The old man is
troubled! As one of his usual rituals designed to keep the “little grey cells”
functioning, the old man has been working crossword puzzles for many years. In
more recent years after working on simpler theme puzzles, he started working
the Herald Tribune’s more difficult Challenging Puzzles books, which
normally begin with the easier daily
puzzles, then graduate to increasingly longer and more obscure subject
matter in the Sunday Morning, Sunday
Brunch, and Super Sunday puzzles.
Each puzzle lists
solving times for Ace, Sharp, and Good solvers, none of which I seem able
to achieve as yet, nor have I been able to solve completely all the Super
Sunday puzzles without looking up the answers for a few vacancies that seem
insoluble before I lose interest. I have persuaded myself that the reason is
not my stupidity but the leisurely, unfocused manner of completion between
bites of breakfast and drinks of coffee, sometimes while watching the morning
news. My failure to become an Ace did
not disturb me. That was not the problem.
Then, a week or so
ago, I reached one of the last ten or so of the Super Sundays nearing the end of the 70 puzzles in the book. I
though I had done well enough considering that the clues included some very
obscure novelists, artists, rock groups and so on, none of which have been part
of my experience. I found the new start difficult but eventually I achieved
what I considered were likely correct answers. However, one clue for a long vertical
word combination or phrase left me totally confused. The clue, as I recall it, was
“Having the quality of being empty.”
The answer, as I remembered it a number of puzzles later, took up all or nearly
all of the 23 or so vertical spaces beginning with space 3 or 4 of horizontal
line 1. Although I had missed many of the cross letters of the first 4 or 5
horizontal lines, I did fill in many of the lower ones but still I made very
little sense of what was to be the “quality of being empty”. Eventually I just
guessed at and filled in a word that spelled out something like “unininitionalabilitation”,
which was still obviously not correct as it did not satisfy the requirements of
all the involved horizontal words. Finally I looked up the answer at the back
of the book. It turned out to be something like, “inanitionalabilitation”,
which reminded me of have sometime in my experience seen the word “inanition”
which I then found definitions for in Webster. The remainder of the compound
word I figured was the puzzle writer’s made up addition having to do with “having
the quality of”. Having then completed the puzzle to my satisfaction after
finishing my breakfast coffee, I discussed the uniqueness of the compound word
with my wife and both of us wondered at the gall of the puzzle writer to
include such an impractical word in the puzzle.
That whole described
event is still not the old man’s problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that
several days, perhaps a week after the event, I was unable to find any evidence
that the event ever took place. What happened? Was the whole thing one of my
half asleep early morning fantasy events? Was it all a real dream? Was it
something that happened many puzzle books ago? Did it happen to me in another
lifetime? Or are the synapses in the frontal cortex of my brain no longer
properly synchronized? Is the event actually a symptom of some form of dementia?
You see, that short period after the event, the memory of the strange made up
word stayed with me. I decided to go back to that recently completed puzzle to
confirm the exact wording of the clue, and the completed word I filled into the
puzzle with many inked corrections in evidence, just to see if I could make up
a sentence using that word. I could find neither. I spent hours, days in fact,
scouring that puzzle book from beginning to end. I scanned through almost every
clue in the book, examined the face of the completed puzzles and the answer
pages too! I can find no such clue, no such filled in puzzle, no such answer at
the back of the book. My wife remembers no such conversation with me. She has
even helped me go through the book itself in case I missed it in my repeated
scans.
I have tried to
forget the puzzling problem by finishing the last three Super Sunday puzzles. I have one left to do. Will the problem then
go away? Or will it continue to disturb me, as being just another indication that
the old man is indeed getting old?
