The puzzle lady

In today’s fast-paced world, plenty of gadgets exist to speed things up. Cell phones keep us in constant contact. Cars go from zero to 60 in a few heartbeats. And the World Wide Web spins quicker than ever.

Then there are doodads that are meant to slow life down.

Like puzzles.

Clarice Kafka, 88, has been piecing together jigsaw puzzles since she was a little girl. The Spokane Valley resident is known as the “puzzle lady” at Sullivan Park Care Center where she lives.

She deserves the nickname.

Kafka keeps dozens of puzzle boxes stacked on a cart in one hallway there. She always has at least one puzzle in progress on a table, and some of her finished work is hanging on the center’s walls. Her friend, David “Speedy” Whiteman – named for his reckless wheelchair driving – keeps some of Kafka’s mounted puzzles in his room, too.

“We didn’t know she liked them at first,” Kafka’s nurse Christina Clark said. “Then somebody brought one out, and it went from there.”

Puzzles are as popular today as they’ve been in the last 10 years, said Donn Eshelman, manager of Uncle’s Games, Puzzles and More downtown Spokane store. Puzzle sales go up during this time of year because people buy them as holiday gifts and because the cold weather inspires more indoor recreation, he said.

“Families get together, it doesn’t take rules, and you don’t have to teach anybody how to do it,” Eshelman said.

Eshelman himself is a puzzle aficionado. He estimates that he’s completed about 2,000 puzzles in his lifetime.

“I generally never was good at something like painting or music,” he said. “Putting together a puzzle is a creative fulfillment for me.”

Puzzles were invented by European mapmakers in the 1760s, according to the Web site of Anne Williams, a Maine-based author on the subject. Wooden puzzles surged in popularity around the turn of the last century and then again during the Great Depression when drugstores and libraries rented them out.

“Completing a jigsaw gave the puzzler a sense of accomplishment that was hard to come by when the unemployment rate was climbing above 25 percent,” Williams writes. “With incomes depleted, home amusements like puzzles replaced outside entertainment like restaurants and night clubs.”

During the 1940s and 1950s, more affordable cardboard puzzles began to replace wooden ones, she writes.

Today, puzzles come in forms hardly imaginable 100 years ago. There are 3-D puzzles and puzzles with pieces within pieces that must also be linked together before the full image is completed.

There are mosaic puzzles made up of tiny pictures that, when the viewer stands at a distance, form a larger picture. The Uncles store at the Spokane Valley Mall has a mosaic puzzle of Homer Simpson sitting in a chair in his underwear. If you look closely at Homer, thousands of still shots from the Simpson’s TV show make up his beer belly and his ugly mug.

Mystery puzzles are popular this year, including one that’s a take on the TV show “CSI,” or crime scene investigators, and others that come with small books to read as you go.

“You put the puzzle together and clues to solving the mystery are visually in the puzzle,” Eshelman said. “Maybe you’re wondering who was holding a candle at a certain time. Unfortunately you don’t have a picture to go with it.”

Puzzles range from a few pieces to 18,000. Eshelman once had a customer buy a 12,000-piece puzzle and then build a table to fit it. A big table. Puzzles that size need an about 9-foot-by-5-foot surface.

Puzzle lovers, like Kafka and Eshelman, said their hobby provides a great way to sit down and socialize with family and friends.

“It’s not just something one person can do and that’s it. You can do it yourself over and over again,” Eshelman said.

And puzzles are recyclable – when you’re done, you can give them to a friend.

Kafka shared her puzzles with Clark, her nurse, when Clark was pregnant.

“I couldn’t do much physically, so she gave me a puzzle to keep myself occupied,” Clark said.