Deborah Sosin stumbled upon her father’s unfinished crossword puzzles. Solving them became a way to honor his memory.
Among my parents’ voluminous piles of papers — stacks that filled file cabinets, drawers and plastic crates — lay a battered, two-pocket folder with a handwritten label in faux calligraphy that read: “A Portfolio of Puzzles.” The overstuffed folder contained dozens of blank and partially completed New York Times Sunday Crosswords, both original and photocopied, dating from 1986 to 2002.
My brother and I were purging 50 years’ worth of our parents’ accumulated possessions. Mom, now 98, was moving to a smaller place with her caretaker; my father had died in 2015. My parents were both multilingual: Dad served in the Navy during World War II, decoding Japanese submarine communications. Mom was a Russian teacher and a Yiddish translator. They spoke German and French, too. Growing up, I happily absorbed their linguistic and verbal prowess. Words held value, as did word games of any sort.
On our frequent road trips throughout Europe, where we lived when I was a teenager, the four of us would play guessing games like Jotto, in which the clue giver thinks of a word and the solver offers a word in turn; the giver then tells the guesser how many letters match, and, by process of elimination, the guesser eventually figures it out. We’d use five-letter words and my parents had no mercy on us. By the time I was 11, I knew “phlox” was a sure stumper.
For as long as I can remember, Mom and Dad did the Times Crossword, acrostics, cryptograms, the daily Jumble in the local paper and myriad other puzzles. At bedtime, they’d ask each other for help. They were bickerers as couples go, but when they solved a puzzle together, they were a team, and a kind of peace prevailed.
In college, I developed my own relationship with the Sunday puzzle. At the University of Michigan, I split the Times subscription cost with my roommate, and we’d finish it together, in pen.
When I moved to Boston after college, I began solving solo. For a long time, I enjoyed Sunday home delivery until it became too much of a stretch for my meager budget. But I wasn’t about to abandon my weekly habit.
So I’d go to my neighborhood variety store, extract the Magazine section, pay 25 cents for a photocopy, replace the Magazine section, and be on my way. All of the clerks knew me and allowed the ritual. Sometimes they would even put the last one aside. At other times, the machine would be down and I’d drive around, even in a blizzard, in search of a store with both a New York Times and a working photocopier.
If I was sick, I’d ask a friend to save me a copy. If I was on vacation, I’d approach a stranger in a hotel lobby or an airport lounge who was reading The Times. I’d ask if they did the puzzle and, if not, would they mind ripping it out for me. Surprisingly, many people did so.
When I got a smartphone, I would snap a photo of the puzzle and print it out at home. Today, at long last, I have an online subscription, including premium puzzle access. To download the Sunday crossword at 6 p.m. every Saturday is bliss. (Yes, I still print it out. Some habits die hard.)
When I got home from cleaning out my parents’ house, I gently unpacked the “Portfolio of Puzzles,” as some of the original, torn-out pages had faded to yellow and were dried and cracking. I counted 76 crosswords — 41 of them with scattered, penciled-in answers and 35 totally blank, just waiting for the touch of my blue Pilot Precise extra-fine rolling ball pen.
I’ve been trying to figure out why my parents, such die-hard puzzlers, never got around to this batch. Were they saving them and forgot? Had they made copies and filed the originals? In another time, I would have asked Mom, but her memory isn’t what it used to be.
Most of the pages date from 1994 to 1997. It’s fun to tackle puzzles that old, as the clues and answers reflect the zeitgeist. So far I’ve found arcane political clues like “Whitewater prosecutor Robert” (FISKE, from 1996) and “Letters after Moynihan’s name” (“DNY,” 1994). There are cultural anachronisms like “Brosnan TV role” (STEELE, 1996) and “Liz has several” (EXES, 1996) — clues that younger solvers today might be hard-pressed to answer.
I waxed nostalgic while completing a January 1997 puzzle called “Presidential Punditry,” whose themed clues referred to all things Clinton — including Hillary, the first lady; Socks, the first cat; Bill’s biological father’s name, “Blythe”; and a town called Hope.
I can hear his Queens accent, and recall his patience and delight at instilling in his daughter the family legacy of puzzle solving.
Besides the thrill of discovering this treasure trove of pristine puzzles, I’ve also reconnected with my father, whose familiar, though faint, block-print handwriting appears on the unfinished samples. It feels as if we are at the dining room table again and he is teaching me fancy words like “etui” or “eft” or “ewer” or “épée” or “eke” — and those were just the E’s. I can hear his Queens accent, and recall his patience and delight at instilling in his daughter the family legacy of puzzle solving.
I trusted Dad’s skill so much that the other day, while solving for a five-letter word with the clue “Name in computer software,” in a 1997 puzzle, I fought hard to retain his answer: GATES. I finally had to override him with the correct answer, the now-defunct LOTUS. And I stuck with HYMNAL in response to the clue “Book of 150 songs” for far too long — out of sheer loyalty — before, naturally, replacing it with PSALMS.
By correcting his mistakes, was I somehow obscuring a part of him, his memory?
Watching my blue pen glide over his pencil marks, I thought, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” with a catch in my throat. Why did I feel guilty? By correcting his mistakes, was I somehow obscuring a part of him, his memory?
Now, as I creep toward the age Dad was when he amassed this puzzle portfolio, I am committed to finishing his unfinished puzzles. It’s like a collaboration across time. He helps me out with the answers I wouldn’t know on my own in categories like poetry or mythology. And when I must cover up his wrong answers, lingering ghostlike on the page, I’ll do it carefully, with a nod of gratitude for my unexpected inheritance.
Deborah Sosin is a writer, editor and psychotherapist in Boston. She is finishing an essay collection called “Heartbeats and Other Seismic Matters,” from which this piece is drawn. Her father would have been ecstatic to see her first NYT byline.
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