Puzzles

Imagine being ten years old and meeting Merlin!  Becoming the sorcerer's apprentice, walking through the looking glass and discovering a whole other world where the rules were skewed in my favor if I only knew the secret words, the magical potions, the Way!

Of course journeys like this never begin the way you might expect.  If they did everyone would take them.  They only happen to those chosen ones, who notice something others seem to miss.  For me it was reading Edgar Allan Poe's, "The Gold-Bug."

In the course of one hot humid afternoon, curled up on the sun porch reading, I discovered secret codes!  Never again would I have to send in two box tops and twenty five cents for a secret decoder ring that only worked on one brand of cornflakes.

I delighted in cracking every code those Battle Creek executives could come up with in order to sell cereal to moms and kids across the country.  Then I branched out and began devising my own codes, even having a secret pen pal whose letters could talk about anything that crossed our fertile little minds without the fear that Dr. No (Aka: our parents) would stumble onto them. 

Life was exciting.  For just a short while I was powerful and invincible.  You couldn't put anything over on me!  That madness slowly slipped away, replaced by the sanguinity of a teenage girl trying to look sophisticated.

I still love puzzles: crosswords, jigsaws, riddles, small challenges to my mind that give me the impression, if not the reality, of being in control of my world.  And lately I have discovered a new challenge:  Transcribing handwritten stories from a mish mash of crossed out scribbles into neatly typed pages -- ten times more difficult than, but twice as exciting as, those cereal boxes!