Awakening

I discovered the New York Times Sunday puzzle when I was 16.  New England had been slammed by one of those sudden, brutal ice storms that leaves every twig crystal-sheathed, every tree a chandelier of glinting, prismatic diamonds, breathtaking but treacherous.  I was visiting my friend, who, along with her latest boyfriend, was caring for two big dogs (white boxers I think) in a small house in Vermont while the homeowners were away.  I wasn’t supposed to stay over, but the roads weren’t navigable; so I slept on the couch for two nights.  Whenever I woke up to reposition myself in the stillest, darkest hours, I would discover a large, jowly, pink-eyed head inches from my own face.  It seemed as if one dog would “guard” me while the other slept.  They were, in turn, vigilant, silent watchers, especially just before dawn.  

The absent homeowners had left a stack of the New York Times Sunday magazines on the coffee table, and my friends were spending seemingly impossible stretches of time in the bedroom (such is youth), so I began to rifle through the topmost issue for something to occupy my mind.  I browsed the articles listlessly, then happened upon the crossword puzzle.  

Puzzles were my thing.  It started with jigsaw puzzles.  I was avid about them at age three, so the family story goes, mastering my own age-appropriate puzzle collection, blowing through my big sister’s collection, and demanding ever harder puzzles to work on.  Later on I was handy with those Wordfinds on restaurant placemats, and I became an expert Jumble solver.  The scrambled letters would reorder and reveal their truth to me in seconds flat, just like that, much to my own amazement and self-esteem.  I hadn’t met a crossword in the local paper that I couldn’t conquer by applying a little bit of creativity and concentration.  I secretly believed myself to be a quiet genius.  So I found a pen and got to work.

Reality began to set in after about 40 minutes.  I could tell from the clues that the long answers were connected, and I wanted to work that out.  It was vexing to repeatedly slide over the surface of this puzzle and get no traction, no foothold, no way in.  Words were my thing!  Puzzles were my thing.  I would put it aside, then come back to it; every time I came back some little section opened up, and this was just enough to keep me going.  A dictionary was my last resort, to look up the plethora of words I simply didn’t know (like “plethora”).  I discovered that I could hit upon an answer by going systematically through the alphabet and crosschecking against the dictionary, plugging each letter into the blank square until something made sense across and down.  Without realizing it, I was setting up a database in my brain, one that I would add to incrementally, using this method, for the next 4 or 5 years.  I finished the puzzle somehow that weekend, and found a lifelong devotion.  

As a reward to myself for my hard work and ingenuity, I took the whole stack of magazines with me when I left, apparently not even considering whether the homeowners might miss them.  Such is youth.  Surely some higher power had arranged things just so, meaning for me to have them.