Brain Trust

Last Friday afternoon, in the lobby of a Marriott in downtown Stamford, Conn., attendees of the 47th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the annual confab of word nerds hosted by The Times’s puzzle editor, Will Shortz, joyously convened. Veteran puzzlers greeted old friends with the excitement of a homecoming. First-timers smiled nervously, eyeing others’ name tags in hopes of catching a glimpse of a favorite crossword constructor. Some broke off into groups to chat or work on one of the many crosswords stacked on the welcome table. “Electric!” I scrawled in my notebook, smiling eagerly at the scene despite my efforts to be a dispassionate observer.

Before last weekend, I thought of myself as a crossword person, insofar as I do the Times puzzle regularly and with some speed. I had, since seeing the 2006 documentary “Wordplay,” dreamed of attending the tournament, but only idly, sometimes musing to my one crossword friend about how it might be fun to spend an entire weekend doing puzzles. I had no idea what an amateur I was. At the tournament I encountered puzzlers who can finish a Saturday puzzle in three minutes. I met a fan who can, when presented with a constructor’s name, recall with precision just how many crosswords that person has had published in The Times. I witnessed a die-hard dressed as a cruciverbalist Phantom of the Opera, replete with grid-printed cape and mask and a rose whose stem was a giant pencil.

“There are no casual puzzle people here,” I wrote in my notebook after the late-night wine-and-cheese reception where I sipped pinot grigio and listened to two constructors try to articulate the ecstasy they feel when, while painstakingly crafting a crossword, they realize the grid is actually going to come together, that they’re going to be able to complete an elegant puzzle.

On Saturday, I did six timed puzzles with the competitors, only one of which I didn’t manage to complete in the 30 minutes allotted, and I felt some measure of pride that I wasn’t totally out of my league. But like a majority of the nearly 1,000 people at the tournament who had no hope of making it to the final round (grand prize: $7,500) my times were beside the point. The point was the community, the shared love and language participants possessed. In the hotel elevator after the first puzzle session, strangers became immediate comrades in arms as they commiserated over the clues they didn’t get: “Wait, how is POT a three-letter word for ‘Cash on hand’?” The puzzles they’d all just completed were enough of a connection to start a conversation, to linger and chat when they got to their floor, then make plans to get lunch together.

This kind of fast intimacy is nearly impossible in the real world. If we take the time to even acknowledge a stranger in an elevator, we’re apt to nod, smile politely, look down at our phones: I see you, I recognize your humanity, but I have no desire to take this liaison any further. At a conference of enthusiasts, this impulse to withdraw is inverted. You’re there because you want to connect, because you’ve been doing puzzles alone in your kitchen for the past year and this is your one chance to geek out with others who share your niche interest. I spend most of my time avoiding eye contact with strangers; at a summit of the devoted, everyone is wide open, gazes get met eagerly. Here we are, all of us with this one passion in common, so we have common ground on which to establish a warm and satisfying chat, if not a lasting friendship.

On my way home from the conference, I stopped in to see my old friend Peter, whom I’ve known since college. As much as I’d marveled at how easy it was to bond with strangers over crosswords at the tournament, it was a relief to be around someone who really knew me, to relax into the easy flow of our shared history. Meeting new people is exciting, but it’s also exhausting. What would be ideal, I thought, was if Peter were into crosswords — then I could have the excitement of this shared interest within a rich, established relationship. That’s unlikely to materialize though; he’s shown no interest.