Confessions Of a Cruciverbalist Lexophile Bibliotherapist

[ Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published August 12, 2024] 2024

It's only in recent years that I learned that I was a cruciverbalist lexophile engaging in daily bibliotherapy.

In simpler terms, I am a word-loving crossword puzzle enthusiast who indulges in therapeutic reading with a medicinal glass of wine. I don t think the wine is strictly part of the bibliotherapy definition but if you're going for therapeutic, you might as well go all the way.

I wasn't always a book person even though I grew up in a family of voracious readers. There were always at least three trips a week to the Pleasantville Public Library where my mother and sibs stocked up on new reading material. I did too, but I read one book to their five. 

Somehow the family speed reading gene seemed to have missed me. I was the middle child, a blue-eyed blond in a family of brown-eyed brunettes, the creamy blond filling in the family Oreo. (OK, so I think we're mixing some metaphors here.) I liked reading but I read slowly, with my lips.

While my siblings tested into the stratosphere on IQ tests, the school's guidance counselor informed my mother that two out of three ain't bad. Mom was advised to (waaay) lower her expectations where I was concerned. Vocational school could be a good fit, or perhaps one of the less demanding state schools.

My Ivy League-educated parents (they met in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown) were having none of this. They refused to believe I was as dumb as I tested. But I think there was some unstated concern that babies had been switched at birth. Somewhere out there was a family of blond dodos who inexplicably ended up with a brunette genius.

Ironically, I was always a much better student than either of my siblings, grade-wise. It's amazing what dogged determination will do for you. In fact, it was my signature "pathological persistence"  (my husband's term) that finally got our streetlight fixed last year after more than 100 hours and a year of effort. 

As the blond sheep of the family, I was sometimes the target of my siblings touting their superior reading-acquired vocabulary. (And yes, you do acquire an amazing vocabulary if you read a lot.) Our dog was misbehaving one day, and I announced, "Josephine, you are a recalcitrant animal!"  ("Recalcitrant" being one of the vocabulary words in English class that week.)

Everyone looked up from their books. "Whoa! Inga said a big word!"   (Then they went right back to reading.)

I was never a crossword person (cruciverbalist) until my sister and multiple locale friends kept calling me asking for foreign language answers that frequently show up on the New York Times puzzle. While I m not fluent in anything (anymore), I've studied French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Italian, and Swedish. So when the clue was Portuguese for "she,"  I could say, "ela."

Now, of course, you could just Google it but that wasn't true then.

As a matter of self-defense, given all the answers I was providing, I started doing the New York Times puzzle myself which I confess is kind of an addiction at this point.

It didn't hurt that studies had indicated that doing crossword puzzles every day made the aging brain stay agile. But then the Wall Street Journal published a study a few years back that all that crossword puzzles do for your brain is make you better at crossword puzzles. Such a buzz kill, those WSJ folks. But by this time, I liked them for their own sake. Although if the NYT could publish a sports-less version, I would not be unhappy.

Never a patient person, I have found that bringing the prior week's New York Times crossword puzzles to a doctor s office is the perfect way to keep my annoyance in check in case I have to wait. (OK, in this day and age, you always have to wait.) There is a neurologist, who shall remain nameless, whose wait times are always so onerous that I get through five days of puzzles, even the Saturday crossword which, I will say, is usually a bear.

For the 12 years that I was a single working parent, I read literally not one book. Probably not even a full page of one book. I obviously couldn't use the public library at that stage of my life as they not unreasonably want their books back sooner than a decade. So I would buy a book that looked interesting to me at Warwicks, and it would languish on my bedside table with the book mark still on the first page. Most nights in that era, I was falling asleep on top of the clean laundry piled on the bed at midnight.

But now I m retired, and get to read at least three books a week. The public library has become my second home. My husband has gone the Kindle route but I still like the tactile experience of an actual book in my lap, and turning pages. Sometimes turning pages really fast if the book is a total snorer. But that's the beauty of the public library: don't like the book and back it goes. My book queue is always full.

I'm loving my late-found identity as a cruciverbalist lexophile bibliotherapist. It feels positively recalcitrant.