Composition with Grid

A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I adopted a new pastime: we would complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. The puzzle gets more difficult as the week goes on, Mondays being easiest, with the qualitative peak on Saturday and the quantitative Sunday, when the crossword is nearly twice as large. It got tricky for us by Thursday—but, we reasoned, our crossword muscles would grow stronger with practice, and we would soon be adepts, puzzling together in harmony through our declining years.

We were partly right. It did get easier—but we were not harmonious. Turns out, there are different styles of crossword-solving, and my wife’s Brownian motion, bouncing erratically from clue to clue without rhyme or reason, I found intolerable. We tried taking turns, but I was so distracted by her chaos I could not collaborate. We shifted to parallel play, but her diligence lapsed, and I now do the crossword alone, each day, in solitary absorption.

At the time, we both agreed: this…