What Crossword Puzzles Can Teach Us

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.

Alan-a-Dale in 1902, with Jay Winkfield aboard.

Hay and Bliss

Walking outside at dawn always makes me think of horses.

When I was a kid, I competed in a few horse shows. And part of the horse-show ritual was to wake up in the pre-dawn dark. Then there was a fast breakfast, a car, and a day of horses—their manes braided, their coats shimmering with citronella Shoo-fly.

Later, when I was in my 20s and had rent to pay, I got a dream job as the weekend manager and riding instructor at a small rental stable. And what time did I have to get to work? 6:30 a.m.: dawn.

So there I was again, waking up in the dark, this time with my clock radio set to a hard-rock station. I’d pull on my boots, choke down a fast breakfast, and drive off to the hills as the light was just starting to paint the eastern sky. When I got to the ranch, the only human there, I’d make a quick pit stop at the restroom—a turquoise Porta Potti on the dusty path to the corral. Believe me, there’s nothing quieter, or more lonely, than a cold Porta Potti at dawn.

After that, I’d head for the feed room. Flashlight in one hand, grapple hook in the other, I’d pop the wire on a bale of hay and check it for mold. Then I’d go out to the corral, scatter eight hay flakes on the ground, prop the gate open, and head across the wooden bridge over the creek to the pasture where the horses spent the night.

Horses at dawn are entirely unlike humans at dawn. They’re not curled up, stiff, or cranky; they don’t look the least bit sleepy. They look, in fact, like they’ve been up for hours, browsing the scrub oak and shaking off flies and stamping their feet. Climbing through the gate into the pasture, I felt as if I were walking into an alien world, as if the horses experienced a never-ending day, enjoying the damp air and gaining in wisdom while I wasted a third of my life, shut down in the land of nod.

I’d check the horses, count that there were eight of them, and then I’d open the pasture gate. Slowly, one by one, they’d plod out, wind their way through the neck of the little canyon, splash into the creek, and wander up to the corral. They’d done this a thousand times before. They knew where the hay was.

I’d walk back to the corral, close the gate behind them, and climb over the fence with a curry comb and a brush, a hoof pick in my back pocket. I’d groom each horse in turn, warming my hands on their smooth coats, watching the steam vent out their nostrils, listening to the hollow sound of their great teeth grinding all that hay. I’d check their feet for stones, work the burrs out of their tails, brush out the night’s layer of dust. They were used to this kind of care, this sure-handed straightening. And for an hour or so, before anyone arrived at our little ranch, it was just me and eight horses and a band of sunlight moving down the walls of the canyon, the cool air pungent with bay laurel and eucalyptus, as the hay dwindled to a few scraps in the dirt.

I only worked there for a few months, but at dawn, even now, I can hear the squeak of the gates and the clump of my boots on the wooden bridge. Somewhere out there, horses want to be fed. And somewhere there’s a woman pulling apart a bale of sweet, green hay and not thinking a thing about it, lost in the simple tasks she gets to do in paradise.

Poem: The Pasture on Sackett Road

If I chose to sit, I’d find

a bit of bare grass among

mines of manure flaking beige

under the sun, nowhere

to lean, the wire fence rusted

and slack, anything rigid

forbidden: no pails or rakes,

or let alone chairs. Horses

have a gift for entanglement.

At thirteen, my jeans

were filthy from hours

cross-legged on the ground,

passive in a land

of larger forces, fleck

of blue in a brown eye,

quake of flesh,

hocks and gaskins flexed

in everyday elegance,

a sweltering land

of sweet and grass

and the endless perambulations

of a dozen wise horses,

their tails the flags

of our small nation.

(appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, 2004)