The day before Christmas, I went on a last minute shopping spree with my
brother and his wife. They were back from Vermont, after having lived there
for a year and a half. Nothing in Pennsylvania was good enough anymore.
"In
Vermont," my brother said, "they stop for you when you walk
in the pedestrian crossways. In Vermont, they don't have any billboards.
Does this town have any used book stores, any coffee shops?"
I took him
to a little country coffee shop I'd found in the rural area where we'd
grown up. The coffee shop also sold remaindered furniture. My brother
and his wife had a good time, examining the furniture for flaws, talking
about what they wanted to get for their new house, in Vermont.
Before coming
down, my brother had directed me to a picture of the house on the Internet.
"It looks better if you squint," he'd told me. He was right.
We didn't
find a used bookstore, but we found a discount basement and took a look
around. It was amazing most of these books had ever been published.
One of these
bargain basement books was a sequel written by Margaret Mitchell, of Gone
with the Wind fame.
"I've
been wanting to read The Wind Done Gone," I told my brother
and his wife. "But I figured I shouldn't do it until I read Gone
with the Wind, and I can't make myself do it."
"It's
not bad," my brother said. "Or at least, that's what I'm told."
None of us had read it.
Later that
night, hanging out at my dad's apartment, my sister found a 3D jigsaw
puzzle someone (perhaps me?) had given him a couple Christmases ago. It
was Tara from Gone with the Wind.
My brother's
wife pulled out the pieces, started putting them together as the rest
of us tried to decide how to get out of cookies the following night with
some old family friends. They had ambushed us at the Christmas Eve service.
This was incredibly bad timing; we'd already made plans to see "The
Two Towers." Our plotting was made unnecessary by the friends calling
to say they'd come down with the flu.
We gathered
around Tara and tried to put it together.
"Where
are the slave quarters?" I asked. They didn't seem to be on the box.
"After
we're done building Tara, do we torch it?"
The jigsaw
pieces were made out of Styrofoam covered with paper. One of the drawbacks
of this construction was that you could force pieces to fit in places
they really had no business fitting.
We'd each
worked on sections separately for quite awhile before my sister's boyfriend
discovered half the house was wrong. He swiftly shifted the pieces around,
and Tara took form.
By now,
my brother had us all singing that holiday classic from the Spongebob
Squarepants Christmas episode, "Santa's coming tonight, tonight.
Santa's coming tonight."
He'd also
managed to convince us we had to finish the puzzle or Santa wouldn't come.
But despite our best efforts, Tara was resolutely unfinished. I renewed
my suggestions to torch it, this time to only weak resistance.
Midnight
was drawing near, and since I'd told everyone that animals are supposed
to talk at midnight on Christmas Eve, we made a halfhearted effort to
stay up, debating what our animals would say. "I need a treat"
or "Give me the softer pillow" were the most popular guesses.
Of course,
given that we all fell asleep before midnight, we figured they wasted
most of their words saying, "Come on, wake up! I have something to
say."
My sister
claimed the next day that her dog had woken her up and said, "All
your base are belong to us." I'm almost certain mine did, too.
The next
day, we finished Tara. Its chimneys were lopsided, and the porch wouldn't
fit quite straight. Scarlet O'Hara lurched out the front door, falling
forwards into a paper version of Rhet Butler.
It was so
beautiful I forgot to torch it.
Moral:
Finish the jigsaw puzzle or not. Frankly, my dear, Santa doesn't give
a damn.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
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