WORD OF THE DAY

SNEAK THIEF

Function: noun

Date: circa 1955

: How my Mother used to refer to our Japanese maid whenever she couldn't find a missing keepsake.

In my previous post, I sketched in our Asian tour of duty. When we first arrived there, our family lived in the Rice Paddies, a hastily constructed group of cottages on land 30 miles from the Tachikawa Air Force Base purchased for just that purpose while housing and facilities to support dependant families were built on the base. We lived there, cheek by jowl, with 20 other families who arrived there on various ships that had arrived from San Francisco and Seattle. We lived there for 6 months before the building project was finished.

The new housing was a series of rowhouses, 6 two-story apartments with a one-story apartments at each end of the structure for the enlisted personnel and single- family structures for the officers. Ironically enough, we lived right next to a fenced in structure where the base commander, a one-star general named Hudnell lived. His son Billy was in my second grade class and I was welcome at his house. In his front yard was a meandering creek with foot bridges crossing with koi in the creek. A really beautiful place.

This was less than 10 years after the end of World War II and several hundred people had been displaced by the base and had constructed rude housing within walking distance from the base. They had ingenious ways of making money. They took beer cans, cut them open, producing small pieces of sheet metal which they bent into various items like trains and cars that they handpainted and sold to the base personnel. They also bought solid colored Christmas ornaments and hand painted them with scenes of Christmas and Santa Clauses and sold them too. It has been 50 years and we still have 20 or so of these ornaments as prized family possessions.

The Japanese nationals who lived in those structures had jobs on the base in different capacities, some worked as laborers for the military but many others worked as maids and gardeners for the people stationed there. Imagine enlisted personnel with a maid and gardener! This was a first for them.

We had a full-time maid who cooked and cleaned and provided day care because my mother worked as a bookkeeper for the NCO club. My mother was slightly paranoid and, whenever she couldn't find a small piece of jewelry she used to call the maid a "sneakthief."

I'm not sure if Betty-san was a sneakthief or not but we were forced to let her got when my mother caught my father taking pictures (without film) of Betty-san topless! I was just old enough to have a glimmering of understanding of what was involved in that little escapade.

WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION IS IN

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been nearly four months since my last post. Jesus, on how many levels can a nice Jewish boy like myself blaspheme!

I continue to lurk and occasionally post on several different crossword blogs, particularly on Rex Parker's, if and when the spirit moves me, mixing pieces of my life when they intersect with things that are related to the puzzle at hand. I couldn' t resist when Minot North Dakota reared its head one day last week and a Commenter posted that his grandfather was a rabbi in that community in the 1910s and he couldn't imagine a Jewish enclave in that part of the world.

Well, it just so happens that I have first hand knowledge on that subject as that was where my family was stationed after we returned to the United States after spending five years in Japan as part of the US Occupation Forces. My father was a career military man in the Air Force and we were one of the first families to accompany a serviceman to the Orient in the 1950s.

My father went over first and that left my mother, a 27 year old mother of three sons, ages 7 (me), 5 and 2 to get our household goods packed up, shipped to Japan, and to drive from Dover Delaware to Seattle Washington to meet the USS Gaffey, a refurbished troop ship, and sail away with her three children to meet her husband in Yokohama Japan. All this in the pre-Interstate days in a 1952 Mercury. Not bad for a country girl from Easton Maryland!

After our tour of duty ended in 1958, the emphasis in the world had shifted from containing the Japanese to confronting the Russians. Since my father's area of expertise was aircraft maintenance, sending him to where the airplanes were made a lot of sense. Minot (the natives pronounced it MY-nut) Air Force Base was part of the nuclear umbrella that protected the United States. My family had spent the majority of our time on the East Coast which meant we were surrounded by Jews. We believed that being in the Upper Midwest would leave us cut-off from our people.

We were right and wrong. The Jewish community was sparse, true, but, we found out, close-knit. We joined Temple Beth Israel in nearby Eastwood Park and found people who were just like us - far from home and disconnected. The natives were sympathetic to our plight and friendly.

This post was prompted by a random comment posted on RexParker's blog that sparked a memory.

Go figure.

RELAPSE CITY REDUX

Well, it continues

My health continues to deteriorate. Over the last several weeks, I have lost the ability to concentrate on typing and my confusion continues to grow. My fingers are not cooperating.

The funny thing is that my ability to do crossword puzzles remain. I am extremely proud of the fact that I am able to solve the Friday and Saturday NY Times crossword every week and have done so for a while. Anyone who knows the crossworld knows what an accomplishment this is. I don't say this to boast about my abilities as a solver but to demonsterate that I haven't lost my ability of mind, just my ability to express myself about the puzzles.

I am an isolated individual. I have trouble walking and talking. And the ability to communicate about the NY Times puzzle, particularly through Rex Parker's blog, is important to me. Aside from my wife and two children, this is the only place where I can communicate. And now I have lost that. It has taken me a little over an hour to get this far along in this post and I am exhausted.

I stopped timing myself a long time ago, more because I enjoy the process of doing the puzzles than being able to gloat over my time. Be assured that I don't begrudge Orange or the others for their speed - I just don't share their interest. I enjoy the puzzles My Way, the same way they do. However when it occurred to me that I was never going to be a serious competitor to Tyler Hinman, I lost interest in my times.

When I was in college, I came to that same general conclusion about my abilities as a pool player and quit the game. Just quit. Number 1 or nothing! That was very short sighted of me. I don't intend to quit doing puzzles because of lack of speed.

I'm rambling so I'll bring this post to a close. Goodbye for now. More later.

