“What did you get it in?”

This is how all conversations with my dad began. Sometimes, it was the extent of them. 

The “it” was our daily score in Wordle. Like so many families, we began playing the simple New York Times game in winter 2021 as a pandemic pastime. But soon, it was overtaking our lives. Phone calls, text threads, even major milestones became consumed by score swaps. An hour after I gave birth to my daughter, Dad was demanding my Wordle time; his new grandchild’s height and weight could wait. 

Our ritual became so sacred that we never broke our streak, playing for over four years without missing a day’s game until his death earlier this year. The shared fixation caught us both by surprise. Our lives were demarcated by borders, diplomas, and ideologies. As a kid, I’d eat meat on Fridays during Lent to offend his staunch Catholic sensibilities. As an adult, I refused to get married in a church. 

We also had a very different grasp of language. As a former editor and current librarian, I’ve built my professional life around the English language. Dad had no knowledge of it when he came to the United States from Italy circa 1960. He was all of eight years old when he was dumped in his first American classroom and expected to shift from a language with a phonetic alphabet to one with more exceptions than rules, in which words that look as similar as “rough,” “bough,” and “through” sound oceans apart. And he dealt with all this at a time when ESL classrooms were essentially nonexistent. 

Fast forward 50 years, faced with chemo and with a weakening body, Dad was solving word puzzles for fun. He even advanced to 64ordle, a game in which the player has to uncover 64 words in 70 guesses. It’s a task as masochistic as it sounds, and one I had little patience for. But Dad was dogged. When it hurt too much to talk about his diagnosis — when it hurt too much to talk about anything else — we had our script, and we had our scores. A jumble of letters to fill the silence. When he stopped sending his stats, I knew his death was imminent. 

I’m keeping our streak alive, and with it, his memory. Each morning when I’m filling in those five-letter tiles, I’m working out my heartache and grief. Whether I fumble to find the right vowel or solve the puzzle in three shots, I miss the person who would care most about these trivial details. The man who’d beat me at uncovering a word as simple as “buyer” or as esoteric as “myrrh” time and time again. 

My dad’s Wordle obsession reflected all his distinctive, sometimes maddening qualities. His tendency to harp on minutia, his perseverance in the face of an unknown word, and most of all, his ability to embrace, if sometimes quizzically, his verbose daughter.