When Tyson Mao, past blindfold Rubik's Cube champion, made the news in seeking to regain his old title, it reminded me about an incident now decades old.

I was at my brother Peter's in California, and he casually told me that his son, (my friend and nephew), could solve the Rubik's Cube behind his back! (I, on the other hand, have never solved it, without a Rubik's Cube For Dummies Cheatsheet!).

I asked JEH, my nephew, whether he would demonstrate this for me, and he quietly agreed. He asked me to spin the faces (out of his view), but the first time he looked at it and said it was not mixed up enough. (I had spun it every which way for minutes.) I repeated my efforts.

JEH took it in his hands, looked at it for quite a long time, (perhaps minutes?) and then put it behind his back and (at least in my recollection) continued our conversation, looking me in the eyes, the entire time.

I swear, in less than a minute, he took it out from behind his back and it was indeed solved. It took a while for me to get my jaw off the ground and then I truly realized what a vast chasm separated me from this miracle teenager. (Even more so today...)

He is a humble guy, and I doubt many people have ever seen him do this, nor probably know he can.

By the way, I remember asking my son or daughter (I forget who actually) to try to solve it, and when I came back, they had taken it all apart and they were attempting to put it back together in a solved configuration.

In a side note, (and maybe my two nephews, sons of Peter, could comment on this), brother Peter told me he met Ernő Rubik, at a party or something, and I think that was just before or just after the first Rubik's Cubes appeared for sale, around 1980.