I grew up watching my grandmother work crossword puzzles.
This was serious business. Every Sunday morning on her way home from church she would stop at the corner store and buy The New York Times. She'd lug that heavy newspaper up the stairs to her second-floor duplex and take out the magazine section. She never touched the rest of the paper.
Then she would peel some potatoes for her dinner, get the chicken into the oven, and settle down with her sharp pencils.
No one was allowed to look over her shoulder on her first pass through the puzzle. Naturally, as soon as something is forbidden, it immediately becomes irresistible to children. So if my grandmother left the room for any reason, I would grab that puzzle and try very hard to complete some words before she came back and caught me. I even tried to imitate her handwriting so she wouldn't know I had been trespassing on her puzzle.
I think my grandmother was on the right track. Maybe not with hogging the crossword, but with routinely doing the puzzle. She did that every week until well into her 80s, when she could no longer see well enough to read the clues. Those puzzles kept her sharp, I'm convinced. I've never been able to complete as much of a New York Times puzzle as she could. They are tough, and she was very disciplined about it. She wouldn't even break out a dictionary until she'd gone through the whole puzzle at least once.
There are worse ways to spend a Sunday. Especially if there's coffee and pastry along with that puzzle.
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