I love a crossword puzzle.

I love the blank slate of it and the way you can slowly start to fill in the grids with all the random pieces of knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Cats, which was based on poems by TS Eliot, who was originally from St. Louis. St. Louis is not the capital of Missouri, Jefferson City is. A vandyke is a kind of a beard, Dick Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins. A Bora is a type of wind and Mount Otemanu is in Bora Bora. All of the hundreds of useless facts you know are not useless if there is a crossword puzzle.

Maybe you do not know what movie had 12 Oscar Nominations in 1996, but then you fill in one or two letters and you remember not only the English Patient but the Seinfeld episode where you agreed with Elaine. You can look at the same clue and the same letters over and over again and then suddenly, out of the mist, Katmandu becomes clear. Sometimes, you look at a clue and you do not know the answer and then, when you come back to it, you realize that it was the clue itself you were misreading. One day it takes you three letters and fifteen minutes to come up with Batik as a dying technique, but then a week later you know it right away.

Certain people, like Esai Morales and Yoko Ono are way more popular in crossword puzzles than they are anywhere else. If Ada Oklahoma were visited as often as it appears in crossword puzzles, it would be a major city. Everyone I know who does crossword puzzles has their own way of doing them. Some people do all the across, then all the down. Some people do a section at a time. I like to go as much in order as I can – one across, one down, two down, three down, four down, five across … Crossword puzzles move in logical, if quixotic, ways.

My father taught me to do crossword puzzles. For most of my life, he made time every day to sit with a pencil and a large eraser and work on a crossword puzzle. He didn’t mind if I filled in answers, but I had to use pencil. Sometimes, if I am doing a crossword puzzle my son will come and fill in the answers he knows, but he doesn’t have the patience to do the whole puzzle. When he was little I dreaded handing him the pen and letting him mess up my puzzle, but I did. The answer I associate most closely with my father is “oleo.” It’s another word for margarine and you don’t see it much any more. But my father used it on grocery lists and crossword puzzles.

Once, just after college, I was at a boy’s apartment. We were snuggled in bed and he decided we should do a crossword puzzle. He found a pen on the floor.  “What if you make a mistake?” I asked. “What if I do? You’re allowed to make mistakes, Marta. It’s just a crossword puzzle.” I was deeply in love with him and our relationship was complicated and took a long time to sort out. I have forgotten what made it so complicated, but I have never forgotten my shock at realizing that I had spent years being afraid to make a mistake, even on a crossword puzzle. It would be many more years before I got over that fear and I am really not over it yet. But I do crossword puzzles in pen, because I would like to be.

My father can no longer do crossword puzzles. Sometimes, when I talk to him and he travels between time periods and languages I long for a grid where I could put the random words and pieces of information he is sharing. I think if I only had the right grid, I could organize it and make sense of it. But I cannot. So I continue to fill in tiny squares and wonder about Mali and Borneo and oleo.