Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

I�m a crossword-puzzle junkie.

Sunday, Jun. 13, 2004
11:00 a.m.
Yes, ladybug-red, I regularly complete the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle. There are times when I leave spaces blank, as I did yesterday, although to my credit there were very few of them and they mostly related to names of �celebrities�, which I am incredibly lame about.

My mom is the one who turned me on to doing crossword puzzles. I was always amazed at how fast she was and how much trivia she knew. She even attempted cryptic puzzles, which are beyond me; I just don�t think that way. When we started getting home delivery of a newspaper, I started doing crossword puzzles daily. But I never attempted the NY Times ones until several years ago. I too thought they were too hard.

We had a friend who has since passed away (I inherited his NY Times crossword puzzle dictionary) who always complained that he never got through the Friday or Saturday puzzle, and often didn�t complete Thursday�s either. The very first time I completed a Friday puzzle I was so excited I had to call him and tell him about it. It was a great day of rejoicing.

The problem with the NYT is that it starts out on Monday very easy, lulling you into a false sense of competence. As the week progresses, however, it gets more and more difficult. I could not have completed that particular puzzle without the aid of a set of encyclopaedias, a thesaurus, and an atlas. Over the years I�ve gotten better at them, and rarely have to revert to outside reference material. I even do the Sunday NYT, which is not as difficult as Saturday�s, but is larger and still a challenge.

On Saturdays we get in the Montreal paper a large crossword, called The Tribune puzzle, which also appears in the Gl�be & Mail, and my mother and I would do it separately on Saturday and then discuss our results on Sunday. As time passed, she left more and more blanks, forgot standard clue/answer combinations, and complained more and more about her vision (macular degeneration). Yesterday she informed me that she has laid the Saturday crossword puzzle to rest as her ophthamologist has informed her that she is legally blind in her left eye, and only has 50% of her vision in the right one. She finds it next to impossible to see the numbers in the little boxes and takes little joy from the exercise. This saddens me a great deal. It is the end of an era.

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