Crossword Brain

I’ve mentioned my crossword puzzle obsession in previous posts. What I find interesting is how many people are unduly impressed by my ability to complete the New York Times Sunday puzzle. I could never do that, friends and acquaintances will maintain. Yet getting good at crossword puzzles is like anything else. All it takes is practice. After thousands of puzzles completed and discarded, I have developed what I like to think of as crossword brain.

Aside from the fact that crossword puzzle makers seem to use a lot of the same clues and answers, there are certain conventions and techniques of puzzle makers. Once you learn them, your brain starts to think like a puzzle maker. A commonality of most crosswords I do is that the puzzle usually has a theme. Often the puzzle is titled so as to give a hint at the theme. For instance, Saturday’s Wall Street Journal crossword had the theme “Marquee Matchups.” This immediately hinted at movie titles as being the likely answers to the longest crossword puzzle blocks.

The first clue related to this theme was “Just another day in Congress, some would say? (Jack Lemmon/Uma Thurman).” This told me that somehow the movie or movies would be related to these actors. I puzzled over what movie both Lemmon and Thurman could possibly have been in and came up blank. Luckily there are all kinds of smaller answers in the “Down” section that could give me some letters I needed to make sense of the clue. I eventually got the word “grumpy” as a start to the answer. Once I got the “o” next to it, I thought of the movie Grumpy Old Men, which did indeed star Jack Lemmon. But not Uma. So I started running through her movies to see what one would make sense with a clue about Congress. And then it came to me: Kill Bill. So the answer ended up “Grumpy old men kill bill.” Voila! I’d cracked the code and now knew each answer featured one movie from each named actor’s body of work.

Another common practice of puzzle makers is the use of puns, homonyms and homophones. So a puzzler needs to think about the various ways you might read a word or phrase in a clue. For instance, the clue might say, “Meet market?,” and the answer might be “singlesbar.” (There are no spaces in the crossword puzzle grid except between different answers.) Or one might say, “Enjoy the nudist colony?” with the answer, “grin and bare it.” I guess it helps to be interested in language, as I always have been.

Puzzle makers also pay attention to parallels and language conventions in their clues and answers. For example, if they use a person’s last name in the clue, the answer will also use a last name. Clue: Frequent director of De Niro. Answer: Scorcese. But if the clue was “Frequent director of Robert,” the answer would be “Martin.” If part of the clue is abbreviated, the answer is also an abbreviation. In the WSJ puzzle, the answer to the clue “Ore. neighbor” is “Ida.”

Sometimes crosswords get really tricky and contain a pattern that includes more than one letter in certain boxes. For instance, I recently did a puzzle in which the letters “mic” went together in several of the puzzle boxes. I had a hard time figuring this out until I came across the answer that basically gave away the puzzle theme. Although these kinds of crosswords can be a little frustrating, solving them also gives me a big sense of accomplishment. And I think my aging brain thanks me.

Although I have branched out to other types of word puzzles in order to stretch my brain, I will always retain a fondness for the good old-fashioned crossword. There is something so satisfying about filling in all the little boxes. My husband teases me that he is going to save all my completed crossword puzzles and bury them with me. I guess there could be worse legacies than being known as a crossword puzzle fanatic. But my crossword puzzle brain and I intend to be around for many more years of puzzle pleasure.

A Three Hour Tour

People who know me know that I have a substantial fear of water. I can think of few things scarier than being out in the middle of the sea. But my sister-in-law was in town for a visit and mentioned how much she and her husband had enjoyed a boat cruise on a previous trip to Florida. So I thought I’d be a good sport and book a sunset cruise for her, my husband and myself. A two- hour tour – what could go wrong?

The boat was a pontoon that looked somewhat seaworthy. But the captain looked more like a surf bum than a seasoned sailor: tan skin, scruffy beard, bare feet and a shark tooth around his neck. He was assisted by a young woman who, he informed us, was just learning the ropes of boating. Before we took off, the captain informed us that he was not very familiar with the area and that he was not going to follow the usual itinerary. Perhaps that should have been my cue to hop off the boat.

The evening was pleasant and breezy, though, and all was calm as we ventured out into the bay. The captain’s first mate would randomly shout out sightings of various seabirds along the way. Other than that, there was not a lot of color commentary. The two crew members had that jokey, overly familiar manner of second-rate entertainers. Still, I was having a glass of wine and trying to enjoy myself

After stopping to admire a lovely sunset, we started to head back in the direction from whence we came. That was when the sand hit the fan – literally. The boat kept running into sand bars, and Captain Nimrod seemed nonplussed. I started eyeing the cache of life jackets over our heads. Night began to fall.

