The Crossword Puzzle
The Crossword Puzzle
It was a typical April morning sunny, yet cold. My key would not open the elevator to my boss’s seventh floor elevator door. We were forty five minutes behind schedule. We carried our gear down seven flights of stairs. I hadn’t worn makeup or taken a shower that morning. This extra exertion did not help.
I made an illegal left hand turn into the mid-town tunnel and raced toward the Queen hospital where a political ad was being filmed. When I finally entered the converted conference room where the crew was staging the gear, I was frantic to catch up with everyone else. The director reassured the client that I was a professional and told me that I could relax. They were going to film B-roll for the next couple of hours. I should stage my gear and stand by for when they needed me.
I unfolded my tripod and clumsily attempted to mount my monitor with little success. I looked up and asked a tall, dark haired P.A. if he would help me. He quickly came over and held my monitor steady while I secured the screws. This was my first interaction with the man I will call the Crossword Puzzle.
It is an occupational hazard that you tend to forget names in my profession. Everyday, I meet ten new people who over the course of the day will become, what can only be called, intimate strangers. All day, you will hear their stories and interact with them on a highly intimate level, yet you know that you will all go your own way at the end of the day. The next day will bring ten new strangers into your life and the cycle continues.
However, I will remember his name primarily because I’ve seen his driver’s license photo of him with a army buzz cut, a photo that he said makes him look like Timothy McVey. And he saw mine, with the gothic dark hair that was my calling card when I first moved to New York. He called me Blondie, and we compared our skin tones by . I was surprised that despite his dark curly hair, he was as fair as I was. He said he was one of seven Irish jews in New York. I laughed. He made me laugh a lot that day.
I will remember him for his crossword puzzles. I had nothing to do while I waited to be called to the set. Usually I bring my computer and try to work online. I had recently given up crosswords for the ever popular Soduku. He insisted that Soduku does not give you anything when you are done with it. So you made some numbers line up, so what. Crosswords were always the way to go. At least you had the opportunity to learn some new word or phrase. I had forgotten the joy of crosswords. Had tossed them off when I saw too many middle age women on the subway face down in their crosswords and not their own lives. I was scared of becoming like them. Cut off from the world and alone. The perils of being a quiet creative who would rather sit in a cafe writing or at home with her dog, than at the local bar.
But doing a crossword with someone else is an entirely different proposition all together. All day, I escaped when ever I could from the set to go back to the room where he was on “fire watch”. He had already solved one puzzle and had graciously relinquished his second newspaper to me, so that I too could do a crossword. We exchange ideas on the correct words and answers. Soon the conversation drifted to non crossword topics like: reading each other our horoscopes, describing early childhood experiences, and our believes about religion and whether or not reincarnation was plausible. This in of itself is not unusual for intimate strangers. When I went back to the set, the gaffer was describing to another gaffer how his mother was Columbian and his father was french and how many different places they had lived all over the world. Everyone wants to connect to another person on a set. Everyone wants their story heard.
The perils of dating some one new are not unlike the mistakes you make on a crossword. You have to be intelligent, inquisitive and alert. You have to think of the ways that one word could have 12 different meanings and how it can screw up your entire set of assumptions about the puzzle, altering your beliefs about your worthiness and self esteem. The clues you are given sometime seem remote and implausible. Success seems unattainable. You have to find the exact work that will fit just perfectly, with all the other pieces of the puzzle. You have failed many times to complete an entire puzzle. And once in awhile you hit pay dirt and realize the correct answer and this blows it wide open and every word lines up perfectly. And then after so many failures you feel like the universe has suddenly shifted.
By the end of the day, we had solved two puzzles together and one on our own. I don’t know if I will every hear and see this intimate stranger again. But if I do…I promise I will tell you what else was said. Until that time, it was just another day on the job.
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