A 10-Letter Disease Prevented by Puzzles

On the list of medical reassurances as to how we can prevent Alzheimer’s disease, working crossword puzzles earns high marks.

This is happy news indeed for a puzzle fanatic like me. My habit will not only keep me alert, but it is now rationalized by scientific research. Sorry, dear, I have to do the puzzle.

But am I willing to trade mental lapses for addiction?

Like my mother before me, my self-worth is entirely dependent on successful completion of the daily crossword puzzle.

Welcome to my world, where the coffee is steaming but the breaking of fast does not occur until that page of the paper is out and folded and swift penciling is underway. Like any addict, I stick to my tried and true routine. I’m hooked on yellow-gold pencils, with no desire to go to ink, although the woman who bore me moved on from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times Sunday stumper having long before abandoned her No. 2 weapon.

I can see how working the crossword could stave off Alzheimer’s. However, I may need addictive management therapy and counseling to combat hardening arteries because of the self-imposed stress as the days of the week unfold -- because the puzzle makers toy with me.

I’m onto their strategy: Monday is the morning we all need a little pump, and so they lift me up that day. From start to finish, it’s a 10-minute conquest. The clues are self-evident, logical, mostly common words, no more than two stuck together in a longer solution. Tuesday is still quite doable; I feel smart, a deft flinger of words hither and yon.

Wednesday is when they start to mess with my mind. The countries nestled in clue form are more remote, the foreign-language hints less memorable. The lost cells of my brain are being tapped. I really struggle through Thursday, never able to get up from the table with the gold, but they still tease me by throwing me a familiar clue in a moment of near surrender, just to feed my fanaticism. And we’d best leave Friday to the teachers. Saturday is criminal. Who are these puzzle people? They should be arrested and mercilessly imprisoned with a life sentence of figuring out the answers to their own questions.

Ah, but Sunday! I love Sunday because the puzzle has an overarching theme, and I am also a confessed theme-a-holic. Give me a theme and I’ll give you the reason -- convoluted though it may be.

The good news is there may be a partial cure: Now that I am married to a fellow puzzler, I have some relief. We not only work the puzzles together, we have a system. He folds, I sharpen. He has the sports and geography facts in which I am utterly lacking. I parle or hablo whatever language we might need. And now I know when to give up. Together, we slap down the pencil and push back our chairs in disgust, rationalize that those puzzle writers are crazy and we have better things to do.

So although I may live longer while maintaining my steel-trap memory, what good will that do me now that I subscribe to three publications for their crossword puzzles and can’t leave the house until I’ve finished them? And whenever I do manage to get out, I will only be able to converse with words like “ort.”

My name is Kathleen Miller and I am a crossword puzzle addict.