This was when I started to realize we were out at sea in the dark with the Beavis and Butthead of boating. The first mate kept hopping over the fore and aft decks, shining her flashlight into the water as the captain shouted at her. At one point they tried distracting us with the sight of the full moon, which Nimrod blamed for the unexpected shallows in our path. I was quietly considering whether I would be Ginger or Marianne in any kind of Gilligan’s Island scenario. More like Mrs. Howell, come to think of it.

It got darker and darker as our little boat struggled across the bay. There were almost no lights on the boat, and the captain and first mate were struggling in pitch darkness to find the markers that would lead us to safety. I tried not to start hyperventilating. Meanwhile my sister-in-law was happily chatting with the other passengers, all of whom seemed to have not a care in the world. At one point my phone rang. It was my daughter FaceTiming me. She had a look of shock on her face as we explained to her that we were out on a boat in the dark, which was why she couldn’t see us at all. No doubt she was thinking, Who are you, and what have you done to my mother, the land lubber?

The two-hour tour stretched into three as we finally got free and made a loop around in deeper waters, making our way back to the marina. As the boat neared the shore, the first mate blithely asked for tips. I wanted to give her and her mate some tips all right!

On the way to our car after disembarking, my husband quipped, “No good deed goes unpunished.” I was pretty sure that was my first and last boat ride.

Unmasked

Since the CDC issued its recommendation that vaccinated individuals need not wear masks in most public places, mask mandates have started to disappear. Here in Florida, the governor has gone so far as to bar local governments from enforcing their own restrictions. So off go the masks, just like that.

I thought it would feel like a relief to go out and about in public places without a mask, but instead it feels jarring to see people unmasked. I still don my mask when walking into the grocery store or coffee shop – or pretty much any indoor establishment. And my husband and I are still loath to dine indoors despite the fact that we have both been fully vaccinated.

One reason I’m reluctant is that the pandemic is far from over. While hospitalizations are down across the U.S., the numbers of new infections (which Florida has the dubious distinction of leading) indicate that there is still plenty of risk, even to people who have been vaccinated. And even if my being vaccinated reassures me that contracting COVID-19 would most likely lead only to a mild infection, I still feel it’s my responsibility to protect others in the unlikely event that a variant of the coronavirus infects me.

When we first started wearing them, masks looked and felt odd. People were uncomfortable with them and would make jokes about them to ease their own embarrassment. But over time, we have grown used to the sight of people in all walks of life wearing their masks. Over the winter and early spring, there was virtually no cold and flu season. My sister, a high school teacher whose in-person classes resumed in the fall, said for the first time ever, her students only went through a single box of facial tissue in her classroom. While there may be a number of factors contributing to the reduction in viruses overall, including hand-washing and social distancing, it seems pretty clear that masks played a role in keeping us healthier overall.

It would be great if people took it upon themselves to wear masks in public whenever they felt an illness coming on. This is already the custom in many East Asian countries, which have had their own brushes with serious epidemics in the recent past. It is considered a social responsibility to protect others from one’s viral infection. And if we had a custom of wearing masks in the face of illnesses, we would get a jump on a future airborne coronavirus if it should attack.

I’m still uneasy about seeing people maskless indoors in public places. Only 50 percent of Americans are vaccinated, so many of those unmasked people may still be at risk of spreading COVID-19. I feel bad for store employees, many of them still required to wear masks, being exposed to maskless customers for hours each day. So I will continue to wear my mask until the pandemic is truly history. And I will keep it handy in the future to protect myself and others from illness.

What’s In Your News Feed?

The Facebook elves must think I am obsessed with breast support. Every day in my news feed I see numerous ads for various brands of bras: from sexy, lacy items to ones offering maximum comfort. I have no objection to shaking things up in my wardrobe, but it gets tiring looking at women in their underwear. Or for that matter, men! I also get plenty of closeups of male packages ensconced in various types of boxer briefs.

The algorithms that shape our Facebook news feeds make for some interesting commentary upon our needs and interests. Along with ads for different types of underwear, I see a lot of photos of athleisure wear. Clearly I’m not the career-driven type or fashionista looking for more dressed-up fare. This trend in my news feed also includes blankets and huggable pillows. One would think I was a veritable couch potato! Also, what does it say about me that my feed is filled with ads for wine and cocktails? On the other hand, there are lots of postings on the arts and literature, so I must not be a complete philistine.

It can be annoying when one idle search for new paint-by-numbers kits for my daughter yields dozens of ads for them on my Facebook page. In fact, I only need mention an item within the vicinity of my iPhone, and the next thing I know, I am seeing examples of said item all over my page. I guess it’s a good thing I haven’t done any Google searches of porn, murder, or Hitler.

