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When I was in my mid-twenties, I discovered the joys of crossword puzzles. Over the course of my life I had solved an occasional puzzle, but I never took the pastime seriously. But then one day I came across a puzzle while reading the New York Times.

There is a certain mystique about the puzzles that appear in that paper. Like their cousins in the London Times, they are slightly intimidating, especially so to the beginner. That morning, I scanned the clues to the puzzle and immediately saw that I knew one or two of the missing words. I picked up a pencil and dove in.

One hour later, frustrated, I put the paper down. I had completed only about two thirds of the puzzle and was feeling slightly stupid. The next day, I found the solution to the piece I had attempted and filled in my blank squares. More than a few of the missing words were ones that were so simple, so obvious, that I should have remembered them at the time! I made a mental note of the words that were new to me and later looked for them in a dictionary. I followed this procedure every day for the next few weeks.

My vocabulary grew daily. I quickly learned the two basic secrets of successful puzzle solving.....Patience and persistence. A few months later, I was working on a puzzle and had gotten it down to only a few missing letters. This time I refused to give up. I put the puzzle down for a minute, sat back and allowed my mind to clear a bit. and picked the paper back up and gazed at the blank squares. A minute or so later, the words came to me. "Gotcha!," I said out loud in triumph. I had completed my first Times puzzle!

There is nothing quite like the feeling of success and the sense of satisfaction that comes with accomplishment. Crossword puzzles can provide this on a daily basis. There are puzzles available for just about everyone, from small children to seniors. They come in all shapes and sizes. Kids can find simple, ten word puzzles in activity books and in the "Just for Kids" section of the Sunday comics page. Crossword books and magazines contain puzzles of all levels of difficulty, from large-squared easy ones, to "diagramless" puzzles with no black squares (or no squares at all), to the very difficult ones constructed by and for the expert solvers.

Probably the best way to get started in this wonderful pastime is to look for the puzzles in the local daily newspapers. Sometimes they appear with other types of puzzles on the comic strip page and are usually fairly easy to complete. Doing

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