A Puzzling Addiction

They say that the initial step in getting help for a problem is to admit that you have the problem in the first place. I actually recognized the warning signs fairly early in our marriage, but to this day my wife still refuses to face the reality of her obsession. It's an ugly thing to have to admit in public, but she's, well, she's, uh a…

She's a puzzle addict.

Oh, it began innocently enough. She would doodle on a newspaper page, just random stuff. Then one day, the doodles happened to be on the same page with the crossword puzzle. She glanced down, and was captivated by all those little empty squares, begging to be filled in.

"One across. Blank Lincoln. 3 letters", she read. "Oh please - is this for 5-year-olds?" - as her hand unconsciously filled in 'ABE' in neat block printing. "Four down. Popular dog breed. Blank retriever. 6 letters." She smiled down at the ever-loyal puddles of inert fur curled up and snoring at her feet, penciled in 'GOLDEN', and apparently took that as a sign from above that this was to become her life's work.

Vacation, one year later. We relaxed in our motel room, reading after a long day. She finished her book, looked around for something else to read, found nothing, and told me she was going to wander down to the store in the lobby and look for another book. How I wished I had gone with her - maybe I could have caught it early and turned it all around. I'll never know.

"They didn't have any interesting paperbacks", she announced on her return, "but they did have a little book of crossword puzzles." Oh God.

Two years pass. I realize that she now knows things like "slang abbreviation for Australian breakfast cereal, two words", or "a 12-letter term for the underside of gravel". Bored, she moves on from crossword books to something called "Variety Puzzles". "This is really cool," she points out one day. "There are these puzzles in here where they give you codes that you have to decipher. There are 1286 blank squares with one letter in the middle of square number 742, and then there are these four pages of random letters, numbers and symbols. All you have to do is sort them out, put them in the correct squares, and it spells out the name of an 18th century king of Bavaria. Isn't that fun?!"

"Where?" I inquire innocently? "In the sun-drenched land of the terminally weird?" But nothing quenches the fire. It's puzzles first thing in the morning. Puzzles on her lunch hour. Sauce-proof puzzles at dinner. Waterproof puzzles in the shower. Then it gets worse. Enter the age of electronics. "Did you know they make Yahtzee and Scrabble as hand-held electronic games?" she asked one day. "Why?" She ignored the sarcasm with her usual puzzle-enthusiasm. "I want those for Christmas."

Now, along with the familiar scratching of pencil on paper, our home becomes blessed with random beeping sounds at all hours of the day and night. She gets puzzle books for Christmas. She gets electronic puzzles for birthdays. She does every puzzle in every magazine she encounters. She accosts strangers on the street, begging for the puzzle page of their newspaper. She has a custom hardwood clipboard. "It can't get any worse," I would tell myself with blind optimism. "It can't get any worse. It can't, it can't" ….. Actually, it can.

We were, of all things, shopping for furniture. I don't have a clue how it happened, but somehow Rose and the designer moved from fabric samples to puzzles - apparently there is a chemical bond between puzzle addicts that becomes airborne and transmits over wide spaces in thin air, like pheromones. "Have you ever tried Sushi?" the designer asked. At least that's what it sounded like to me. Maybe it was Suzuki.

Good either way, I thought, at least they've moved off puzzles and onto food. Or cars. Anything. "It's the latest puzzle craze. Started in Japan and is sweeping the world." No. Please no. Not another one. Now, pages of little square Sudoku puzzles litter the house, including the new couch we bought from the designer that I still want to strangle. "This is totally addictive!" I was informed one day. "Everything has to have nine numbers, in every line and every column and every square and every box on the whole puzzle. It's fascinating!!'

Do you win money," I asked, always the practical one. But she was gone. Gone. Then she contracted PHS - Puzzle Hand Syndrome, a repetitive-motion wrist injury common to puzzle addicts. I felt sure the agonizing pain would finally slow her down and get her to take up a less dangerous hobby, like bungee-jumping.

But no. She just became left-handed.

Paul Bianchina can be reached for comments at paul2887@direcway.com.