Puzzled

I heard on the radio that it's the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle. Hard to believe it's only been a 100 years--they seem firmly entrenched in our collective psyche. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has a long memory of them--I had a grandfather and a great-grandmother who did them religiously.

My own puzzle-solving has been sporadic. When I was a kid I used to get those Dell puzzle books, and for a time I have regularly tackled the Sunday crossword in the New York Times, which I could do while watching a football game on TV. But I haven't done any recently, and anyway, crosswords were never my favorite. They are to puzzles what cola is to soft drinks--the bland common choice.

Of course, the Sunday Times puzzle is always more interesting--it has a theme each week, usually involving puns or a long quote, and the trick to solving it is to figure out the theme. But my favorite Times puzzle is the acrostic, a more complex puzzle that takes a quote, rearranges all the letters into a series of clues, and then is solved by figuring out those clues and putting the letters into a grid, to solve the quote. I was also a big fan of word searches, logic problems, and the Jumble, which sometimes I try to do without even writing in the answers.

Why do we love puzzles? I'm no psychologist, but I think it appeals to our basic interest in exercising our brains, and is probably the same reason we love a mystery. Those of us who love words have a special interest (I do not like the number-based puzzles, like Sudoku--that's the other half of my brain). I think there's also something appealing about using a pencil. The sight of a sharp pencil has always inspired me, whether it's to write something new or endeavor to solve a blank puzzle.