A New Way, for Me, to Exercise the Brain

      Unless I’m mistaken—and I don’t think I am—I never have done The New York Times crossword puzzle. I do remember decades ago sitting on the D train in the Bronx with one of my high school teachers and watching amazed as she settled into her seat beside me and eagerly started doing the Times crossword—in ballpoint pen.

       It’s not that I don’t like word games; actually I love them. In fact, while vacationing in Maine over the years, members of my family would groan whenever I would say after dinner: “How about we play some Scrabble?”

       But never the Times crossword—until now.

       Not sure why I was drawn to it a few days ago. It was sitting face up on the dining room table, and I figured what the hell. It was only when I was in the middle of having a great time filling in the little squares in front of me—drawing words out of the ether, so it seemed—that it also dawned on me that, hey, this is good brain “exercise!” No dementia for me!

       At 78, I am not obsessing about going gaga or drooling—and not in a good way—over my next bowl of rigatoni. Still, with some other of my parts (I’m looking at you, knees) underperforming, I’d be foolish not to want to keep the gears oiled upstairs.

       I should note here that I am not a fan of cards, board games where you throw dice, or, for that matter, the hardy perennials of chess and checkers. In the latter case, checkers always seemed too easy, and chess too complicated (e.g., where the fuck does the horse go?)

       As for playing games like poker, I’m just pathetic, never having graduated from “what does two-of-a-kind beat?” But that didn’t keep me from showing up for our weekly poker games at Lippmann House at Harvard during my Nieman year some 45 years ago. Truthfully, I attended for the laughs, as well as the free beer and food (It's good to be a Nieman.)

       As our grandchildren were growing up we played tons of board games, most of them forgettable (except, of course, for Scrabble, that I routinely won, and which probably explains the lukewarm reaction whenever I suggested we play it.)

       Our granddaughter Anna loved Uno, a card game that involved a lot of colorful cards and earning you another turn if you could match the color on the card at the top of the discard pile. Great—and boring—but Anna loved it, and at age five she did not respond well whenever I’d ask “wouldn’t you really rather be playing Scrabble?”

       So, I guess I’ll always be a word guy.

       A word guy is someone who loves doing all kinds of things with words: besides writing news, writing poetry (in my case Valentine’s doggerel to my wife Judy every year) penning—and singing—satirical political campaign songs (I was unofficial balladeer on any number of presidential campaigns in the late 1960s through 80s. ) And, since being a reporter requires one to be a repository of all manner of arcana, loving word games involving trivia.

       An exquisitely simple, if often off-color, example of this was the game “Categories” that we played ad nauseum (i.e., when we should have been in class) in the offices of the CCNY newspaper The Campus in the 1960s. No board, dice or checkers required; just pencil and paper.

       Draw a grid with five boxes across, five boxes down. Down the leftmost column write five letters, drawn at random, usually from that day’s newspaper. Across the top horizontally write five “Categories.” Popular ones, if memory serves, included “dirty men’s magazines” and “diseases.”

       Filling in the boxes (against a time limit, of course) was a hoot. And you got more points if no one else matched your selections.

       For example, say with the letter “H” you put down “hepatitis.” under diseases. Chances were pretty good someone else would have written the same thing. Better: Huntington’s Chorea, trust me.

       As for dirty men’s mags, “Hustler” would have been an obvious choice to everyone—well, to the guys anyway. But why not write “Horny” and turn a deaf ear to anyone challenging you? (After all, someone, somewhere with a basement mimeograph machine perhaps, surely must have published a mag call “Horny,” right? Right?)

       If you think of all the time we wasted doing this, you also could say that we were protecting our brains from atrophy and ruin.

       Nowadays, some bluenose might argue you’d be better off learning a foreign language, and who am I to argue? But I submit you’d have a hell of a lot more fun trying to write the equivalent of one of my political campaign hits, “Mamas Don’t Let Yer Babies Grow up to be Newsies,” or better yet, hunkering down with friends for a nice evening of Categories.

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Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based documentary and fine art photographer, journalist and author. During 20 years with the New York Daily News, he served as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor. He also is the former photography columnist of the Washington Post. His latest book, done in collaboration with his wife and partner Judith Goodman, is “The Green Heart of Italy: Umbria and its Ancient Neighbors” (Fall, ’25).