Generational puzzles

I've known several people, in my life, who enjoyed doing puzzles.  Jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, seek and find puzzles, even three dimensional puzzles like Rubik's cubes and those old wooden cubes and spheres.

I've never considered myself a real puzzle aficionado.  I leave a crossword book in the bathroom and I've done a few jigsaw puzzles in my lifetime, mostly with children because they are good for building pre-reading skills.

I never realized that the most difficult puzzle in the world, the one that challenged every part of my mind would be transcribing.

Transcribing the miniscule, hand written work of a man about the same age as my grandfather turns out to be the most difficult thing I've ever done.

Not only is the script small and hastily scribbled so that just making out the letters and words can be almost impossible, but there are bigger problems.

If he were to try and make sense of my work , even though it is carefully typed, I suspect he might have some of the same difficulties.

The jargon, the popular phrases, magazines and books, the slang, even the nicknames for the musicians and writers as well as the trending hobbies are so different from generation to generation and when one generation is skipped it can become almost impossible to figure out.

Thank goodness for the Internet, it is the best tool I have beyond my own imagination, but this transcribing is the hardest puzzle I could ever imagine.