Like most people, I grew up tinkering with crossword puzzles—the
easy ones in the back of TV Guide and
the quickies designed for killing time in waiting rooms. But a few years ago I got
hooked on New York Times puzzles.
With my special puzzle-only subscription to the Times, I download a few every week and work on them at odd hours, usually
during meals. And while I’m sitting there pondering clues, I often think about
how much I learn from doing crosswords—and I don’t just mean the names of R&B
singers (BLUCANTRELL) and silent-film stars (MAEMURRAY). Some of the lessons
are a bit more metaphorical.
1) All knowledge is
useful.
Lately I’ve been appalled to find that most of “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has fallen out of my head like so much crumbling
plaster, yet the entire theme to Gilligan’s
Island is still in there, maddeningly intact. But crossword puzzles are a
great leveler—every fact counts, and pretty much everything you know, from
horse anatomy to foreign swear words to Forrest Gump’s military rank, will come
up sooner or later. So that makes it equally OK to browse People magazine (RACHAELRAY), eavesdrop on fishermen (STONEFLY),
and brush up on your Egyptian board games (SENET). In the crossword
universe—and, I like to think, in life—no knowledge goes to waste.
2) Your brain sees
things differently on different days.
Sometimes I get stuck on a crossword answer that won’t come
and won’t come, and I finally give up and put down the puzzle. Then I pick it
up the next day, and that elusive answer pops out at me like one of those 3-D
images in the Magic Eye books. It’s like some days my eyes can’t fill in the
gaps and recognize the patterns, and other days they do it effortlessly*. There
are two life lessons in this: 1) If you can’t solve a problem now, that doesn’t
mean you won’t be able to figure it out later, and 2) If our eyes can make
connections on some days when it couldn’t see them before, then maybe other
things involving our “vision”—like intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and
bigotry—aren’t set in stone, either. These too may change over time—perhaps
suddenly, perhaps tomorrow.
3) Sometimes we’re
wrong.
Once in a while, I feel like I’m cooking along pretty well
on a section of a puzzle: I get one easy answer and a few others seem to fit,
but then I get stuck and can’t fill in the rest around them. Much later, I
figure out that my first answer—the one that seemed so obvious—is actually
wrong. (It’s CAPEANN, not CAPECOD.) This reminds me of one of my favorite
bumper stickers: “Don’t believe everything you think.” It also serves as a
reminder that we all make mistakes—I do, and so does the driver who almost hit
me this morning, the one I growled at and almost flipped off. And among all
those mistakes we make, most of them aren’t deal-killers; nine times out of
ten, we get to just fix them and move on (and question our assumptions next
time).
4) Difficult things
take time.
Times Sunday puzzles
used to scare me just because they seemed so ridiculously hard. I’d sit there and look and look at the clues, and not one
answer would come to mind. Frustrated, I’d toss the puzzle aside and go do
something easier, like caulk the bathtub. But in time, I figured out the secret
to doing the Sundays and their much harder brethren, the Fridays and Saturdays:
simple, dogged persistence. To get started, I just have to figure out one word
somewhere in the puzzle—the thin edge of the wedge. This often takes a while,
but if I look at it long enough, I’ll at least be able to guess at one. And then,
after I keep pushing at it and thinking and thinking and thinking on it—sometimes
over the course of several days**—things start to happen. Patterns emerge, red
herrings get tossed out, blanks get filled in. And then—pop—it’s done. And what
a rush that is, to do something that seemed virtually impossible at first. I
can’t speak for other puzzlers, but for me, there are no shortcuts to this—it’s
just a matter of putting in the time and not giving up. This philosophy comes
in handy in other difficult parts of life, like writing a novel, or finishing a
project at work, or even recovering from an illness. In our fast-food, quick-cut
culture, it’s easy to forget that some things have to happen in a series of small
increments, not all at once. So we sometimes give up on a difficult task before
we even take the first step. And then we never get the satisfaction of doing
that hard thing—a thing was actually within our reach all along.
5) There’s more than
one path.
Crosswords are a bit like religion, in that there are no one-size-fits-all
rules. Some salesman in New Delhi may be plunking away on the same New York Times Sunday puzzle I’m working
on right now, and so is the retired woman across the street from me, but that
doesn’t mean we’re all doing them in exactly the same way. There are no classes
where we learn this, no set of printed rules we have to follow. And in fact, one
person’s “cheating” is another’s “standard procedure.” For example, my dad always
kept a crossword dictionary next to his reading chair. But to me, that’s
cheating, so I don’t own a puzzle dictionary. But I will, on occasion, look up
an answer in a reference book if I’ve been stuck on that spot for days and I
know I’ll never get it because, going one way, it’s “the city where Jonah
preached,” and going the other way, it’s the aliens in Avatar***. But some would consider that illegal, and would never
look up an answer. On the other hand, some people think it’s OK to peek at the
answer in the next day’s paper or the back of the book, but to me, that’s the
ultimate disgrace; I usually won’t look at the answer even after I’m done. If
I’ve got a little fudgy spot that I’m not sure about—that IPAD might be an
IPOD, and that Macedonian river might be misspelled as a result—that’s OK; I
can live with it. The important thing to me is to finish the puzzle, even if
it’s not quite perfect. I find it comforting—and subversive, in a way—that
we’re all doing crosswords while adhering to our own completely arbitrary set
of rules. We all get to the same place at the end, so what does it matter? Like
I say, a lot like religion.
*Case in point, a couple of
weeks ago: “She’s no naïf” ( - - M - - - - T - - - - - - - ) turned out to be WOMANOFTHEWORLD. It
stumped me and stumped me, and then one morning I looked at it and could just
see it. How my eye could piece that together from only two letters, I’ll never
know.
**I recently did a stinker of
a Saturday puzzle that took about a week. I had to break down and look up a
couple of things, because there was no way I’d get them otherwise. One was the highest
mountain in Australia—KOSCIUSZCO; the other was a 1902 Kentucky Derby winner
named ALANADALE.
***NINEVEH and NAVI. One unfortunate
thing about crosswords is that they point out the holes in your education, much
like those Jeopardy categories that make
you groan. Among my weak spots are the Bible, British royalty, and bloody Roman
numerals, which trip me up every bloody time. I’m actually pretty good at James
Cameron movies but have never warmed up to the cartoony blue people in Avatar.
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| Alan-a-Dale in 1902, with Jay Winkfield aboard. |