Sudoku

After stumbling upon and binging the excellent - and for some (not me), nap-inducing - Cracking the Cryptic channel on YouTube, I slid into the habit of solving Sudoku puzzles in the evening. I use the Classic Sudoku! app, and the exercises gradually increased in difficulty (stars) as I completed them and unlocked tougher constructions.

I don’t always succeed at the tougher puzzles, but I can tell that my instincts have improved since I started, and I have started to recognize certain patterns to look out for. More importantly, my little puzzle time has a calming effect, which helps me to wind down without being overstimulated at the tail end of a long day.

Sudoku reminds me of my uncle.

Scaling value

In 2004, I traveled to Kentucky for my grandmother’s funeral, and my aunt and uncle were kind enough to put me up for a few nights. My uncle had retired as a farmer, and when he wasn’t busy cultivating prize-winning flowers for the county fair, his nose was often buried in a Sudoku puzzle book.

While he was never a big talker, my uncle gleefully showed me a clever way to stretch the value of his Sudoku book: by solving the puzzles in a separate graph paper notebook. He would draw the boxes and rewrite the starting state of a puzzle in black pen, and then proceed to work on solving it with a mechanical pencil.

He had extended the life of that book far beyond the price he paid for it, and could solve the puzzles as many times as he wanted - the book had over 100 pages, and he’d gone through them all several times. His notebook was starting to fill up with solved puzzles.

This tidbit of information could tell you a fair amount about my kin and their values. My uncle was born in the midst of the Great Depression years, and by the time he had taken up farming tobacco, he’d internalized many ways to stretch a dollar much further than it should reasonably go.

In memoriam

My uncle passed about a year ago. I don’t believe he knew how much our short time together years ago had influenced and challenged the way I thought about the world. How important it is to exercise our minds, and to conserve what we can, treating even something as trivial as a puzzle book with respect.