Many years ago, my father wrote that it's a little-known but indisputable fact that EARTH is a cyclical permutation of HEART. Little known, yes: when I Googled "earth is a cyclical permutation of heart", there were no hits. When I left out the word "cyclical" the search yielded about two hits. One was from the website of a Christian college, in a piece about the mystery of motherhood, the other a poem written just last year. The poem , "Permutations of the Earth", is a pleasing plethora of permutations tumbling from the words "Earth" and "Terra", a babble evoking flora and fauna and erratic motion, a stream of consciousness pooling at "The Earth, a hearth: Heat at her heart....", a wordfest fading in flecks of foam at its eddying end. The poem resides at www.poempigeon.com/poem.php?uid=5311.
In my description of the poem, I resorted to alliteration, because as simple as permutations appear, they are not. Take the game Boggle, for example. How many words can you make out of three random letters? Sounds easy. Looked easy, watching my brother play with other family members. Once I sat down to play, I realized how it got its name.
Where am I going with this? I've been doing crossword puzzles lately, initially to pass the time while recovering from hip replacement surgery. But it's become somewhat addictive, this word play thing, and I'm beginning to understand my mother's preoccupation with games such as crossword puzzles, anagrams, anacrostics, and Scrabble. But then she was much better at those games than I ever was.
I've never seemed to have the patience for crossword puzzles, and it didn't take more than fifteen minutes or so of playing Scrabble with my mother and brother for me to get discouraged, start drawing blanks (and I don't mean blank Scrabble tiles) and ask to be excused. Or more accurately, I'd grumble something about needing to run to the store for another six-pack of beer.
That was in the far distant past, of course. I haven't played Scrabble with my family or made a beer run for well over 30 years. And I think my brain stamina has improved over those 30+ years of not making beer runs. I suppose I can partly credit the ongoing practice of listening to clients, registering what they say, and formulating responses for my improved attention, and Ritalin, I won't deny, has significantly improved my ability to digest and retain information from what I read as well as what I hear. But certainly the lack of mental acuity that accompanied excess alcohol consumption was a problem during some of those Scrabble games. So I've been pleasantly surprised by my new ability to sit in one place long enough to at least get to a stuck point on crossword puzzles. Better yet, I've finished a few at one sitting. Never mind that I end up feeling sore in the butt and like I've wasted the better part of a morning.
My recent affinity for crossword puzzles didn't really start with my hip surgery. Some time before that, while looking through old letters my parents had written to me, I came across two anacrostics my mother had created. They were long, each spread out on two sheets of paper taped together, from which I had made copies sometime after my mother died. I cleverly stored the originals in some place which no longer seems such a clever place, since I can't recall where it might be. One of the copies I found stored with letters was cut off so the first letter of a whole list of words, along with parts of the clues, was missing. Not that it mattered much, because I had to cheat a lot -- internet, books, Thesaurus, etc. -- to complete the two puzzles. But complete them I did, and while doing them, cheating or not, I felt like I was finally giving my mother her due. Because when she first showed them to me more than three decades ago, I didn't have enough faith in my abilities (and also didn't have the benefit of the internet) to ensure I might actually be able to solve them. "You're amazing, Mom!" was the best I could do at the time. I couldn't fathom her facility with the written word, her ability to form complex words from scrambled letters, her knowledge of Latin, Sanskrit, and all manner of literature, the innate poetry of her being.
Here's a sample clue (all of which were hand-written in her very own pica-sized, upper-case print) for one of the words or phrases the letters of which would be inserted into the anacrostic quotation:
"Anc. Greek spring festival at Delphi, honoring Apollo"
And another:
"'The trumpet of a prophecy, O wind,____'(8 wds)"
There were, of course, some easier ones, synonyms, which were nevertheless not always easy for me, such as "Spread out, dispersed" and "Unduly demonstrative". But between my figuring a few out on my own and looking up many more, I was able to fill in the quotes. And then, because they were quotes my mother had chosen, I wanted to honor her by going to the internet to find out who she might have wanted to honor. It was quite satisfying, making this connection with my mother, so many years after her death, by solving (or at least filling in after Google, Thesaurus, and my mother's old books of poetry had solved) her puzzles.
It's a little harder to read the anagram on the copy which has all the first letters cut off, although I did try to write them in at the edge. What I come up with is OM_SHHUXLEYONA_IECEOFCHALK. Evidently the first clue was cut off as well. The answer is, it seems, "Thomas H. Huxley, On a Piece of Chalk".
I don't know how long my new fascination with word puzzles will last, but maybe next time I visit my brother I'll be willing to try my mind at boggle again. In the meantime, that anagram my father wrote? An indisputable step up from the pedestrian pet dust I'm scattering here.
This is my mother and brother's birthday, so happy birthday to both.
