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For my eighteenth birthday, I bought myself a crossword puzzle book created by Will Shortz, a clever mastermind behind some of the world’s most difficult puzzles. I had hinted to several friends that this was definitely something worth buying, but when no one took the bait, I splurged and ended up spending nine dollars of my own money.
I’m assuming to most of its readers, the book was a leisure pursuit: the type of thing you’d bring to the beach or carry on the airplane, occasionally using as a coaster for a hot mug of coffee. But to me, the book symbolized a lot more. To me, the book was a form of training, a way of exercising a skill which would one day preferably, bring me fame and glory. The art of completing crossword puzzles in front of other people.
I picked up the hobby not because I enjoyed it, nor because it was good for my brain. I picked it up because it impressed people: the action itself not unlike carrying an encyclopedia around on ones head.
In college, I’d retrieve my newspaper every morning and shovel through the heaps of ads and useless articles about wars and car accidents, just to get to that one page, the page with the small games and mind joggers. It’d always be right next to the comics section, but that was for blockheads. I’d take the page with the puzzle, fold it up into fourths, stick in my back pocket, then pull it out in opportune times to ponder questions which very few college students cared to reflect upon. In line for food: what’s a synonym for allemande and in the back of class: a six letter word associated with standing water?
I even started to think like a crossword puzzle: referring to things like “Arthur of tennis” and “Portion of opera” just to piss my friends off. Over the years, I developed a pretty good crossword vocabulary, and while that’s not to say any of it was actually useful in real life, it did strengthen my puzzle-finishing skills. Towards the end of my Junior year, I started completing Monday-Thursday puzzles on a regular basis and then tossing them into my closet which eventually came to look like papier-mâché graveyard.
When I arrived in Panama though, all my hard work and training appeared to turn void. The years I spent on the corridor to fortune and worldly goods were reduced to little more than an evening sitting on my couch, perplexed by every single clue from La Prensa. I could do English crosswords blindfolded, but the La Critica ones were hopeless.
The Panamanian crossword puzzles suddenly became intimidating things to me. A hobby that had once brought me confidence and buoyancy, now turned frightening as I would embarrass myself trying even to complete the simplest of clues. Popular folk singer, Nenito ______. How the hell am I supposed to know that?
Traditional Panamanian snack?
Platanos?
Nope, Tajadas.
F*ck!
Even small kids standing next to me would help. “Four across” they’d say and point, “chicha” making me feel, once again, the size of a split pea. I would still fold up the crossword puzzles, but after going in my pocket, that’s where they’d stay.
Just the other week, I did something magnificent. In addition to making homemade gazpacho without the use of a knife, can opener, or blender, I completed my first Panamanian crossword puzzle. It was a long a heated affair, involving the use of multiple friends and reference books, and granted it was only a Monday, but it was a completion nonetheless. In the process, I learned a boatload of words I’d never otherwise come across: words like chicharon, a pork rind, and montezuma oropendola, the coolest bird on the planet. There’s something sexy about the look of a completed crossword puzzle, and finally in Panama, I can call it my own.
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