In my adult life, I’ve mostly followed, without examination, the rule that four-letter words were the “bad” ones and should be eschewed. But I’ve begun to realize that five-letter words, at least when you’re making mini crosswords, can be villains too. A year or so ago, I started constructing 5X5 crosswords for a friend who was recovering from heart surgery and, I presumed, needed entertainment as she convalesced. I solved the Wordle and used that word as the anchor each day. I have a couple of cruciverbalist apps that suggest five-letter candidates to fill gaps. But lately I’ve found myself wallowing in unacceptable suggestions, ones that would fail the so-called breakfast test of crossword construction, words or names people can’t face before their first cup of coffee. For example: Adolf, bimbo, boner, bowel, dildo, enema, farts, feces, gonad, G-spot, hymen, kegel, labia, mucus, Nazis, ozena (disease of the nose in which the bony ridges and mucous membranes waste away), pe...
Getting old. Not since my teens have I felt such angst. At my age, though, I suppose it’s called agita. And whereas people care about adolescent angst and write novels exploring it, old-age agita is a bore for everyone, including the sufferer. There’s the stress of doctor’s appointments and tests, which fill your calendar, as workdays and social events once did, and any of them may foretell the cause of your death. There’s the lost word or name that signals dementia. There’s the anguish over friends who have died and the sorely missed opportunities to be with them. There’s the horrifying knowledge that if you compliment a baby or dog on the street, the owner of that baby or dog receives your words with dread, fearing you may prolong the encounter. There’s the even more horrifying sense that when you talk to your children, whom you love beyond measure and desperately want to connect with, they subtly steel themselves for your inevitably irrelevant or trite or tedious or, worse, ove...
For the past 10 days, I’ve awakened to my own mad mutterings of a number—“one hundred twenty-five thousand”—repeated over and over. And all night long, that number has intruded in my dreams, and all day long, formed the backdrop to errands, walks, conversations. That’s a roundup of the figure on a bill that dropped into my MyChart account late last month for an emergency ablation for palpitations in August: “Amount Due on 11/28/21: $124,323.06.” When I saw the bill, I repalpitated on the spot. Trouble is, the billing company is a separate entity from the Manhattan emergency room where I was treated, and further, the number on the bill is for a call center, which is itself separate from the billing company, which is in Boston, so there was no one I could actually talk to about the bill. When I made a second call to the call center to see if my inquiry could be expedited because I was afraid the trauma of owing that sum was going to send me back into a-fib, and that I would be afrai...
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