Virginia Carraway Stark
Yes, I have a puzzle box. I don’t THINK I’m in a Clive Barker novel (or movie)… although a lot of things in my life would make sense if I were…
The fact of the matter is that I have an honest too goodness puzzle box. The problem isn’t opening the box, that’s easy to do. I can open and close it and look through the contents without any problem at all. The problem is the mystery of the contents.
This really is novel worthy and I’m going to put this blog into two parts, because I need to explain the situation and then… I need to make the discovery. Perhaps a third part is in order: Consequences.
Here is a picture of my puzzle box:
I’m not sure if it is a disappointment to you. It looks quite intriguing to me and I’ve gone back to it dozens of times over the years, looking for ways to try to interpret its contents.
So much of my life was stolen from me. I don’t have a lot of the things that my mother, grandmothers or grandfathers left behind. I didn’t come from a happy home and like so many people of my generation, I’m left with little connection to the past. This box is one link to the past, but it is written in a maddening, outdated set of codes that no one translates anymore.
I bought a light board to see if it would literally illuminate the situation, but it didn’t help much. I could make out a detail here or there and even bought a magnifying glass… still, little help.
You see, I don’t have many pictures of my family. My dad felt that removing family pictures would alert the authorities that he was burning down the house on purpose. Hmmm. Yes, sociopaths do make life difficult for their children, especially the ones who wanted to do things like go to university and have a linear, normal life.
My dad was a smart sociopath and he knew that photo albums missing from the house would be rather obvious, but a little tiny metal box, fiiled to the brim with negatives… who would notice if something like that wasn’t in a burned down house?
Eventually, the box ended up in my mother’s keeping and I managed to get it out of the neurotic grasp of my brother’s hoarding. One small box. It wasn’t a lot to ask from someone who wasn’t even old enough to remember the people or places in the pictures that were in there. My brother didn’t know anything about those times. He told me he didn’t even remember a time when our parents had been together (although he did testify to the police about a time he would have been in diapers to protect sociopath daddy. The fact that he looks older than me was enough to convince the police that he was a credible witness somehow despite the fact that he would have been about two when he suddenly remembered what he was told to remember and contradicted my testimony. Maybe he finally got that, ‘I’m proud of you, son’ he had been waiting for his whole life.)
Back to my puzzle box.
I admit that I have a lot of layers of feeling around my puzzle box. Has there ever been a puzzle to unfold that hasn’t been wrapped. That’s the nature of a puzzle. It starts off looking like nothing at all and slowly, a picture resolves until the moment of clarity comes when we say: Oh, of course, it was a —-
I was ecstatic to discover technology, while making it so that searching for someone to develop negatives had made the concept obsolete… had caught up to put the solution into the palm of my hand.
And here it is!
I bought it off Amazon (I attached a link, I’m not an affiliate so I don’t get money for you using the link, but feel free to use it)
Stay tuned for my part two: Resolution. I turn this device on and see the past in colour! How bizarre and beautiful of a world we live in that after all of these years of trying to solve this puzzle box, a piece of technology can solve it with the click of a button. It’s a little/ a lot like magic.
More and more often there are things like record players, cassette players, all sorts of things that can play and digitize the things that would mean nothing because our parents tossed out those outdated devices. I don’t know why it never occurred to our parents or grandparents that some of us might be sentimental, might want something that was theirs… but I’m glad that I can get some of those pieces.
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0781FWMGZ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_E28SD2WS7ARWGRMAYHJ9
(See links to record player and cassette player/walkman that converts files to MP3 files as well. I’ve been having fun with these as well and I’ll see about writing an entire blog about them, it’s pretty cool.)
virginiastark 