(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange used a recent period of recuperation to take up an old favorite recreation.
(LANGE) I’ve been doing crossword puzzles since I was a kid. I started out with the no-brainers in Boy’s Life (“Second Class Scouting test match limit” — Two) and went on to the local newspapers. Nothing regular, you understand. The urge comes and goes, like the urge for a favorite brand of sausage or beer. And I lacked the dedication that would have led to mastery of Expert status. I found the morning paper’s puzzle author preferable to the sadist whose puzzles appeared in the afternoon, so generally skipped the latter.
Friends send me books of puzzles if I’m going to be laid up for a bit. My older daughter once sent me a New York Times crossword puzzle that folded out to six feet long. It was a beauty! Last winter, as I faced a couple of housebound months, Mother brought me a book of puzzles. New York Times again – so-called “favorites.” I knew what that meant. The people who vote for these favorites are the characters you see on the subway, zooming through the Times puzzle in ink, ignoring the Down crosswords, and holding up their work so you can’t help but notice what they’re doing. I wish them bad cess. (That’s the answer to the clue, “Unfair Irish tax.)
Not that I’ve never done that sort of thing myself — but never with the Times. What I do is, if I’m on, say, an American Airlines flight with a change in Atlanta, I tackle the in-flight magazine puzzle on the first flight. Those puzzles are full of stupid clues like “Fleming hero” “Model Macpherson.” I complete it, freely referring to the answers in the back if I have to. Than on the second flight, I pull the magazine from the seatback rack and whiz through it in pen, while my deeply impressed seatmate is no doubt thinking, “Wow! What a guy!” (or possibly, “Oh, man! What a jerk!”)
This past winter Mother, visiting me in the hospital, brought me a book, titled “Over 325 Puzzles!” There were all kinds of brainteasers: tests of logic, acrostics, puzzles with the vowels missing, cryptograms; and they ranged from “Easy” to “Expert.”
Now my long-standing principle is never mix single malt with anything but water. So I stuck with the straight crosswords. Started on “Medium” and moved up the ladder. I discovered that affinity with the author of a puzzle has as much to do with success as quick wits, thesaurean gifts, or vast vocabulary. I also discovered what’s probably a new revelation — the Oxycodone they gave me caused wooziness, as advertised; my typing became the literary equivalent of the photograph of the web woven by a spider on cannabis. But it was great for doing tough crosswords. Stumped, I lay there pondering, and drifted often into sleep. Waking some time later, I was still holding the pencil, but had the answer in my head. And an almost overwhelming urge to get out my guitar and play some heavy metal.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work: labor, travail, occupation, profession.