Alright, so today I decided to tackle the New York Times crossword. Usually, it’s a nice little routine, gets the brain going, you know? Sometimes I breeze through it, other times it puts up a real fight. Today though? Today was something else entirely.
I started off pretty okay. Got the NW corner filled in without too much trouble. Felt good, like maybe this was going to be one of the easier ones. Cruising along, picking off clues here and there. Then I hit it.
The Wall
It wasn’t even one of the super long answers or some obscure trivia. Nope. It was a simple, five-letter word. The clue was something like ‘Common garden tool’. Five letters. R _ K E _. Come on! My mind just went completely blank. Total freeze.
I went through the possibilities:
- SHOVEL? Too long.
- SPADE? Too short, wrong letters.
- HOE? Too short.
- TROWEL? Too long.
I could see the ‘R’, the ‘K’, the ‘E’. What fits? I must have stared at that little section for a solid fifteen minutes. Got up, made some coffee, came back. Still nothing. It felt ridiculous. A garden tool! How could I not get this?
I started thinking maybe the crossers were wrong, but I double-checked them, and they seemed solid. Was it some weird brand name? Some archaic tool nobody uses anymore? My brain was just spinning its wheels, getting nowhere fast. It was genuinely unbelievable how stuck I was on this.
The Breakthrough (or Facepalm)
Finally, I just threw my hands up and decided to look at the crossing downs again, really carefully. One of them was ‘Take ___, cowboy!’ and the answer was clearly RIDE. Okay, so the second letter had to be ‘I’. R I K E _ ? Still blank. Wait. RIDE… RAKE? RAKE! Like, a leaf rake! R-A-K-E.
Oh. My. God. It wasn’t R _ K E _. It was R A K E _. The crossing answer wasn’t RIDE, it was something else entirely that gave me the ‘A’, I must have misread the clue or had a typo earlier that I corrected without realizing it changed that letter. The sheer, simple answer was RAKE. All that time. For RAKE.
I felt like the biggest dummy. After that? The rest of the puzzle practically filled itself in. It was like that one mental block jammed up the whole works. Once it was cleared, everything flowed again.
Finished the whole thing maybe ten minutes later. But man, that struggle over ‘RAKE’ is gonna stick with me. Just goes to show, sometimes the most unbelievable part of the crossword isn’t the clever wordplay or the tough trivia, but how your own brain can just completely short-circuit on the simplest things. Wild.
