That Last Piece Just Fit Into Place

I lived with my grandparents growing up. While I had several top-of-the-line toys to play with, my favorite toy was a small IQ test block puzzle. It was a wooden square cut into six different shapes. To solve it, you had to fit all six together to make the square, but it was much simpler to make it with five. By the time I was three, I had learned how to put it together, though I much preferred playing with the pieces like you would blocks.

A few months later, my grandfather’s brother was invited to the house to celebrate his induction to Mensa and they brought out the puzzle to show him. I sat there and watched him work with it for a minute or so. He wasn’t putting it together right, and I kept seeing him get so close to the answer, only to mess up. He finally laughed and said, “Oh, it’s a joke puzzle. The sixth piece isn’t meant to fit in.”

I stood up from where I was sitting with my grandfather, walked over to the puzzle, and made my great uncle watch me as I put the puzzle together properly, wanting to be a helper and show him how to do it right.

My grandfather proudly told everyone for the rest of his life how his three-year-old granddaughter outsmarted his genius brother.