Charlotte Latvala: Goodbye for now, crosswords
Like any love affair, this one had to cool eventually.
“What’s a 1987 Michael Jackson album?” I asked my husband. “Three letters.”
“Seriously?”
My head hurt. I felt stupid. “Well, it’s not ‘Thriller.’”
“It’s ‘Bad.’”
It was bad. And not in a good way. Bad that my feeble brain couldn’t remember a piece of 1980s trivia so well-known it barely passed as trivia. Bad that I had to keep pestering my husband, who was trying to focus on a YouTube video of workmen digging a giant hole. (A story for another day, dear reader.)
But mostly, bad that I was hooked on something that was driving me crazy, and in the end, probably wasn’t so good for me.
So I must cool it with crossword puzzles. It’s been a hot and heavy few months, but things are turning toxic. It was all smiles and lollipops at first (Oh, look how smart I am! I know who “Lee of Marvel Comics” — four letters — is!) but now?
Now, my leisure time has ramped up into an anxiety-laden frenzy of digging around in my brain for particles of knowledge. It’s a damp, fusty, cobweb-laden mess in there, and I think excavating little nuggets of unrelated facts is making it worse. I’m beating myself up over questions like: What’s a “skill displayed at the gift counter?” (Nine letters.)
A “dispatch boat?” (Five letters.) A “levy on liquor?” (Hallelujah, it’s a “sin tax” and that was one of the few clues I got in that particular puzzle.)
For the past few months, I’ve reached for the crossword puzzle book during moments of downtime. And instead of relaxing me, it made my anxiety ramp up. It felt like a chore, a test that I was failing.
Maybe because, despite being a professional writer, I’m not very good at word puzzles. (Psst. I’m not a good speller, either. Judgment, for instance — the word, not the concept — always trips me up.)
But, c’mon. Crossword puzzles? The province of old people? How can I not handle this? Well. I had a revelation during dinner with a friend the other night. “What are you reading these days?” she asked.
And it hit me. I wasn’t reading anything. Possibly for the first time in my life, or at least since I was old enough to devour “Are You My Mother?” I didn’t have a book at hand. It was beyond a light bulb moment. It was more like a supernova explosion.
It wasn’t the crossword puzzles making me, well, cross. It was because I had abandoned the one thing that always grounds me, no matter what.
Goodbye for now, crosswords. We’re done. It’s time for a re-read of Jane Austen. And then Tolkien. And Dorothy Dunnett. The lengthier and denser, the better.
Then, after tens of thousands of pages, maybe my brain will calm down enough to solve a simple five-letter clue like “works with a needle.” (It’s “knits.” Not that I’m keeping score or anything.)
Charlotte is a columnist for The Times. You can reach her at charlottelatvala@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Charlotte Latvala: Goodbye for now, crosswords
