Playing Solitaire

I play a lot of solitaire. I have no idea why I find this particular activity soothing, but I do. I used to play with real cards--and cheated like hell--but now I play on the computer, where I can't cheat. (At least I don't think I can--I don't know enough about computers, let alone developing programs for them, to figure how).

The games we call "Solitaire" used to be called "Patience." I discovered this because I loved Georgette Heyer novels (the original Regency Romances) and wondered what the elderly aunts were doing when they "played endless games of Patience."

Linus says that she plays solitaire when her life is messy because cards are something easy to control and organize. There may be something to that--I play more when I have too many things to do and not enough time to do them, which should add to my stress level, but somehow doesn't.

I also suspect there's something genetic to my playing. Grandmother Wilson (my father's mother's mother, who was "grandmother," not "grandma," and "Wilson," not her given name, "Ethel") smoked and played solitaire and cheated like hell as well. When someone challenged her cheating, she told the accuser in her best mother-of-an-impertinent-six-year-old voice, "I play cards to relax and, if I don't win, I don't relax. Therefore, I cheat."

End of questions.

Computers--the Internet

I really like this computer--my dad's, bought the summer before he died and still in the room we call "his office." It has lots of bells and whistles that I haven't even begun to figure out and it's responsive to most of my needs (which I'm told is a function of its huge memory).

And I love the internet. With my best friend two time zones away, my daughter and her family in Canada, and my son in the Army and presently in Germany, it allows me--if not instant--certainly daily contact. Not to mention Google and Wikipedia, which point me to information I'd never find in an ordinary library.

I don't like the spam--the ads for cheap drugs and "erotic enhancement appliances"--or the truly annoying pop-ups this computer allows me to block (most of the time--the occasional one slips under the radar and gets closed tout suite).

I even enjoy the--usually--stale jokes that seem to get circulated with every change of the season. I always read them for the occasional brand new one or the new spin to an old one.

But (you knew this was coming) I loathe the e-mails that end with "pass this one on to three (four, six, your whole buddy list of) friends and something wonderful will happen." And the ones that add "if you delete this message, something terrible will happen" make me so angry I want to track down the creators and shove their heads right through their computer screens.

How dare they make such threats? Yes, I know they're impotent, but the idea that anyone thinks what they have to say is so important they have use threats to make certain we all listen to/read them is so far beyond arrogant I haven't found a word in English to describe it.

So I've told my friends and family, "send me the stories and the pictures and the cute kid/animal photos and the inspirational messages and the jokes--even the raunchy ones--but DON'T send the others." I don't want them and I won't pass them on.

Pussywillows, Cattails

I can't speak for anyone else, but my memory is stuffed with odd scraps of songs, poems, "wise" adages, quotes from the famous and not-so-famous and (surprisingly!) long passages from favorite books. One of these is the refrain from Gordon Lightfoot's "Pussywillows, Cattails":

Pussywillows, cattails, soft winds and roses

Which is a lovely phrase, evoking various stages of spring after a long cold winter, but, besides the tune, it's all I can remember.

One of the really nice things about being connected to the internet is how easy it can be to find things like words to songs. I just typed in "Gordon Lightfoot" and went from his bio to a list of his songs to the songs themselves

And what did I find? The song is like an exercise in Freud' s free association technique, where one phrase evokes another and that evokes a third and so on and so on. Since no one's mind works exactly like another's, Lightfoot's patterns are different from mine. No wonder I couldn't follow it.

Given that spring has finally arrived to stay, and that is an event worth celebrating, here's the opening and closing stanza:

Pussy willows, cattails, soft winds and roses

Rainpools in the woodland, water to my knees

Shivering, quivering, the warm breath of spring

Pussy willows, cat tails, soft winds and roses