One of my least endearing qualities is a lack of compassion for people who claim they are “unable” to solve crossword puzzles. Oh come on, I say, it’s not that you can’t do it, you’re just not in the habit. Solving crosswords is a skill that, with practice, anyone can develop, just like exercise. Start with Mondays, and soon you’ll be complaining that the same words keep reappearing and that the work-to-fun ratio in the Sunday Times crossword is not favorable enough to merit spending time on it. Eventually, if you have the proper predisposition to addictive behavior, you’ll become, well, like me: before the news can be read and thoughts can be had and the work of the day carried out, the puzzle must be solved.
As I do every Sunday, I opened the magazine from the back, bypassed the crossword at the top of the page and went directly to the diagramless below it. The wonderful thing about solving a diagramless puzzle is that it’s like parachuting into the desert without a compass and finding your way home, all at your kitchen table. It requires an inner sense of where you are, the mental equivalent of Bill Bradley’s ability to stand in the middle of the court and throw the basketball over his shoulder into the net behind him. Without looking. The diagramless, as the name implies, is a crossword with the black squares removed, thus leaving you on your own to figure out where to put them in. To make up for this added challenge, the clues are generally easier than they would be in a standard crossword. Once you get the hang of it, it can be a rather routine affair, but there is an elegant beauty in the way the answers ooze like blood from a stab wound, starting in the upper left corner and proceeding to the lower right. Every six weeks or so when the diagramless appears, I employ this same process so that I may begin my day.
Today almost didn’t begin.
1-Across: “Male turkeys.” I knew the answer would be four letters long, since the next clue was 5-Across. And that’s all I knew. For the life of me, I could not conjure up the answer. Male turkeys? Uh. Coqs? No. Under normal circumstances, filling in the downs would have solved the problem, but these were all stumpers. Was it possible that this puzzle, and therefore the whole day itself, would be stopped before it began? Because, given the aforementioned process I’ve followed year after year, without 1-Across, I wouldn’t be able to progress to the rest of the puzzle.
After an hour or so of fidgeting and pacing and staring off into space, I suppose a normal person would have Googled, just to get the damn thing going. For some reason, though—and I don’t think it has anything to do with morality (although now that I reconsider, it might)—I won’t consult outside sources. Not that there’s anything wrong with people who do. That’s an individual choice they make for themselves. It’s just not for me. The problem is that it’s so difficult to know what you don’t know. It’s a matter of figuring out whether a.) you simply don’t know the answer, in which case checking a reference work might be permitted, or b.) the answer is in your brain but it’s just hidden under a pile of papers. Since the answer is almost the latter, then no looking up.
Panic took over. I had things to do! Plus, I’m too young to go senile. Are those head injuries are starting to catch up with me? Is the government lying about mad cow disease in the food supply? Have I become one of those people with whom I have so consistently failed to empathize?
Look at a problem head-on long enough and you fail. Turn your attention to the side, say, to a long, rambling phone conversation that still allows you enough CPU space for the unresolved problem at hand, and you stand a chance of hearing that teeny voice whispering from the medulla oblongata: “Dean, dear, you have become a rat in a Skinner box. Years of routine have inured you to the thrill of the challenge, the very thing that attracted you to these puzzles in the first place. Who says you have to start at 1-Across? Since the whole purpose of these diagramless crosswords is to navigate without a map, then get off your ass and start doing that. Start somewhere else in the puzzle, and then solve backwards to the beginning.”
I thanked the voice, it muttered something that sounded like “dumbass,” and off I went. Within minutes, I wrote in T-O-M-S.
And thus the day began. Just in time for dinner.