FAREWELL LINDA G

To the crossworld, Linda G wrote about the New York Times crossword puzzle every day in her blog Madness ... Crossword and Otherwise and, incidentally, about her family and her job. Or was it the other way around. We learned this week that she will no longer be able to continue her blog. She had gone into hiatus earlier this year and came back just a little shaky because job and family were more important to her than writing about crossword puzzles but that she would try to keep all three balls in the air at once. She apparantly lost that battle.

She used a photo of Ava Gardner as her avatar and, since I never met her, that is how I pictured her. A celebrity photo has never been put to better use.

I solve the Times puzzle every night before I go to bed and my first stop to check my answers was her blog. She was not one of those Super Solvers who blew through the puzzle in less than 5 minutes. As a matter of fact, I have no idea how long it took her to complete the puzzle - she never said. I learned the expression " I declare this puzzle solved" when she reached the end of the line and could not finish. This didn't happen often but enough to humanize her. I shamelessly appropriated the expression for myself .

I was introduced to some other blogs through her site, most particularly Robert Loy's Green Genius where he wrote about his family and country music, Anna Southward's A View from my Window where she presented her poetry and graphics (N.B.: A Crossword Pantheon Moment this blog) and Wendy's I estivate, therefore I am a blog about the music of the Boomer Generation and my youth.

So Goodbye Linda. I hardly knew ye. And every time I see Ava Gardner, I will think fondly of you.

RELAPSE CITY

When I was a senior in high school, we were called upon to memorize 10 lines of poetry. Being something of a wiseass, I decided to do The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe which was considerably longer than 10 lines. When it was my turn to recite, I accomplished the feat with just a couple of stumbles. Most of the poem has stayed with me to this day. Oh, I can't recite all eighteen or so verses, but, if prompted, I can rattle off 15 or 20 lines.

All this is apropos of one of the quirks of my Multiple Sclerosis. I say My Multiple Sclerosis because one of the real oddities of this disease is the nature of its symptoms. MS is a disease of brain lesions and how one is affected depends on just where on the brain the lesions are located. In my case, the left side of my brain has the lesions and I have generalized weakness on my right side and my speech center is affected.

I could very well be paralyzed or blind so, all things being equal, I got off lucky.

When I was first diagnosed, I had a real problem with talking and maintaining my balance. I was fond of saying I had to relearn how to walk and talk and crawl on my belly like a reptile. One of the first things that dawned on me was that reciting poetry and talking were two entirely different processes. I'm not sure why that occurred to me but it did. Perhaps you are aware that certain singers, such as Mel Tillis, stutter but have no problem singing because singing and reciting poetry are right brain processess and speaking is a left brain process.

I figured out that I could talk with a minimum of trouble by memorizing what I wanted to say, then saying it. That is a very exhausting enterprise but, to some extent, it works at least in the short run.

All of the above leads me to this: I had a relapse a couple of weeks ago and had to be hospitalized for a few days. My doctor stablilized me and I was released, on crutches and stuttering up a storm. I am an outpatient and am taking physical therapy for my balance and speech therapy for my speaking. When the brain lesions "heal" I will be back to "normal," whatever that is.

Anyway, I missed about a week of doing crossword puzzles but my doctor - who is also a fan of puzzles - tells me that returning to them is good therapy. So I am back.

A CROSSWORLD PANTHEON MOMENT

We in the crossworld are Word people. We like the look of them, the feel of them, the way they roll off our tongues. They are old friends.

Certain words tend to re-occur frequently in puzzles and are known to the community of solvers as "crosswordese." They are usually 3 to 5 letters long and have more vowels than consonants which are helpful to those who actually construct puzzles.

Anna Southward has constructed a graphic that deliciously displays these words in a beautiful variation of a traditional crossword puzzle grid. Some of these like ABIE, ESAI, ENO and EERO are proper names unfamiliar to most people. And others like ASIA, EEL and TIARA are familiar to everyone.

Depending on how many of them show up in an individual puzzle, what they all have in common is the way they bring a fleeting smile or, perhaps, a grimace to the faces of those among us who work a lot of puzzles.

Anna's website is called "The View From My Window" and features not only graphics but poetry that illustrate the graphics. There is something about the interplay between the two, particularly in a haunted pair entitled "LIPS."

It is a wonderful place to visit and I have done so many times. She describes her site as "random musings in words, pictures, and color. Just for fun." I am hoping the site will be updated soon as I am looking forward to seeing which direction her work is going to take.

Here is the link for you to visit for yourself. Enjoy

CROSSWORDS REVISITED

Well, I am part of a community now. I am a regular contributor to Rex Parker's blog on the subject of crossword puzzles . As a result, the number of rules that I had no longer exist.

Granted, I still use my trusty Cross pen. But the varying difficulty of the puzzles throughout the week obviate the need for some of the other rules. I am not as strict as I once was on where I start. The difficulty of the Friday and Saturday puzzles forced me to try to find a toehold anyplace within the body of the puzzle. I still use my trusty Cross pen for Sundays when I still do it in the newspaper.

Tradition, don't you know.

I like the idea of being able to discuss puzzles with others. We are all language mavens to some extent or another. I like being part of this community which is mostly about language itself and reading the comments of other solvers is truly a wonderful thing.

The tangents we go off on!

During this past week there was a discussion on the need for a new word to describe what I like to call meta-cluing, that is a clue that points to the language of the clue itself rather than what the clue describes. Recently we had a clue which was BIT OF COCOA? and the answer was SILENT A, which is an example of this kind of cluing.

So, come on over if you have an urge to participate - or just lurk around the edges - of a spirited discussion of our native tongue!