CROSSWORD CLUES LEND LIFE LESSONS
It must be true that people on opposite sides of today’s pressing questions can learn more about each other’s points of view, even if, as Bill Maher said, you can’t get 70% of people to agree that the sun is hot. If we stay in our bubbles, how do we grow?
‘Hey Mom, can you help me with 37 across?” I called out. What sounded like an innocuous question inadvertently ended up changing our parent-child dynamic during the COVID-19 shutdown — and possibly for years to come.
Alone among my nuclear family members, my mom and I never had an activity to uniquely call our own. My dad and I shoot baskets on our driveway hoop all the time, plus our books list perpetually overlaps, even if he wouldn’t publicly admit reading all 13 novels in the teenage spy series Alex
Rider. Even as young adults, my brother and I still play video games on our PlayStation 2 from 2001, which miraculously still works.
This discrepancy with my mom became particularly noticeable in late March, when I temporarily moved back to my childhood home town of Glastonbury to work from home and weather the pandemic with family. Items from 2009 still littered the desk in my old bedroom.
Back in my adult home town several hundred miles south, my weekly attempts at the local newspaper’s crossword were consistently just shy of 50 percent success. While that threshold apparently suffices in the presidential popular vote, I wanted to finish the challenge.
Back in the Nutmeg State once more, completing the two crosswords in each Sunday’s
Hartford Courant became a new goal.
I wasn’t having much better success. And I insisted on doing the crossword in pen — a victim yet again of the hubris that isn’t uncommon among us 20-somethings.
But it turned out the yin to my crossword puzzle yang was right in front of me the whole time, if only I’d asked.
Initially, I intended for my mom to assist with only that one clue. But looking at the puzzle, she happened to know another answer that I’d left blank — then another, then another, despite never having done a crossword before. Soon enough, she’d taken the seat next to mine, a wealth of varied accumulated knowledge pouring forth. Working together, we solved the puzzle to completion. At her insistence, we used a pencil.
The subsequent month of
co-solving taught because her lesson Her intelligence. learned: ability me she several crosswords doesn’t surprised If That’s you’re lessons. advertise with one me, good her at something, speak horns for and itself. banners. your It quality won’t need will
a humbler Maybe it’s generation her growing than up my in
own, which featured promotional social media profiles and braggadocious rap songs. Which would also explain why she didn’t know the answer that I got for last week’s 7-Across: “Tyler the Creator work that won the Grammy for Best Rap Album.” (The answer: Igor.)
Another lesson was well phrased by Bill Nye: “Everybody you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
The past few years, but especially this summer, have laid bare the discrepancies in many Americans’ lived experiences, across geographies (Rust Belt vs. coastal cities), generations (Silent Generation and Baby Boomers vs. Millennials and Gen Z), and races.
In a society where people increasingly seem to live on different planets, siloed in their own echo chambers with little to no cross-communication, my mom and I each learned from the crossword clues the other solved.
What might happen if more people stepped out of those silos? It must be true that people on opposite sides of today’s pressing questions can learn more about each other’s points of view, even if, as Bill Maher said, you can’t get 70% of people to agree that the sun is hot. If we stay in our bubbles, how do we grow?
I don’t know the first thing about cosmetics, and my idea of fine dining is Boston Market, but I learned that Essie is a brand of nail polish and T-Fal is a brand of cookware. My mom, whose idea of hard rock music is probably Hall and Oates, learned that Korn was the 2000s band who recorded “Freak on a Leash.” A diversity of backgrounds working together can go further and prove more successful than just one myopic outlook.
And a final lesson: everybody makes mistakes. Both when doing crosswords and when approaching life in general, a pencil and eraser mindset is better than permanent ink.