Why Crosswords are Superior to Sudoku

1. Sudoku is too much like a jigsaw puzzle. It just requires plodding through. In the trickier ones, you may try this and then that, or you may try this, try this, try that, but there's never anything to discover, only something to be fittted together. Crosswords, on the other hand, require knowledge, epiphany, luck, stunted humor, and crawling in through the window backwards.

2. Sudoku is solitary. And if you pick up a stranger's half-finished puzzle from the pocket in front of you on an airplane, you learn nothing about her. Crosswords can be a communal experience, a true entrepreneurial democracy of puzzledom.

That is to say, I suck at TV shows and you don't understand homophone jokes, so together we can mash out a most of crossword in an hour or so, along with R-, at a table in a Kansas truck stop. We're scanning for the easy stuff as the waitress brings water and coffee and orange juice (it's always late on a Sunday morning; liquid rehabilitates), then dig into the hard clues over biscuits and gravy (M-), homemade chicken soup (R-) and omelet (me). The paper is folded so just the puzzle shows, and we pass it around, as if holding the actual thing will prompt brilliance. The comics take their turns on stage, for relief, naturally, then get shoved under the toast plate, where Billy, Dolly and the Not Me ghost get jam on their hands. There's buckets of wretched coffee, musings on the meaning of "Lat." in clues, and a cameo by Dear Abby. Then we retire to R-'s tiny apartment where we battle each other on an ancient game of Tetris, occasionally jumping up to fill in another entry on the crossword puzzle as the brain sublimates caffiene into knowledge. Usually we finish the puzzle but sometimes we don't, and sometimes, at the poker game later in the week, dear, greying, reclusive R- will slide the folded newspaper from behind some sheet music on his piano and show me, under the din of pennies and beer-can-holding boys, the last strokes of insight, the final letters, the right answer.

Why I Like My Neighborhood

1. People plant vegetables in their front yards, in the space between the sidewalk and the street, in little patches by the back gate, in pots and empty lots. Today I saw a cucumber vine slinking between the pre-fab shrubs in front of the new houses on C- St.

2. I get a neighborhood discount at the barber shop.

3. I can learn neighborhood news while sitting in the leopard-print barber chair that says "KRAKEN" on the footrest.

4. When we show movies or whatever's on GOL TV on the side of our house from our neighbor's front porch (using a projector M has borrowed from his work) and a couple of us drag porch chairs out to the alley to watch, no one complains. Passersby stop, watch a few minutes, chat, and then go on walking their dogs.

5. Coming or going, people are always happy on the quarter-mile walk between here and the river. I love seeing the energy in the steps of people on their way to the river, and the satisfied, sun-burnished faces of people on their way back.

6. There's more, but I'm going for a walk. I love the thought that even at 10:30 at night, people will be sitting with friends on their front porches.