Toddler Mikey a mystery to everyone but his family
He sits determinedly on the beige kitchen floor, ignoring his mother's repeated calls -- a miniature James Dean with dark blue jeans rolled up to chubby ankles.
Of course, it's impossible to know if he really does look like Dean, the 1950s movie heart throb from "Rebel Without a Cause," or anyone else for that matter, because all you can see is a thick fall of silky dark blonde hair. He has gone completely face first into the disappearing remnants of a jigsaw puzzle and seems frozen there, a towheaded ostrich in a cardboard box.
But look closer, and you can see movement: Small hands are rooting around in the box, stirring it up, mixing it around, looking for just the right fit. And he won't stop until he finds it. When he does -- and it only takes something close to a nanosecond -- he quickly slips it into place, then down goes the head again. More rooting. More searching.
A lot of people do jigsaw puzzles, and some do them quite well.
The trick here is that Michael "Mikey" Lorhan is
slamming together 300- to 500-piece puzzles in less than 30 minutes or less -- and sometimes with the pieces flipped over, working blind. Whenever he finishes a new one, he looks over the work and shouts with glee. That's because, says his delighted and bewildered dad, Jessie, the boy never looks at the picture of the finished puzzle before he digs in and starts shifting it together.
Nor does he usually begin like most of us do, by trying to fit the frame together before filling in the rest of the puzzle.
"I've been trying to get him to put the outside part together first," his father says.
Why?
Jessie looks abashed. "Maybe that's because it's the way I do it."
It's the way most people do it -- but Mikey is not most people. Jessie says his son is putting together 7,000-10,000 pieces together a week, and he was working 100-piece puzzles by the time he was 2.
"He can do a 100-piece, two-sided puzzle and figure out which side of each puzzle piece he needs without looking at the completed picture," says Mikey's mother, Mara. "And these are two-sided, with colors on both sides."
As far as the ones the little boy does with the pieces wrong-side up, she adds, "I think he just gets bored."
Of course, there is no shortage of brains in this family. Mara, who looks like a teenager, has a degree in business and finance. Her father and brother are engineers, "really, really good engineers," Jessie emphasizes, and he and wife work in a family-run business.
But Jessie did work for The Press at one time as a feature writer, and he's passed the literature side of the family onto 5-year-old Genevieve. She is already doing math and reading chapter books, and she uses her mother's printer paper to write her own books.
Then there's 2-year-old Isabella, a charmer in bright pink who can irritate Mikey to no end when she rampages over his puzzles or when she dumps 10 boxes of them out on the floor, like she did quite recently. She's the only one of the three who needed an MRI by the time she was 1.
"She is insanely bright," says her mom. "She's also fearless. She likes to run down the slide standing up."
Where the kids get their brights, though, is tossed back and forth between Jessie and Mara.
"They get it from my husband," says Mara. "I'm just the mom. I'm like my dad, but I have to work for my brains. Jessie just has them."
She and Jessie slouch against the wall and watch tiny hands work, stirring the pieces up.
"They absolutely got it from her," Jessie says without hesitating. "He can just do it, and I don't understand jigsaw puzzles at all. His first was a 4-foot long Winnie-the-Pooh. He opened the box and got it done in 10-15 minutes. We had our pastor here, and he just stared at him."
There doesn't seem to be any particular method to Mikey's puzzle-solving other than laser-like focus. It locks in and stays there while something ticks, ticks, ticks away in his fascinating little brain.
"He doesn't organize them," Mara says. "He doesn't sort them."
But Jessie thinks he has one thing figured out.
"Mikey looks for patterns. But other than that," he says, "we can't figure out how his mind works."
Before Mikey even turned 1, he became fascinated with building blocks. He built a tower, Jessie says, that was bigger than he was, and it kept tipping over.
Without any instruction, the tyke figured he needed to broaden its base to provide stability -- and he did.
Mikey's obsession with puzzles began around the same time, when people began giving him puzzles as gifts. Gradually, Mara realized she was walking over a lot of irregularly-shaped cardboard pieces.
"We walk around and get the pieces stuck to our feet," Mara said. "My mom says it's like being a cat in the snow."
"He does the same thing with train tracks. It took me two hours to put this one train set together, and he took it all apart and put it right back together again.
People are clogging this small Coeur d'Alene house on Lincoln Way on a quiet Wednesday afternoon: his parents, his grandmother, his two sisters, other visitors. But Mikey is having none of it. Only on the sixth call from his mom -- "Michael!" -- does he glance up, blue eyes enormous in a secretive, elfin face. A grin flashes, and then it's back to the puzzle.
And it is those puzzles that puzzle most people, probably because they frustrate so many, and because Mikey's 3-year-old focus is razor-sharp. Whether he's working with tiny, tiny pieces, or those with colors that meld into each other, few things can break his concentration.
And yet, when he isn't head-first into a puzzle, he's as social, his parents say, as any other child.
"He just gets in the zone," says Mara.
Lynn Berk can be reached at (208) 664-8176, Ext. 2016, or at lberk@cdapress.com.
