It's a gray Sunday morning and I don't want to get up. As my body uncurls and unstiffens, I go downstairs caught in the lovely lethargy between being fully awake and asleep. I expected to find my wife stretching in preparation for what she calls her torture, which is her daily vigorous walk. Instead, she's in the living room sitting in the corner of a couch. Pen in hand she is oblivious to everything but the clues in The Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. With only one lamp lit the house is beautiful in a dim dawn-like light. The moment is too good to pass up.

"Can I be of assistance," I intone. It is the opening gambit of our ritual about the crossword puzzle, which is serious play for us. My wife does the puzzle every day, but Sunday is the penultimate challenge. Although an honest person, she makes a curious exception with the crossword puzzle. If and only if she's stuck will she ask me. I am my wife's sometimes consultant primarily on sports, sometimes on geography, occasionally on movies, political candidates and '50s Rock 'n' Roll.

I can answer most of the sports questions on the spot like the pro football clue she calls upstairs to me while I'm working on this article. However, after offering a clue which stumps me, she always adds, "Don't look it up," to which I reply, "I won't." This is where the plot thickens. At least in her mind I'm not allowed to look it up. Who's kidding whom? I latch onto some of those clues like catnip, no doubt with a lascivious grin on my face, as I go off to research the problem. Sometimes it is not simply a matter of looking it up. That's where the challenge and ultimately the satisfaction lie.

It's difficult puzzles that make it possible for my wife to look the other way while I research the answers. Baseball clues can be tough. For those I have a huge baseball encyclopedia which requires strength to lift and perseverance to go through. I have an all-purpose sports encyclopedia, which has yielded a few obscurities that make me smile years later. A geographical dictionary has been invaluable in finding the names of rivers, which might have otherwise been impossible to locate.

What is truly curious and makes our alliance, on the surface at least, most unlikely, is my spelling. I have sat staring in vain at the computer screen trying to understand why a word has a squiggly red line beneath it. You might think a college professor would know how to spell. While I can spell the technical terms in my field, more mundane words can pose a problem. It is only half in jest that I say, "What's the difference if it's one letter more or less than the allotted number in the puzzle?"

Recently I combed through a very large atlas with a magnifying glass trying to determine the compass direction between two Canadian cities. I didn't give my wife the right compass designations, but I wasn't more than one letter off. Getting the answer is so satisfying what's one letter more or less?

In truth, I usually help her to get no more than three clues; getting four would be a banner day. However, she often says that what I give her helps her get sections of the puzzle. That makes me feel good. This morning, I'm of no use; the questions are brutal. After a while my wife sighs and puts down her pen to take a temporary rest from her Herculean task. Later she will return to the puzzle, get the "trick" and in all likelihood finish the entire puzzle or perhaps leave out only a few words. It won't be until at least mid-week that our practice will resume. The first days of the week, I'm told, the puzzle is easy. While she goes out for her walk I will nonetheless check out the puzzle, while I'm grinding away on my exercise bike. Then, with some luck, I will be able to tell her the few clues down and across that I can get. I'm not completely sure why, but our crossword puzzle caper always makes me smile. It's our ritual.

(The writer is an associate professor of sociology at Adelphi University and a Woodbury resident.)