By Rachel Sauer
Special to The Daily Sentinel
Welp, I have spent the past few days down a rabbit hole of angst that began with remembering tomorrow is Presidents Day and most recently has seen me prone on the couch, bereft over my inability to construct crossword puzzles.
My steps were as follows:
- Remember that Monday is Presidents Day. And OK, fine, “remember” is probably a bit generous. I saw it on the calendar and remarked, “Oh, yeah.”
- Spend three minutes mourning the public educational failure that is my never having learned all the U.S. presidents.
- Scurry to Google with a firm but temporary resolve to learn all the U.S. presidents. In order!
- Immediately get distracted by a profile of Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword.
- Tumble down a cascading chain of hyperlinks; happen across a story about former U.S. president Bill Clinton constructing a New York Times crossword puzzle in 2017.
- Learn that crossword construction software exists. Fume that nobody ever told me. And after I attempted it on graph paper like a regular ol’ pioneer several years ago when I received “The Compleat Cruciverbalist” as a birthday gift!
- Download CrossFire, the preferred program of your more discerning crossword puzzle constructors.
- Make repeated, tragic stabs at constructing a crossword.
- Retreat to couch.
It turns out that just because I can do a thing doesn’t mean I can make a thing, and this is a bitter pill to swallow.
I mean, I love crosswords! Back in the day, before e-convenience made me forgot how to write with my actual hand, I went so far as to subscribe to an ink-on-paper Penny Dell crossword magazine.
And with my current digital crossword subscription, my completion streak is 1,071 days as of Friday. I coddle this streak like Gollum hunched over his precious. It’s creepy.
But when confronted with a blank grid? And a few hastily viewed YouTube tutorials?
1 Across: The sound an over-confident ding-dong makes looking at 225 empty squares (uhhhhhh…).
Part of the problem, I think, is that I also refused to start small or reasonable. Why, the Monday through Thursday crosswords have a theme, so I shall have a theme!
I decided on an homage to girl sleuths, because they were very influential in my youth and because I think it’s a crying shame that the likes of Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames have been largely forgotten.
After typing in the names of three girl sleuths, as well as the clue “girl sleuths,” my crossword train immediately jumped the tracks. Is “smaxy” a word? Would Nabisco be OK with “Orhio,” which I was trying to pass off as an alternate spelling for “Oreo”? And why was I so hire-a-skywriter proud of the clue “Prickly pair?” for “cacti”? Which I had to spell “cakti” to make it fit?
I quickly descended into a trippy word salad phantasmagoria, which only made me think I could somehow fit “phantasmagoria” onto my grid and then come up with a clever clue, because Will Shortz says he likes clever clues. Spoiler: I couldn’t.
Not long after, I was supine on the couch, brooding. “Remember the Legos!” my brain cruelly harped.
See, I’d never really been a Lego-doer as a kid – my experience mostly limited to the huge, battered cardboard box of mismatched, occasionally glued-together Legos that every home with children seems to possess – and only built a few square, roofless and windowless forts.
But I received a Lego set for Christmas two months ago and thought it was SUPER awesome, which led to a few more Lego sets and then the thought that maybe I could design a Lego set! There’s software for it!
Needless to say, I will not be stealing any Lego designer’s job. I guess there’s a reason these people have advanced degrees in things like structural engineering and industrial design.
And yes, yes, practice makes perfect, but I’m more interested in understanding this impulse to plunge my hands into the structural underpinnings of things I love. Is it because, come the apocalypse and my iPad is dead, I want to be self-sufficient in crosswords? And Legos? Am I trying to realize some sort of internal vision? Do I think I can do it better?
Actually, though, I think it’s just because I want to spend a little more time inhabiting the worlds of the things I love. I like to think it’s the same urge that inspired Dwight David Eisenhower to raise prize-winning Angus cattle or Barack Obama to collect comics – I like to think he’s tried drawing a few.
(See? I did eventually Google the presidents.)