers, one was reading a newspaper—you get the idea. Working it together made us sound as if we'd already escaped from the home: "I'm working on this Cat-in-the-Hat chicken; do you have any of these red stripes over there?"

After I had gotten the chicken puzzle home, I read on the box that the series included 100 frogs and a fly—perfect for the sister who likes frogs, I thought, and 100 dogs and a cat, and 100 cats and a bird. My local Wally Worlds didn't seem to carry the frog puzzle, but I bought the dogs for Darling Daughter and considered getting the cats for Number One Son.

DDr got away after Christmas without opening the dog puzzle, but I had had fun with the chickens and thought the dogs—which came in a much wider variety of colors—would be fun for me, since right now I outnumber her in dog maintenance by two to one.

I opened the box and took a tip from my sister, who had used made color copies of the box so all four of us could have one when we worked on the chickens together. (Amazing how technology has taken over even low-tech jigsaw puzzles; when I made my copies, I enlarged them to the size of a page so I could see details better!) Instead of fishing out all the border first, I sorted the pieces by color and started assembling dogs from the smallest pile first. Before the evening was out, I had assembled several green dogs, a few blue ones, and most of the pinks. NOS drifted by the table a couple of times on his way in and out of the kitchen and commented that he just didn't have the patience for jigsaw puzzles.

By the time I gave up for the evening (on grounds that I had to work the next day), I had done maybe half the puzzle and finished most of the border around it. The next evening, I started in again as soon as I got home from work, and when NOS came in a couple of hours later, the puzzle was really taking shape. Like the rest of my family, he couldn't resist, so he picked up a piece or two and tapped them into place, and then he was hooked on multicolor dogs, too.

Shortly after NOS started to work with me, Soldier Son called from his post in Georgia, where he is working through whatever training retreads former reservists into full-time duty. He didn't sound wonderful (hauling a 45-pound pack on his back in freezing weather has never been his idea of fun, and I think he was coming down with a cold), but he said something that got his brother's attention. I tried unsuccessfully to switch the phone to its speaker setting, but I gave up and handed the phone over to NOS.

I really thought NOS would give up and walk away to carry on the conversation with his brother, but I realized a few minutes later that I was glad he didn't. When my marriage broke up and NOS moved away from home with his dad and then again in a huff because my rules didn't suit his image of how he was allowed to behave, our "family time" pretty much fell apart. SS and DD and I found our opportunities to have "family time" without him, but "family time" with him has been sparse for the past 10 years, to put it mildly.

But this week, it seemed to be back, and I'm glad of that. I was sorry it couldn't be a face-to-face time when he and his brother and sister could all clown around together, but I was glad I got to feel as if his brother and I mattered to him in a way that let him relax and be comfortable just chatting and playing with us. I know he had tried to get there with his brother before SS left for Georgia, but somehow they never really seemed to "click."

It took the telephone to make it happen, but it was a nice little "family time" moment to share.