Monday, June 24, 2019
By:
The crossword is mankind’s greatest invention, and Will Shortz should be elected King of the World. We can even forgive his mustache.
Shortz, for the uninitiated, is the guy who edits the crosswords in the New York Times. He has written over 100 puzzle books and owns around 20,000, the world's largest collection, according to his Wikipedia article. (I cannot, in good faith, write this post without mentioning that his Wikipedia article also says that one of his professions is “table tennis center owner,” with zero context.) I’m giving you Shortz’s biography because since my work day begins at a different time to every other intern’s, and thus my commute is a solemn, solitary affair, I started doing the crossword. My puzzle of choice (I'm kidding, I can only afford the free paper) is in Express, the quick-hit, local-and-world number that is known to DC as the Metro's signature piece of litter.
That’s my morning: get up, head out, get my paper from Andre, who you may know as the guy who stands in front of the Foggy Bottom stop with papers in hand, and who I know as my personal savior. Andre doesn’t know this, but I love crosswords. On a day-to-day level, they’re a bit of morning mental gymnastics, and they do something for the crushing loneliness. On a deeper level, though, Will Shortz’s cryptic little grids got me into reporting.
When I was first easing into journalism, I came to understand that I was only game for half of the process: I loved the process of talking to people and getting stories, but I hated reading newspapers and staying up to date on events. This is, of course, a cardinal sin, and if anyone from any paper that may someday employ me is reading this, please know that I saw the error of my ways and I have changed. Forgive me, WaPo, for I have sinned.
My ever-supportive dad recognized my split loyalties and decided that, instead of gently coaxing me to see the light like the philosophers of Plato’s Republic, he would chuck me into the deep end like the mobsters of de Niro’s Godfather. This took the (admittedly less murder-y) form of putting a paper in front of me each weekday morning before school and quizzing me on front-page articles in the car. Usually I failed those quizzes. My parents, ever the globalists, got the Wall Street Journal most mornings, which at the time represented to me all the driest aspects of journalism. (Ford’s stocks fell again! The drama! The outrage!) I had the hardest time retaining--or caring about, take your pick--facts and figures about the world’s markets. Shame me if you will, dear reader, but I was sixteen at the time. The comings and goings of capitalism thrilled me on about the same scale as the finer points of etiquettemattered to Ghengis Khan. That is to say, it’s not really my thing.
Weekends were different. My parents got the New York Times, which was a revelation for two reasons. One, I realized that there were papers that covered world events outside the walls of the New York Stock Exchange. Those stories encouraged me to flip through more than the first page, which led me to revelation two: the crossword. What, I wondered when I first saw it, is this mysterious grid in which some squares are arbitrarily blacked out? What is this list of cryptic two- to three-word hints?
Based on how this blog has gone thus far, you might imagine that upon seeing the crossword, trumpets played, the angels sang, and celestial light beamed down on 31-Across. In actuality, dear reader, the first time I saw a crossword I felt not elation but frustration. Why would this Shortz character just write weird clues? He gets paid to do this? My consternation didn’t last long, as the second bugbear of my high school days kicked in: apathy. With a mental shrug I moved on. Looks like even the inside of papers are boring.
Now, before you feel validated for reading all those think-pieces about Those Damn Millennials, know that I came back to the puzzle. I flipped to it every day, getting less and less angered by the fact that Somebody out there has a job to befuddle people, where does he get off and more curious. I started to learn the basic thrills: the hints often made you think backwards, or sideways. The work you’ve done before helps the work that comes after, in that the words overlap with each other. I started to see that solving a crossword is like solving a math equation (if you’re just now realizing “Oh god, he’s a nerd,” you should have been paying more attention) and suddenly I liked being befuddled.
I started rifling through the paper each weekend morning in search of the puzzle. Just as a function of having to open the paper past the first page to find it, I started reading articles. I never knew exactly where the hell the crossword was (I swear to you, it’s like it changed every day), so there would be a lot of frustrated flipping back and forth, during which time I accidentally absorbed some news. The whole wide world unfolded in front of me with a welcoming crinkling sound. As I read, I learned some craft. And somewhere along there I felt less discouraged about my tentative career choice and I thought, I can do this. Then, of course, I got stumped by every crossword clue and felt like an idiot, but the spark was there.
And so, Will Shortz made me a journalist. Consider this post my vote for his dictatorship.
Jeremiah O'Mahony