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Christmas is packed away for another year. I dusted and tidied as I removed the Christmas knick-knacks replacing them with the items they had displaced. Every year I pull out less stuff because the undecorating always falls on me. Hubster took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather yesterday to fell another tree and to split it up for firewood. I took down the outside lights only in shirtsleeves.


There's something about January that leads me to pull the poetry anthology down from the shelf to reacquaint myself with old poem friends. Most recently I reread some Housman, whose "Loveliest of Trees, The Cherry Now" never fails to move me. I also enjoy doing crossword puzzles particularly this time of year. My post-Christmas tradition of many years is to buy a new book or two of NY Times crosswords in the spiral back format which is easy to use and easy on my poor eyes. Last year I tried a book of Wall Street Journal puzzles for a change. They frustrated me endlessly. The clues were bad. The answers were inaccurate and at times just plain wrong. Will Shortz's editing makes all the difference in the world and turns puzzle solving into a relaxing pleasure.

So what draws me to crosswords and poetry now? My first thought was that after the excesses of Christmas, that the precision of these forms is refreshing. Instead of a sensory glut, there is the single carefully chosen word or turn of phrase. There's some truth to that. But I realize that there is a strong unconscious factor too. When I think of crosswords, I picture my Dad doing the daily Times crossword...in ink, he'd remind me, as if those of us who used pencil were rank amateurs. Son-in-law, to my delight, is also a fan of crosswords.

Dad and Mother were both English majors in college, but it was Dad I remember quoting poetry or reading aloud a passage from Yeats, Tennyson or Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't know who bought us "The Just-So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling, but I know I learned the delight of alliteration from hearing "the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees". Dad's birthday was January 13th. Do you think my picking up a book of poems and doing a Times crossword are just random occurrences? In my field, it is said that all behavior is unconsciously motivated. As I tell my patients, there's the good reason and there's the real reason. Never confuse the two.