There is another interesting trend I’ve noticed in my news feed lately. I’ve been seeing lots of memes asking a random question, such as: “Peanut butter goes with what? You are not allowed to say jelly.” Presumably readers are expected to answer this question in the comment section. I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of such memes is, and I have a somewhat suspicious nature that makes me wonder whether someone is performing a psychological experiment on Facebook users. After all, there are those phishing memes that ask you to divulge possible answers to your security questions online, such as the name of your pet or a favorite rock group or song. Whatever the reason for these postings, I resist the urge to play along. The internet already has enough personal information about me.

For some time, of course, critics have complained that our social media accounts are bubbles which exist only to validate our beliefs and opinions, especially in the political sphere. It’s true that I rarely have any Fox News stories popping up in my news feed. While some of this is guided by actual subscriptions to news sites, it is also true that my Facebook feed is not likely to challenge my beliefs in any significant way, except in the case of postings by certain friends who don’t share my point of view. (Yes, it’s possible to be friends with a Trump supporter.)

Still, I think you could do an interesting psychological profile of people based on what turns up on their social media sites. What’s in your news feed?

Small Town Charm

I spent the past weekend helping my daughter move into her temporary digs in a small town in Vermont where she will spend the next ten weeks playing soccer with a semi-professional women’s team. From the moment we set foot in the town of about 7,000 residents, we were embraced with a warm and friendly welcome from the people we met.

I like to think of the village in which we raised our children as a small town. But connected as it is to the greater Chicago metropolitan area, our hometown has more big city sensibilities than the picturesque Vermont town in which we found ourselves. First of all, we found these new surroundings much less technologically dependent. Although most public places have WiFi, many of the cafes shut it off for major periods of time. Numerous small businesses accept only cash, and the front desk clerk at the hotel in which I stayed informed me that there was no Uber presence anywhere nearby.

We met the soccer team administrator, his wife, and children over the course of the weekend as they helped the young soccer players move into their lodgings. Later on we ran into the administrator’s wife at a local store, and she explained that running into people you know is a major part of small town living. She had been raised here and had moved her family back after some years away in order for them to go to school and grow up in the same friendly environment. The couple also explained that the town was so safe nobody locked their doors or their cars.

Everyone we met had a slow-paced friendliness that we “big city” types could find either charming or, at times, irritating. But it was enjoyable not to feel hurried or stressed, except when my daughter, still completing college classes online, had to make a Zoom call at a particular time. My daughter related to me how, when she asked some strangers where she could find a cafe with WiFi, they had directed her to a place nearby and then said, “Have a really great day!” It’s hard not to fall in love with a town where people make a point of wishing you well.

The town itself is as picturesque as a postcard. Surrounded by gentle green mountains, it features lovely clapboard homes, roundabouts, and buildings erected in the early 1800s. Main Street winds through town lined with quaint, white-painted inns, restaurants, and unique shops. There is even a Museum of Fly Fishing. And despite the lack of big box stores nearby, we were able to obtain everything my daughter needed for her stay in this rural paradise.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to the small town way of life. We noticed that almost everything closes by 9 pm. So night owls are a bit out of luck here. Particularly for young adults, the small town environment can seem stifling and boring and necessitate long car trips to more thriving metropolises. And said lack of Uber service led to a pricey taxi ride to the airport for me when I was ready to go home.

Still, I was happy to leave my daughter in such a beautiful, safe, and friendly locale for most of the summer. I hope she enjoys the large dose of small town charm and creates some happy memories for the future.

Colleges and COVID-19

A disturbing thing has been happening on college campuses during the latest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as incidence of infection have leveled off and the vaccine promises a return to semi-normal, administrators are cracking down on students who violate COVID-related restrictions with renewed vigor.

Early in the pandemic, many colleges and universities overreacted to the normal urge of young adults to congregate with one another. Stories of students being summarily expelled, or at least sent home to complete their studies online, were common in the early fall of 2020. Some larger universities handled COVID outbreaks by quarantining individual dorms or groups of students using contact tracing and even examining the viral content of on-campus sewer systems.

While understandable, many college administrators’ actions have been unduly harsh, not allowing for students, many away from home for the very first time, to learn from their mistakes. Even when no long-lasting disciplinary repercussions were at stake, these young people were deprived of the opportunity to be on their own, socialize with peers, and enjoy, at least in some capacity, the college experience they had worked so hard to achieve.

