It’s been a challenging six months since I last published a Quarantine Letter. As you may remember, I had COVID for a few weeks in February and I was thankful to be “discharged” to resume my regular daily life. Mid-April I returned to Kingston determined to refresh my home by painting my walls in pale colours and decorating with white-framed, bright-coloured prints of photos I had taken, mostly in Barbados.
Heretofore, I was accustomed to painting a large room in a day: shuffling furniture, removing artwork, masking, spackling, sanding, cutting in, making sweeping Ms and Ws with heavily laden rollers, and cleaning up. It didn’t quite work out that way this spring. After six days I had only completed the last half-wall of one room and now, five months onward, I haven’t tackled any further painting projects.
I’ve taken several trips to home-decor shops for pillows, rugs, vases, and the aforementioned frames. And, holding to my long-time rule—one-in and one-out—I’ve made as many trips to thrift shops to drop off my older decor items; I like my home spare, tidy, and clean. These excursions have been marked with resting periods in the mall and/or in the car. I exhausted quickly with minimal output and was easily shortened of breath and dimmed of memory. I curtailed my walks along the waterfront, limited my work-time in the garden, and made modest easy-to-prepare (phone calls are easy, right?) meals.
I made time for much-loved Kingston friends and fed my addiction to Northern European who-dun-its and geo-political series on NetFlix. [If you’re keeping a list: Borgen; Borgen: Power & Glory; Occupied; Shetland; and DeadWind.] The tiredness and breathlessness I could deal with by cutting back my activities. Having dealt with Fibromyalgia since the early nineties, I was an old hand at that. What I truly struggled with was my sketchy memory and poor focus; watching my mother be subsumed with Alzheimer’s had frightened me then and I wondered what was happening to me now. Surely, at only 71, this wasn’t just a question of aging. What was I going to do now? What was working for other people?
Back in 1995, with the stimulus of a report on aging and memory from Baycrest Hospital (Toronto) and the suggestion and encouragement of a tenant, Dominic, who had quickly understood my determination for a reward-based, rapid-fire brain nudge, I began an adventure with Tetris. My home rang out frequently with a triumphant “Yes!” as I increased my scores and re-jigged my sluggish brain. By 1998, I had regained sufficient brainpower to be back teaching full time, which I enjoyed for another dozen years.
Here was I, a further twelve years onward, struggling with the same ailments now, although likely under a different name: Long COVID. I did not believe that Tetris would stimulate me this time. Emerging out of the Fibro-Fog two decades ago, I was grateful for whatever it took to bring me there. This year, I tried out several online games: Wordle, Dordle, and Quordle to begin with. They were fun but it felt to me that they were based on randomness with only a little skill thrown in, as was my remembrance of Tetris. A long-time New York Times subscriber, I started working through their catalog of games, beyond Wordle. I enjoyed Letter Boxed, Tiles, Vertex, and The Mini (Crossword). But, not one of them felt like they were firing my sleepy neurons. I needed something stronger!
Enter: Spelling Bee.
At 3:00 AM daily, the Times uploads a fresh game of seven letters, a central one that must be in every word you create, and circling it, an additional six letters, which you can use to create words on their list, including—when you use all seven letters—a Pangram (sometimes several), and a multitude of other words of at least four letters (but not curse words). No clues are given, such as in crosswords, but their Hints page will list how many words there are that begin with each set of two letters. So, for instance, today there are three words beginning with BI, and twelve with WI. In addition, the site will tell you how many four-letter words there are beginning with the letter B, how many with five letters and so on. The six letters surrounding the central one can be shuffled, which helps those of us skilled at pattern recognition. Words the site deems are incorrect are identified as Not In Word List.
To acknowledge one’s progress towards Queen Bee, i.e., when you identify ALL the words that are possible, the site shows nine stages from Beginner, through Nice, all the way to Genius. Owing to the complexity of the letter combinations, each day’s numbers are different. Tougher days usually have lower numerical values, even for Genius. Each week, the site reports which day was the toughest and the percentage of people who achieved Genius status at least once during the week (in the 40+% range).
My sense of its effectiveness? I wouldn’t say Amazing (a category) but perhaps Great (another one). My memory has improved, albeit with better data entered into my smartphone, and my ability to focus is stronger.
The exhaustion, tendency to overheat, breathlessness, gut issues, and insomnia still cramp my days and nights. Some days I hit Genius level well before 7 AM. If insomnia is at its most insistent, there have been nights where I achieved Genius just before 3 AM, when the day’s selection is about to change.
Perhaps the most compelling feature of Spelling Bee isn’t any of those labels or shouted/almost-hissed “Yeses”, but my renewed sense of agency and locus of control.
My earliest memories of my having a sense of agency and choice brings me back to being about four-years-old in our home near the river with a window seat, under a west-facing window, with a view of the water. On my lap is a small cat, named Minou; in one hand a book and in the other an apple.
Mum had been a teacher for several years and found her eldest daughter—moi—an eager and ready learner, especially for the joy of reading. I devoured the books in the small English section of the library; it wasn’t a large collection as the closest town was a francophone enclave: Trois Rivières, Quebec. Try as he might my father had been unable to secure a permanent position locally. His Dutch accent was very strong in English, and even more so in French. Earlier in life he had learned German along with a smattering of Hungarian, but none of those languages were of any use in a blue-collar, predominantly French-speaking town. So, instead of working in Trois Rivières, he commuted to Montreal every Monday morning, staying in a rooming house overnight until Friday evening when he would catch the bus back to Trois Rivières.
Our mother, trying her best to juggle her new managerial position at work and home- and child-care (the latter two not her forte) on her own, quickly lost her sense of humour and weekdays were a hard slog for all of us. Not surprisingly, I retreated even more frequently to the magical worlds created in those wondrous pages. I became a very serious little girl.
To the rescue came our Dutch grandparents, Oma and Opa. He, of the extraordinary skill of whittling and carpentry, created fences, garden boxes, swing sets, doll houses, bird houses, and miniatures of all sorts of small animals and birds. She made beds with sharp corners, ironed shirts with sharp edges, and crafted meals made sharply at 6:00, both AM and PM. They lived with us for six months until Papa finally found a decent job—we were buying a farm and he would become a farmer!
Upon Papa’s return to Trois Rivières, we moved temporarily into a tiny cottage—named Fly Home by Libby and me—until we could begin to work on the farm. With his parents now returned to Holland, he could reestablish himself as the principal parent and he was quite taken aback at how very serious his eldest had become. His belief was that a sense of humour would take you through the darkest hours, the worst times, and the toughest relationships. He began to teach me to tell jokes in both Dutch and English, most of them quite corny. His favourite one tells the story about a farmer who had an obstinate mule and hires a trainer to “make him behave.” The first thing the trainer does is to take a 2 x 4 out of his truck and whack the mule over the head. “Wait, wait, what are you doing?” yells the farmer. The trainer replied, “First, y’a gotta get their attention!” We were still telling each other that story 60 years later. It was a lesson I took into the classroom years ago, substituting a cartoon or a story for the 2 x 4.
My father’s favourite actress was Audrey Hepburn, who said: “I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.”
I would argue that it is the words we use that tickle our funny bones, build our lives, bridge our connectedness to others, and get us through tough times. Building words in Spelling Bee is helping me now but it’s my mum’s teaching me to read and my dad’s teaching me to play with words that made it possible to play the game and rewire the firing of neurons.
Love this one -- especially your take on words and getting through tough times.
As ever so enjoy your writings