Riddle Me This

Silence had reigned for a while.  For a moment, I wondered if I’d made things too difficult this time.

Then, the messages began popping up on my phone.

“Shred, lasso, trap,” one mused over the puzzle I’d left. “Terrapin?”

I checked, the clues did indeed translate to “tear, rope, pin.”

“CORRECT!”

Another came in, deducing that “lose it, quick text” actually meant “snap, ping.” And another, turning an especially convoluted wordplay into “teenage mutant ninjas.” Before long, most of the “Turtles” category had been uncovered.

Another Riddle Night was under way.

It’s probably my most curious hobby. Lots of people read. Plenty of people act with a theatre group, or play tabletop games, or fool around with a musical instrument. But the number of folks who create riddles for a group of friends to solve … well, I won’t say it approaches zero, but it is clearly a specialty entertainment.

I inherited the title of the Riddlemaster a while ago. Like many things, it started with a Facebook group, in this case centered around the humorous and thoughtful “Callahan’s Place” stories of the writer Spider Robinson. The tavern where Robinson’s science fiction stories were set had compassion, revelry, and near-constant puns – all things we could readily duplicate in a virtual environment.

But one of the more occasional features of the stories was Riddle Night, where one of the patrons would pick an unspoken theme and then write several related riddles on the board. Each successful guess scored a point; the winner had his or her drink tab cleared and got to be Riddlemaster next time if they chose.

We obviously couldn’t do anything about the drink tab in an online “saloon.” But the rest, with some effort, was doable. We added some more time (most of a weekend rather than just one night) and the caveat that if the winner didn’t feel up to the challenge of next week’s riddles, they could “pass the microphone” back to the default Riddlemaster – which, after the first few months, became me – and we were off.

OK, we were clearly off. But a little insanity never hurts for something like this.

By now, the topics have been myriad. Poker hands. Middle-earth. Heroes and villains. If you name it, we can riddle it – and maybe even crack it.

It takes a lot of mental effort, both to forge the riddles and to solve them. But it’s worth every drop of cranial sweat. In many ways, it uses the same parts of the brain that a good pun does, but in slightly different ways.

It forces you to look at meanings and see whether there’s something you hadn’t considered.

It makes you look for patterns and connections, veering away from the unproductive ones and zeroing in when the evidence becomes clear.

At times, it encourages you to work together – someone else’s wrong guess may have the key to your own solution.

In short, it makes you think, be aware, and pay attention to others.

That’s never a bad thing. Especially these days.

We don’t spend a lot of time trying to understand any more. Maybe that too is a specialty interest. It’s always easier to mobilize the troops and concentrate the folks who think just like you, to reinforce old habits and strengthen existing beliefs, than it is to try to see where someone else is coming from. It’s harder to feel where another person hurts – or harder still, to see where you’ve hurt someone else yourself – and reach out to help them out.

Harder. But essential. For all of us.

How do we get there? That’s a riddle indeed. But one well worth the solving.

And like the turtle riddles, the first step is to come out of your shell and try.

Hands of Hope

There’s an exhaustion that threatens to border on despair. I think a lot of us are there now. I know I am.

I’m tired of this.

What else can you be when you see the same situations play themselves out over and over again? New shooters. New victims. New settings, from Colorado Springs to San Bernardino. And exactly the same results.

I’m tired of our communities becoming a roll call of blood.

I’m tied of the wait to learn a killer’s name, tired of the endless gabble and chatter and theorizing when it’s revealed.

I’m tired of the argument that’s become ritual, as we raise the points we know so well. Guns. Mental illness. Terrorism. Rights. Needs. Like a tae kwon do training pattern, we pose and shake the skies, only to end up right back where we started.

To have this happen in a sacred season seems a grim joke. And yet it’s the time we need the reminder more than ever.

Now, most of all, we have to have hope.

It sounds kind of insubstantial, doesn’t it? Of all the virtues that get celebrated coming into Christmas, hope may be the most misunderstood. It doesn’t get the full spotlight that basks over love. It’s not directly celebrated in carol after carol like peace or joy. When it comes up in the season at all, it’s a quick mention, almost glancing:

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoicing …

Respite in the midst of exhaustion. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

But how?

Let me make one thing clear. This is not optimism. A simple conviction that “Hey, everything’s going to be OK” will burn out fast in the face of everything besieging it. Hope has more than good feelings behind it. Hope is putting your sweat where your dreams are.

Hope is the soldier of World War II who can’t see the end of the conflict, but throws himself into it, convinced that his one life can still make a difference.

