Making the Words Fit Together

By Sarah Raman ‘20

As both a human and a teenager, things in my life do not often run like clockwork. Moods, for example, or friendships, or my vision of tomorrow, or the noise in a room, swing from extreme to extreme much faster than I appreciate. But the New York Times crossword puzzle does run like clockwork. On Monday, there’s an easy puzzle. On Tuesday, it gets harder. Saturday is the hardest. On Sunday, the grid expands from 15x15 to 21x21. On Monday, it all starts over. There’s a puzzle on Thanksgiving. There’s a puzzle on the Fourth of July. If there isn’t a new puzzle, the world is probably ending. Will Shortz’s name has been on each one since 1993.

That means, no matter what day it is, no matter what else is happening, if I get out of bed, there will be a crossword puzzle waiting for me. It will be black and white. It will be a perfectly symmetrical square. It will play by the same rules it always has: plural clues mean plural answers, abbreviated clues mean abbreviated answers, no two letter words. I know how hard it will be. And, no matter how loud it is inside my head, I can sit down with a pen and a cup of coffee, and that will become my puzzle. The other interpersonal and emotional and it’s a big scary world out there puzzles have to wait. All I have to do is make it to the next day, and I can let a brand new crossword have my full attention. Promise. It’s a solution that is never, ever going to fail.

I start with the one across clue. On Mondays and Tuesdays I do all the acrosses I know off the top of my head before looking at the first down clue. Then I do all the downs, then I start working on the gaps. Clues won’t come so easily to me on the other days, so once I get an across, I work on the downs that intersect it before moving onto the next one. That’s the great thing about crosswords: every word I fill in gives me a clue for another one. There’s constant momentum. There’s a rhythm to it. You can only be stuck for so long; the solution builds on itself. Sometimes, it takes all day to come up with an answer. But I know there is an answer, and when I know it, I’ll know it's the one. That’s how crosswords work. So I can sit in math class, or lunch, or while I’m driving, and I can think about it. And nobody can make me stop if I don’t want to.

Each puzzle brings a new set of words. But it’s okay because that’s part of the clockwork too. It’s not so scary. Sometimes I don’t know all of the words. Usually it’s the actors’ names that trip me up. I spend too much time doing crossword puzzles to know about old actors. But that’s okay -- as long as I know most of the other words, I can figure it out. And the puzzles get easier, too. Ames is a college town in Iowa. To barely squeeze by is to eke out a living. Three letter snakes are either boas or asps. Only so many names start with a “J” and end with an “hn”. You don’t have to know everything to finish the puzzle. And if you get really stuck, you can ask a whole bunch of people for help. It’s surprising what people know. And the best part is, once they help you with one clue, you’re right back up on your feet again. Even just a letter. Nobody needs to hold your hand. 

I’ve been working on constructing my own crossword puzzles. It’s really hard. There are so many words in the English language, and it takes days and days to find one set of them that will fit together and follow the rules. And then you have to worry about clues: they have to be different than anything that’s come before, they have to be witty and clever, and they have to be enigmas that end up crystal clear. It’s a mess. And still, there’s a new puzzle every single day. 

That’s where I find my peace. As long as I open my eyes, someone will have wrangled the mess of the English language into a new grid for me to solve. It will play by the rules, but it will be different than anything I’ve seen before. The grid will be intentional and clever. I will astound myself by pulling an obscure answer from the recesses of my brain, and a clue will make me laugh. And that will keep happening. Never stops. Always something different. A brand new crossword every day until the world stops spinning. What an incredible thought. And if we can do that -- if we can make the words fit together every single day -- maybe the other things don’t have to be so scary either.