by Patricia Littlefield
*Archived February 2006 article

Let me establish right off the top: I do not do numbers. Never have. Whenever I have to deal with them, I go immediately in "deer in the headlights" mode as a glaze slips over my eyes, and my skin takes on an unhealthy pallor and becomes unpleasantly clammy.

However, I love words and language and everything therein related, including crossword puzzles. I am partial to those of the New York Times, particularly the Sunday ones, and I especially like the clever ones that include puns, homonyms, and the like.

My son, Mike, has the same predilection, and when we visit him and his wife, we have to share the crossword puzzles in the newspaper (I have decided that on future visits we are going to order a subscription to the Sacramento Bee for ourselves to avoid this hassle).

Last time we visited, he asked if I had ever tried a Sudoku puzzle, explaining that it consists of a grid of nine rows and nine columns that make up nine boxes with nine squares in each. The object of the puzzle is to insert the numbers, 1 through 9, in some order in each of the nine boxes so every row and column contains the numbers 1 through 9 exactly once, without any repeats, either vertically or horizontally. As soon as I heard the "N" word, Mike lost me, even though he assured me that no mathematical skill was involved; the numbers were simply placeholders. Sure. No way. Not interested. Forget about it.

Early in December, I received a flyer from the PuzzleWorks announcing the latest edition of Merl Reagle's Sunday Crosswords. Merl Reagle is my all-time favorite puzzle constructor; his puzzles are clever, witty, topical, and erudite. I began working them in the San Francisco Chronicle years ago and when I moved to Hawaii, arranged to have the Sunday Chronicle sent to me, just so I could continue my puzzle habit. When Merl decided to start publishing books of his puzzles, I wrote him in tear streaked, joyful gratitude, and he called me on the phone, amazed and taken aback that I had gone to such lengths to continue working his puzzles. That's how it is with us addicts.

Of course, I immediately ordered my copy of Merl Reagle's Sunday Crosswords, and then noticed that another puzzle book was also listed on the flyer, Erase-free Sudoku. I read further, learning that Merl, a word person as am I, at first had little interest in Sudoku, because he didn't know how to attack them. However, Erase-free Sudoku, created by Dennis Aramanda, includes strategies explained by Merl to aid the "numerically-challenged" in solving the puzzles. He now declares he is hooked on Sudoku as well as crossword puzzles.

I ordered a copy of Erase-free Sudoku for Mike, and then decided, what the heck, and ordered a copy for myself, just to try. I figured that if another word person like Merl can do them, despite their use of numbers, maybe I could, too.

I even went so far as to create a Sudoku wall hanging to celebrate my new best activity (after quilting). As someone pointed out to me not long ago, solving Sudoku puzzles has got to keep one's brain sharp. I need all the help I can get.

Who knew I'd get hooked on something using numbers? How ironic.