Inka dinka doo

As I learned to love baseball from me Pops, I also learned to love doing crossword puzzles. I still typically buy the Sunday paper simply to get the three big crossword puzzles which it offers. I imagine I could just get a crossword puzzle book and save money, but old habits die hard. Quiet Ron.

It always impressed me that Pops did the puzzles in ink. I never had that kind of confidence. But one day recently I thought to myself, self, why not try? You never really know what you can do until then. So I sharpened my pen to attack a crossword in ink.

I suppose my first mistake was sharpening my pen. It made a mess of the sharpener and got ink on my shirt. Fortunately the shirt was tie dye, so at least I can camouflage that embarrassment.

On to work. When writing I've developed the sloppy trait of not connecting the top horizontal bars of the letters E and F to the supporting leg, but that is readily corrected with either pen or pencil. You just connect them. Yet I rarely like how my letter S comes out so that I often erase and redo it. You can't do that in ink so easily. I tried writing over the original effort several times, trying to make that stupid S look right, until all that was left was a small square of black ink. Rats. But then, hey presto, I could claim the square was whatever letter I liked. It helps get correct answers I tell ya what.

The trouble deepened when I found myself trying desperately to correct the look of any letter which I decided I didn't like the look of. The O was never round enough and the angled leg of the Q too (or not enough) angled, and the intersection of the horizontal to the vertical of the capital T was not mathematically precise. So I overwrote a lot of them too. In the end, I had one large black ink square superimposed over what had been many small black ink squares. In fairness to me, there were a relative handful of letters plain to see. Relative being the operative term, and plain to see being a questionable assertion.

I think I got some answers right. And Pops, I came to realize that there are many things where I will never be as good as you. One of those is doing crossword puzzles in ink.