The Pills, the Puzzles, the Pebbles March 15, 2023

I snapped closed the little “S”-for-Saturday lid on my translucent pill dispenser and thought, “There goes another week.” 

I think this every week. Week after week…month after month…year after year. 

But my pill caddy isn’t my only reminder of weeks gone by. My other is the rotation of puzzles I do on a weekly basis.  The dailies in the NY Times and the fabulous Two not Touch in the print addition, the online Wordle (followed by commiseration with my daughter Annie), the Spelling Bee, and Easy Sudoku, with the goal of completion within five minutes. Tuesdays and Thursdays I find myself delighted and confounded by cryptograms, also in the NY Times (sometimes in need of consultation with my buddy Julie). Thursday is heaven-on-earth “puzzle day” – I leap out of bed, grab the coffee, and get started! First out of the gate, appearing at 7am Pacific time, is the Wall Street Journal killer Sudoku, which cycles through 4 stages of difficulty in as many weeks. By 8am I receive an email with the cryptic crossword called “Out of Left Field” by my friend Josh Kosman, and by mid-to-late afternoon the WSJ publishes its fiendish crossword contest – a meta puzzle that causes my buddy Mike and me no end of head-scratching and a dose of delight or despair, depending on the week. Then there is the WSJ Saturday variety puzzle, which actually appears late in the day on Friday, and occasionally Mike sends me a National Puzzlers League cryptic crossword when we seem to have some extra time. 

Recently I re-read Aging as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond, a Zen priest. In it, he talks about an acquaintance who estimated how many more weeks he had to live, based on actuarial tables, and filled a large jar with pebbles equaling that number. Then, each week, he removed one pebble and placed it into another jar. He could see the accumulation of time slipped by and the steady diminishment of life remaining. I’ve made a little calculation for myself, as I’m approaching 70 and actuarial tables indicate I should make it to 87.6. That’s about 936 pebbles from now. 

The pills, the puzzles, and the pebbles: finer grained than a birthday, these mark the slow but inexorable march to life’s end.