Hope is the civil rights worker of the 1950s, for whom the vision of freedom seems impossibly far away, who nonetheless keeps marching and speaking and battling to make it happen a little sooner.

Hope is what keeps the teacher at a classroom. The policeman on a beat. It’s what fuels the best of marriages, the kind that didn’t stop all their energy on the altar but kept pouring it into every passing minute and hour and day.

Hope means work. To paraphrase a favorite writer, once you say that problems can be solved, that better is possible, you have to get off your duff and do something.

That’s what can transform a “weary world.”

Despair is easy. You just sit back, let the world happen, and say “told you so.” Hope can wear you out to the point where it almost breaks you. But it’s also the only thing that gives any of us a fighting chance.

This last year has been a quest for hope in our house. Ever since my wife Heather was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, we’ve had a lot to do. There have been medicines to try, work schedules to balance, a life to somehow keep going in the midst of everything. And it’s tempting to just sit down and shout at the heavens “I CAN’T DO IT!”

Sometimes we do. Everyone needs to retreat sometimes. But eventually we keep going. We have to. Or it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hope asks a lot. But it’s the only way to move forward. It’s the only way to move at all.

Are we ready to try it?

It means more than hand-wringing and pained pronouncements. It requires more than a hashtag and a Facebook post. If we’re going to break the cycle of death, we have to be ready to fix our eyes on a goal and shoulder our piece of the work. It may not be monumental. It may seem hopelessly insignificant. But drops become a flood. And a flood can change landscapes.

Will we? Are we ready at last to take up the burden of hope?

I’m tired of what we’ve got.

Let’s wake our world.

How the Worst was Won

Thank you, Forbes. It’s always fun to start the day by being told your job stinks.

For those who missed it, Forbes just put out its annual list of the worst jobs in America. You know the sort I mean: the jobs with either low pay, or high stress, or no future, or a work environment that goes beyond the challenging.

Jobs like the infantry, where people, you know, shoot at you from time to time.

Or working on an oil rig, where the hours are long and family often distant.

But the job that rated the worst of all – below the chancy life of an actor, the injury risk of a lumberjack or a roofer, or the downsizings of the post office – was newspaper reporter.

Really?

Seriously?

There must be some mistake. I mean, sure, the pay is nothing to write home about. Sure, there’s enough long hours and deadline pressure to make coffee a viable tax write-off. And yeah, a lot of papers have been closing down, laying off, or thinning out. But still, that’s no reason to ….

Hmmm.

I hate to admit it, but they may have a point.

From a coldly clinical point of view, this is not the line of work that every parent dreams their child will someday pursue. Doctor? Sure. Lawyer? Why not? Teacher? Of course. Ink-stained wretch? Keep the room furnished, they may be moving back into it soon.

It’s folly. It’s absurd. It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous.

And I wouldn’t do anything else in the world.

I’ve wanted to be a reporter since the eighth grade, ever since the day in Ms. Shopland’s Spanish class where I couldn’t find the word “author” in my glossary for an exercise, but could find “journalist.” And despite every pothole I’ve mentioned above – and quite a few I haven’t! — I’ve never seriously regretted the choice.

To be a reporter is to be a storyteller, with the chance to meet intriguing people and relate interesting situations.

To be a reporter is to be a translator, making the complexities of a government, or a process, or a problem understandable to the average person.

To be a reporter is to be part of a heritage, measured out in crinkled headlines. It means being part of a profession so necessary, it’s cited in the Constitution; or being the first one to hear what’s happened; or seeing people at their best and worst, and remembering that they too are humans with a story worth telling.

It means diving into the pool of words, immersing yourself in the beauties of English. Even if it means arguing endlessly with an editor over using“cement” or “concrete” in a sentence.

And for me, it means doing what I love.

And really, that’s the important part, isn’t it?

We’ve all taken jobs because we had to. Life goes on, and it demands food on the table and a roof over the head. But to do what you love, to do a job you know you can do well and delight in the doing of – that is heaven and earth with a fistful of rainbow sprinkles on top.

It may even keep you alive and alert, as well as happy. There’s been more than one study out there showing that high job satisfaction is good for your body and good for your mind. And really, it’s just more fun to be around someone who enjoys what they do. Even if it’s not the glamorous or “practical” choice.

The science fiction author Spider Robinson once wrote about coming to a crossroads in his life: should he take the plunge and try to write full-time, or chuck it in and concentrate on his less enjoyable but more secure day job? His editor at the time, Ben Bova, gave it a week of thought before finally telling him “Spider, no one can pay you enough money to do what you don’t want to do.”

Words of wisdom.

Oh, the job that Spider walked away from?

Newspaper reporter.