Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Playing Solitaire

There are times when just playing several games of solitaire can lead to a kind of unfocused, unproductive busyness, that helps to keep off boredom. I've always loved playing solitaire, its one of those games that leave much up to chance. When you play with real cards, there is the break for the shuffling, the dealing, and then the slow moving of the cards into rows of black and red. There is something so soothing about just playing a game of cards with yourself. You play by your rules, one card or three from the pile? You might even cheat a little to get your way.

I first learned how to play solitaire on the plane to the Netherlands when I was in second grade. For a while I watched one of the men near me, deal out cards onto his tray table and play a game. Very soon I was playing it myself. In fact that trip included many things that were completely new to me, a language I could not understand, cobbled streets, and markets that seemed to come from fairy tales. For two very short weeks my mother and great-grandmother shared a country with my sister and I. We had gone to see one of my mother's host sisters (From when she had been a exchange student) get married.

I might have been a little young to remember everything that we did, but I do remember riding a train, walking the dikes, eating pancakes with nutella, and finishing a whole pot of mussels all by my self, and than helping my sister with hers (she hated seafood at the time). So many little things that I kind of remember, like the old church where the wedding was and my great-grandmother before Altimers took away any memory she had of my existence. Obviously solitaire was not forgotten for I have never really stopped playing it. Although I do not play it often, I do randomly play through a couple of games one day, or perhaps tick away some time on a bus or train playing it on my i-pod. And of course my ability is gotten better since those first few hands on the plane all those years ago.

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