I re-discover a small stash of free time in the summer months that I consistently misplace throughout the remainder of the year. One of my favorite ways to spend this aforementioned free time? Sitting pool-side with my Grandma, both of us deep in concentration (think crinkled brows here), the daily crossword puzzle sitting smugly in front of us.
While we’ve yet to fully conquer the puzzle’s characteristic vagueness and perpetual randomness, in the past few days we’ve come increasingly close to achieving our lofty goal of leaving no clue unanswered. We actually make quite the dynamic duo, her crossword fighting knowledge spanning almost seven decades, and my own brain seemingly filled with an exorbitant amount of pop culture trivia and other random, but quite useful information. Take our puzzle today: Grandma knew that a four letter word for “not an aristocrat” is a “pleb,” while I knew that a five letter word for a “Jefferson in Paris” star is “Nolte,” as in Nick, and that a five letter word for “Polly, to Tom” was referring to Tom
Sawyer and is “Aunt.”
But the best part of our daily puzzle campaigns, apart from the opportunity to flex my vocabularly muscles, is hearing my grandma give a righteous hoot n’ holler whenever we correctly indentify a particularly sneaky clue.
Crossword puzzles everywhere, take notice: Grandma and I will one day be unstoppable.