Looking Out: Sharing puzzles maintains family connections
For many years, crossword puzzles brought me lots of satisfaction. I’d dig into a Sunday crossword, chip away at it and sometimes I’d get the whole thing done. Not so much these days. It’s not that my brain doesn’t work right. It’s just that I don’t keep up with modern culture.
Ask me Ringo Starr’s real name and I’ll get it. Ask me about some current actor or musician and I’m lost.
Every now and then I still do a crossword on the AARP website. Those I can handle. The people who write those puzzles are stuck in a prior generation just like me.
Years ago, the sudoku craze took hold. I was traveling all over the United States for work at the time, and every airport was full of people working sudoku puzzles. These are fine, fine games of logic, challenging and satisfying.
My dear old friend, the late Dr. Reagent, a chemist, swore that most scientists like riddles and puzzles. He hypothesized that the quest for answers motivated them to do puzzles just as did their scientific research.
A year or so ago, my friend Dasher introduced me to Wordle, a game in which you have to guess a 5-letter word in not more than six tries. As you try a word on for size, the screen uses color coding to identify the correct letters you choose, along with placement within the word.
I was hooked. I’ve done it every day since Dash sicced it on me. I also do other variants of the same game — Quordle which requires you to guess four words in nine tries or less. There’s even one that gives you 37 tries to get 32 words.
My sister Susie, brother Bill, niece Kathy and I exchange reports every day, revealing how stupid or smart we were in our quest to guess the words. It has been a fun thing to bandy about with them.
As for me, if I do well, I claim incredible intelligence. If I fail, I blame it on something or someone else. It cannot be my own fault, don’t you know?
There is a certain competitiveness in this practice of sharing results, but our merry little group of family puzzlers has pledged to avoid making a big thing about it. We praise one another’s good efforts and never criticize. This is partly because my sister eschews competition of any sort. She is a kind and good person who used to whip both my brother and me in leg wrestling competitions when we were younger but outgrew her requirement to be always victorious.
I should say, I was younger. They are both older than me. My brother used this against me when we were kids.
“Jim, when you are my age, I’ll buy you a BB gun,” he said. I’d patiently wait the 18 months until I caught up with him.
“Bill, where’s my new BB gun,” I’d say.
“You’re still not my age,” he’d proclaim, accurately.
“You buzzard! But Susie can beat you at leg wrestling.”
Not long ago, I had some surgery and had to take powerful medicine to control the pain. It affected my brain. I thought I knew which way was up, how to spell and all kinds of other normal cognitive tasks, but when I attacked my word games, I discovered that the medicine had turned my brain to figgy pudding. I was incompetent.
In time, I’m optimistic that my brain will be more like a cantaloupe and less like figgy pudding. When that happens, I’m sure Bill will get me a BB gun and Susie will let me win at leg wrestling.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Sharing puzzles maintains family connections
