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In our 62 years on earth together, my dad asked me a lot of questions.
Some of these queries were intrusive: “So much money are you making now?” Some were compassionate: “How much did it bother that I didn’t get you help when you needed it?” Some were just based on curiosity: “How come don’t get one of those hair transplants?” as he viewed my monk’s tonsure.
But I regret for the one question he never asked me: “Give me a 5 letter word for an Ecuadorian rat.” Indeed, I am chagrined by my failure to realize that, besides that old standby sports, solving crosswords was a real common interest and thus a bonding opportunity lost.
In my pre-tween years, dad’s favorite crossword solving spot was on his bed with his tools of the trade: pencil, puzzle books, Old Gold cigarettes, all within easy reach on the night table. If I was in the bedroom, then most likely the black and white was turned on. My seat was on the carpeted floor, peering up at the Motorola at eye-straining closeness. Dad and I usually watched sitcoms like The Phil Silvers Show or westerns like Wagon Train. We might discuss the TV shows, analyzing which cowboy had the fastest gun draw, but I never asked about the crossword books. Like the Old Gold soft pack, the crosswords were pure adult stuff.
In early adolescence, dad’s night table stash of books attracted my browsing interest. I concluded that dad was a cheap paperback mystery reader. I also riffed through a few diagramless puzzles, where the layout was just a grid. There were no black squares to define word length. Diagramless looked like crosswords without the training wheels. Dad was nonchalant about his tackling diagramless puzzles, just admitting that, yeah, they were harder. It occurred to me that he was one of these vocab geniuses under the daily cover of his job as a dentist.
For the next 40 years or so I constantly skipped over the puzzle pages in the newspaper. They held as much interest to me as the legal notices. There was though a brief puzzle interlude during my crossword obliviousness, stretching over a couple of Sundays in my 20s. My roommate suggested that we tackle the Sunday Boston Globe puzzle.
This brief experiment confirmed my feeling that crosswords were just too frustrating to work with. My roommate, a very linguistically talented French major, filled in almost all the tricky vocab-based clues. I was only able to chip in with straight forward trivia clues regarding people, like “Roger who hit 61.” I would say “Maris,” as I saved face with an answer or two. I didn’t have the puzzle solving magic of dad.
My addiction to crosswords started inauspiciously in the early aughts. There was no thundering voice declaring, “If you solve it, he will come.” I was in a work-training class in a downtown Boston hotel. The subject was project management problem solving. To warm us up the instructor wrote out rebus like puzzles on the board. For instance, the word “head” higher than the word “heels” had a solution of “head over heels.” Most of them were more difficult than that, but that was good because when I solved them it was like getting a quick endorphin spritz. They were difficult but still within my range of cognition, unlike a Rubik’s Cube, which in my possession would only be a paperweight.
Once the class over was, I went on-line and attempted to solve more of these word arrangement brain-teasers. Soon I realized that crosswords, with their tricky word clues, were not evil-step-sisters of brain teasers, but just friendly cousins. There was a mental state flow with these puzzles akin to my job coding computer programs, but refreshingly verbal vs. mathematical. Thus I began my regular appointment with the Boston Sunday Globe crossword.
At first, after three hours or so, I could finish maybe seventy percent of the Sunday puzzle. The positive aspect of my introduction was not completing most of the puzzle, but the fact I would spend that much totally engrossed in trying to solve it. The puzzles were challenging but doable. For better or worse, my ego was at stake. When stuck in mid-puzzle, I would only reluctantly answer phone calls, trying to be civil but really just wanting to say, “Don’t interrupt me when I only have three parts of a seven part George Carlin joke filled in!”
Over the last 15 years I have improved as a solver. In all honesty, just being more familiar with crossword sensibility helped me a lot. I learned that almost all puzzles have the Mount Etna volcano as an answer to a clue, so when there is a 4-letter word with the clue anything like “fiery Sicilan,” the answer is always “Etna.” I actually had the opportunity to travel to the top of Etna once. I was shocked that at the top it didn’t say, “You have reached apex of the greatest 4-letter crossword clue.”
I eventually got the hang of clues that have a “?” It means that the clue is not that straight-forward word definition, but instead is a work of the puzzle-maker’s playful malevolence. For instance, a clue “colt fan?” can have an answer of NRA (referring to a make of gun). With all these tricks of the trade, I still am about 2 hours off per puzzle solving from entering a crossword tournament.
I would bet that my dad followed a similar but more celebrated path as he soared past crosswords into the more rarefied air of the diagramless. Like me, he got hooked an crosswords, found the Mt. Etna-like strategies, and quickly realized what a “?” meant. We both enjoyed the thousands of hours of crossword practice spend just so we wouldn’t be confounded by New York Times crossword wizards.
In dad’s mid-80s he moved into to a unit in a senior living complex. During dad’s last decade I visited him at Hebrew Senior Life a couple of times a month. We did have some issues during that time, with dad in the middle of sibling rivalry with my sister. Dad and I were both crossword aficionados at this point. Somehow my dad’s crossword gene had waited to be expressed in my late middle age.
Yet it never occurred to me to ask dad to help me tackle the Sunday Globe puzzle that lay hidden under the weight of the entire Sunday Globe. Once dad hung up his golf clubs, my birthday/Father’s day gifts were often crossword puzzle books. I remember my best birthday gift find was a Red Sox crossword book. Tackling these Red Sox puzzles could have been a warm up to a Sunday viewing of a Sox game in dad’s living room. I might have been able to handle the recent based clues, but dad could have helped with the “Short shortstop of the ’30s” type of clues.
Yes, from dad’s exotic adult world pastime of my childhood, our interest and ability in crosswords had finally crossed paths. But my recognition of this as a bonding activity was obscured, perhaps by some ire at dad, or perhaps because pairs-crosswords was just not as obvious a bonding activity as tandem sports watching, or perhaps just because it was a solitary dad activity accompanied by Old Golds.
Still, I’m glad that dad and I shared laughter at Sgt. Bilko and that we both later undoubtedly had the satisfaction of solving 5 letter clue Phil Silvers role, albeit not as a father and son crossword duo.
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