Lately, though, there have been more and more stories of colleges and universities suspending students with only a few weeks left to go in the term, not allowing them to complete their course requirements or obtain credits for classes in which they had toiled all semester – and paid dearly for in tuition. Just the other day, three University of Massachusetts freshmen were suspended following their attendance at an off-campus party. They were immediately cut off of virtual learning sites and forced to forfeit the $16,000 tuition fee they had paid for the semester. Their parents were understandably incensed. (“UMass Amherst students suspended for attending party unmasked,” USA Today, May 11, 2021) This is not an isolated incident. In the past month, my daughter’s small college made a similar move against numerous students for the same kind of infraction.

I sympathize with educational institutions trying to navigate during this pandemic. They must balance the needs and interests of students, faculty, staff, and surrounding communities. This is no easy task in the best of times, so it must certainly be a challenge during a life-threatening pandemic. And I in no way think college kids should be given a pass and let completely off the hook for their behavior. I just don’t think it benefits anyone to take away all that these students have accomplished. There are other ways to discipline students who break the rules, and quarantining them seems to be a logical and effective method of both containing infections and getting the college’s message across about following the rules. Students could then be put on notice that any further infractions would result in the relinquishment of credit for the semester’s work.

This policing of student behavior is also creating an atmosphere of alienation and mistrust on campus. In the UMass case, the students’ COVID violation came to light after another student sent a photo of the partying freshmen to the administration. My daughter has told similar stories of investigations and students being encouraged to incriminate other students. I’m not sure this is the kind of lesson we want colleges and universities to be teaching our children.

In the United States, an 18-year-old is technically an adult with many adult rights and responsibilities. Yet the science of human development tells us that young adults are still forming that all-important prefrontal cortex that helps regulate impulsive behavior. It is patently unfair of colleges to expect sober and mature behavior of students at all times. College students should be allowed make mistakes and to learn from them in a caring and instructive environment.

The pandemic will not last forever. But the ways in which we nurture our future leaders will have a much longer-term impact. Let’s make it a positive one.

Football in Spring a Sign of Our COVID Times

Photo by Jim Slonoff, The Hinsdalean

In the past few months, I have seen news stories and photos from my hometown featuring high school football. Ordinarily, this would be a normal occurrence. But it has been decidedly abnormal seeing my children’s high school team take the field in early spring. Football and daffodils just don’t go together! Football in the spring is just one of the many strange results of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For more than a year now, we have had to adjust our expectations, habits, and routines to protect ourselves and others from COVID-19. No longer do we look askance at people wearing masks in public places. Masks can be seen on teachers and students, brides and grooms, restaurant servers, cashiers, office workers. I can distinctly remember the oddness of once seeing Michael Jackson out in public in L.A. years ago. He was wearing a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, and the sight was jarring. Nowadays he’d be in good company.

Virtual doctor’s visits, drive-by graduations, classes on Zoom, temperature checks before entering public places: it’s a brave new world of accommodation and experimentation as we struggle to get the scope of infection and serious illness under control. Meanwhile athletes play games in empty stadiums, countries quarantine travelers, and adult children move back in with their parents and commute to the dining room table for work. Recently a friend of mine had me in stitches as she described the bedlam at her house with a husband, two grown sons, her college-age daughter, and their dog all trying to live and work in a confined space. I thought it sounded like a great idea for a sitcom.

Some of the adjustments being made due to COVID-19 are definite improvements. Many cities have promoted outside dining, for example, and the explosion of sidewalk cafes is charmingly European. In Chicago, the city has decided to close one of its major streets on Sundays this summer for dining, shopping, and special events. It has also been nice to run errands in relatively uncrowded spaces. Who would have thought shoppers would be willing to wait in socially distanced lines outside to take their turn entering Trader Joe’s?

There are signs of hope that things will eventually get back to normal. As more and more people are vaccinated, I see many happy photos of family reunions and grandparents meeting their grandchildren for the first time. Travel is picking up as we head into our second pandemic summer. And the promise of a normal school year for many young people lies ahead, let’s hope for real and not as a mirage.

We are by no means out of the woods with regard to COVID-19. It’s still important to wear masks in public, especially indoors. Surges are still occurring when groups throw caution to the winds. And the situation around the globe is uneven. As I write this, India is still coming to grips with overcrowded hospitals and a lack of adequate oxygen for afflicted patients.

Meanwhile, we will have to take our victories where we can. And seeing the Red Devils take the field in my hometown once again has surely been one of them.

Yoga Breath

One of the scariest symptoms of COVID-19 is the inability to breathe. Early on in the pandemic, the sight of patients in hospitals on ventilators sent me into a panic. I started to feel a heaviness on my chest, which is a sign of my asthma and was no doubt a response to the stress I was feeling. It took me a few weeks to feel calmer and to realize that my asthma flareups were not a sign that I had contracted the novel coronavirus.

