Cross Words

Today, I did the crossword first, and it was easy. I know it was easy because I zipped through it, and only had to look up one or two words on the internet. (I'm sure someone out there knows the star system Draco is next to the Big Dipper, but it just looked wrong. I agree, it's cheating. I do it anyway.) I want to believe that I am so clever and word-rich that I am capable of ripping my way through any crossword, but last week I made that mistake. Five minutes into the New York Times crossword on the opposite page, I gave it up and went back to reading.

I blame my sister-in-law. She's the crossword demon. She infected my mother and I. Somehow, my brother and father have a deep resistance to crosswords, but send the family off on vacation, and give my sister-in-law the paper, and voila, there we women sit, stumped, for hours, doing the crossword. The three of us have a fairly wide range of knowledge together: My mother retains much of her French and the various details of being well-traveled and well-read throughout her life, I am the theatre and literature contributor (although I fail miserably when movie actors are involved), and my sister-in-law has a lifetime of dealing with crosswords, so she knows all the sneaky crossword tricks. Together, we have enough success to break even the New York Times crossword, but on our own, it's a struggle.

My mother, after a couple of years of only being drawn into the crossword only at holiday time, recently decided she could stave off intellectual flabbiness (and presumably, alzheimer's) by doing the crossword every day. My father initially supported this endeavor by buying books of crosswords as gifts, but soon we all realized what a time-intensive labour the crossword was for my mother alone. My father now refers to himself as a crossword widow.

"It's just that they're so sneaky," my mother frets, drugstore bifocals perched on her nose. She loses glasses at an advanced speed, so we buy her boxes of them from Eckerd or CVS, and never mind the exact prescription. "The crossword will give a clue that makes you think they mean ONE thing, but they really mean something else. I just can't think sneaky like that." She also bemoans the crossword habit of having a clue match the answer - an abbreviated clue means the answer is an abbreviation, a clue in the past tense means the answer ends in 'ed', tricky things like that.

When I call my folks some evenings, my father usually signs off first and my mother has additional gossip or news. In the past few months, that's turned into: "Wait....are you still there? Good...I needed to ask you something. Let's see...I need a five letter word that means 'form a gully'."

In the end, I understand. The crossword never tempted me before those group sessions. But once I'd had a taste of the satisfaction of fully completing a crossword, even as a team, I was hooked. As I filled in the final blanks today, I felt the self-satisfied content of the conqueror. In the back of my head, I am aware that success is often defined by the comparative height of the bar and not your ability to reach it. But completing a crossword, however simple, has within it the seeds of linguistic mastery.

Now, on to the New York Times.