“Four weeks in bed? You must be kidding.”
Dr. Seidenstein nodded his grey head, “Yes, Ellen, you have mono. I know it’s your senior year; I’m sure you’ll be able to graduate.”
Concentration, while lying in bed was hard to muster. I couldn’t sustain enough interest to read or even watch “Million Dollar Movie” which looped through several showings of old movies each day. I slept a lot, drank quarts of ginger ale and picked at my mother’s standard “sick” food, cottage cheese and noodles, topped with cinnamon sugar.
One evening my father came home from the City with a present for me. In his hands, wrapped in a Brentano’s bag, was a spiral bound book of crossword puzzles from the New York Times. In a spurt of true father/daughter kinship, he understood that this would pique my interest.
“I know they’re hard, but you might just learn some new vocabulary words for the SAT exams,” Daddy suggested. “Maybe you’ll like doing them. At the least, you won’t be so bored.”
He never knew how perceptive those words were.
I was lured into the world of words, black and white squares controlled by the headings “Across” and “Down”. Lounging in bed, hardly able to stay awake, I was able to work up just enough energy to fill in a few of the blank spaces. As the days passed and the words meshed together, I intuited the keys to unlocking the grids.
Daddy was my junkie. The drugs were the puzzles, and I became an addict.
On his daily commutes into NYC, my father diddled with the daily puzzles in the Times, the World Telegram and the Post. My brother often finished them for him in the evenings. I however, was passionately filling in the pages of the spiral compendium – the serious puzzles - while I lolled in my sick bed for a month. I had an edge though - lots of time to hone my skill and no job or school as a distraction.
I recovered from mono, but not from my puzzle habit. On Sundays, when we picked up the New York Times, along with the bagels, lox and cream cheese at the local deli, I passed on the food and went right for the last page of the Magazine section. Margaret Farrar and her staff of puzzle writers elevated what I had thought of as a tedious un-hip newspaper to a level of excitement few teenagers felt towards the Press in the 1960’s. I got out my pencil sharpener, Pink Pearl eraser and No. 2 pencil, and got high on words.
When I went off to college in Boston, I located the nearest convenience store that sold the Sunday New York Times. I spurned the Boston Globe as too provincial, and spent my hard-earned babysitting wages on a weekly crossword puzzle. Oh, I made a pretense of reading the rest of the paper, but what I really wanted was that end-page of the Magazine.
Moving on and into adulthood, my puzzles came with me. I used them as therapy. When I was angry, working on them calmed my down. Boredom was conquered by the symmetry of the squares and the cleverness of the clues. I met boyfriends over puzzle pages and learned new strategies from old flames. Peter, my British rocker/businessman introduced me to the curious, cryptic puzzles from the London Times and Ted, an uber-organized city planner showed me how to navigate a diagramless grid.
Puzzles were the perfect diversion during my years of active mothering. I could cook dinner, straighten up a room, comb out messy hair and still work on one that was attached to a clipboard somewhere in my house.
I indulged myself, buying more of those spiral books of puzzles Daddy had introduced to me years back. My family knew that when I was working on a puzzle, I was incommunicado.
One day, not so long ago this winter, my husband’s hand was hurting. He wasn’t comfortable playing the piano, his usual diversion, and picked up a daily puzzle from the Globe. He’d tried Sudoku, and lost interest in a short time, but was intrigued by my passion for word puzzles.
“Hey, El, what’s a five letter word for “exercise performed on a bench’?”
“Etude,” I called back. I sensed in him, a frisson of interest.
“Yeah, that works, ” and he PENNED it in.
He was hooked. Of course, the Sunday puzzle was out of his league; he was fine with the dailies from the Globe. I did have to train him to use a pencil, not a pen; crossing out never works in a puzzle, but he soldiered on. New clipboards began showing up around the house. My stash of mechanical pencils was mysteriously disappearing.
One day, after he felt he mastered the basics, he picked up the Sunday Times from the front hallway. While I was still in bed, he started filling in the empty squares, with what he thought were the correct answers. When I discovered what he was up to, later in the morning, I went, as they say, ballistic. NO ONE, not even my beloved Ernie could touch my Sunday puzzle. Didn’t he understand that was why G-D created photocopy machines? He slunk back to his Boston Globe puzzle, promising never to usurp my back pages again. I have to admit that I took some mean pleasure in pointing out to him that to cultivate a garden is to tend, not to till.
Late in May, my daughter moved back home after graduation. She is her mother’s girl in many respects, and loves a good puzzle. Her understanding of photocopying is, to my delight, beyond her father’s, but she has been caught hoarding precious pencils. A third layer of clipboards with multiple puzzles under each clamp is now cluttering our countertops.
I’m still the puzzle queen in my house, but the princess is eying the throne.
And the king is watching from he sidelines.