Breathing is the bodily function we most take for granted. Enter the discipline of yoga. One of the most fundamental parts of this mind/body practice is the use of breath, linking it to movement and meditation. As we inhale and exhale deeply through our nose, we are sending signals to our body to open, stretch, and strengthen itself. And we calm our minds. Focusing on our breath shuts out our anxiety, the to-do lists in our heads, the worries that keep us up at night.

One of my favorite breathing practices in yoga was taught to me by my teacher Carol. You start by picturing the breath traveling up your spine while inhaling, slowly creeping up each vertebra and gliding up the back of your skull. Then on the exhale, you feel the breath cascade down the front of your body. Over and over you make this loop of breath around your torso. When I practice this, I have a sense of well-being that is hard to put into words.

There are many breathing exercises, called pranayama, in yoga. These exercises can be done in conjunction with movement or as a focus all their own. They can contribute significantly to a person’s mental and physical well-being.

At the end of a yoga session, you practice savasana, or corpse pose. During savasana, you lose awareness of your breathing once again. It integrates back into your being but with a difference: a deep sense of calm and repose. Neither deep nor shallow, it simply sustains you as you rest on the mat.

After the terrible deaths millions of people have suffered during this pandemic, we will never again take for granted the fundamental act of breathing. Yoga has helped me regain some equanimity during this COVID year. And yoga breathing has been a big part of cultivating that sense of peace.

A Good Mother

As I finished the Hulu network’s series Little Fires Everywhere last night, I thought that my timing was apt. With Mother’s Day around the corner, I had just experienced a serious reflection on mothers and motherhood. Little Fires Everywhere tells the tale of women from different walks of life: the successful wife and mother of four having regrets about what she has missed; an artist who moves from town to town with a daughter and a big secret; a desperate Chinese immigrant who relinquishes her baby; and the foster mother who takes in the baby after years of attempting to have her own. What these women have in common is that they are all mothers, and their choices, decisions, successes, and failings are held up to an unforgiving spotlight.

Being a mother is simultaneously the most rewarding and unrewarding job in the world. It is tiring, hard, unpaid, and unglamorous. Even the upper middle class mother of four finds herself pulled in two directions: towards a fulfilling outside career on the one hand and towards the myriad crises that affect her teenage children. Sleepless nights unable to get a baby to nurse, the efforts of desperately trying to find a safe harbor for oneself and one’s daughter, the anguish of trying and failing to carry a baby to term, the need to be both protector and role model for their daughters: all these difficult situations are portrayed with unromantic honesty.

Yet these mothers are also passionately in love with their children, as most mothers inevitably are. Our children are like appendages. If they are estranged from us or taken away from us, it is as if we have lost a limb. We feel keenly all the pains and slights they experience in the cruel world of peer pressure. We invest them with all our hopes and dreams, sometimes failing to realize we are strangling them with our expectations. In our desperate desire to protect them, we deny ourselves, keep secrets, hold back the ugly parts of ourselves, and try to project to the world the happy glow of motherhood that is expected in our society.

To be sure, the mothers in Fires are far from perfect, as imperfect as all mothers surely are. They make mistakes and say things they regret. At one terrible moment in the show, a mother screams at her daughter that she had never wanted her in the first place. Although it’s a horrible thing to say, what mother has not said things to her children that she wishes she could take back? We say we love all our children equally, but our actions sometimes favor one over the others – or at least our children perceive it that way.

In fact, in the series, the teenage girls at one point or another swear they will be nothing like their mothers when they are older. I remember having similar feelings about my own mother as I was growing up. It is very hard for children to understand their mothers’ lives and feelings, and sometimes we are only able to do so when we become mothers ourselves.

Our culture does not cut mothers much slack. We cultivate an idealized version of mothers because they are so important to the development of a child and its ability to thrive. Yet this idealization leaves mothers feeling as if they are never good enough. No matter how much they deny themselves, no matter how much they give to their children, they will inevitably find themselves wanting, i.e. human.

As Little Fires Everywhere ends, a home has literally gone up in flames. Some of the children have scattered. Some of the mothers find themselves reunited with their beloved babies; others find themselves bereft. It is definitely no Hallmark version of family life. It would be easy to condemn these women for their poor choices. It’s much harder to try to understand their motivations and the promptings of their hearts. But only by doing so can we afford mothers the right to be human. Only by recognizing the difficulties inherent in mothering our children can we truly honor our mothers and support them to become the best versions of themselves that they can be.