Solitaire

I found this unfinished blog post today, which I started this summer while staying at my brother's place in Arizona. I thought I'd finish it off and post it.

I was sitting in my brother's TV room this morning with my laptop. If my brother had to pay the annual French TV tax, he'd be broke. There are 7 TVs in his house. And yes, you have to pay a TV tax here, whether you're a renter or own your home. Since my TV is my laptop, I can get away with not paying...for now...until the gendarmes get wind of my lawlessness.

My brother was in the nearby office on the desktop computer and my brother visiting from Philly was standing at the kitchen table in front of his laptop. All three of us were silent, while others in the house were chatting and bustling around us. Misc T was probably slaying some bees or driving a rented back hoe into the back yard to dig for a pool. I don't know. I just can't keep up with her. Lovely Reggie was probably doing her hair...again.

I tore myself away from my laptop to make a trip to the bathroom and then get some water in the kitchen, passing both brothers on the way. That's when I realized that all three of us were doing the same thing. Playing solitaire. What a revelation.

I've been playing solitaire on my laptop for years. I play plain old solitaire. I use it in between work sessions to clear my mind. Many, many times when I'm writing, I get stuck. So I just play solitaire until a solution bubbles up to the surface. It always does. Once, when I was still working in corporate America, my boss walked in while I was playing solitaire. I didn't bother to hide it, because it's a productivity tool for me, not a distraction from my work. He burst out laughing, but it was a sardonic laugh. He was really saying, "I can't believe, with all we have to do, that you're playing a game." I said, "You know those 30,000 pages of software specifications that I pumped out in one month while I also tested the software and wrote all the website content and the marketing emails? I did that in between playing thousands of games of solitaire." In other words, shut up.

But, I digress.

My brothers play a more complicated form of solitaire, which requires thought and strategy. I'm not interested in that. Nor do I keep track of my winnings or losses. I just want to click and click and click and I don't care if I win or lose. I need a mindless activity while my subconscious processes my stuckness.

But I suddenly realized, when I saw what the three of us were doing, that my two brothers and I are solitary souls. We keep to ourselves and join others when we're required to do so - out of social or familial or work obligation. Most of the time, we'd like to be left alone. When I used to travel for business and stayed at my brother's home in Philly, I'd wake up at oh-dark-thirty (my Arizona brother's phrase) and find him sitting on the couch in the dark, with a coffee cup in his hand. "Hey," I'd say. "Hey," he'd say. I'd get my own cup of coffee and then go back up to take a shower. I know he was sitting there thinking about his life, hoping his kids didn't have to have a back-breaking job like he had, worrying about paying the bills, regretting his past. Once he said to me, "I'm not a priority in my own home. First there are the kids, then the cats, then the gerbil, then me." Ah.

Staying with my Arizona brother this time, I've gotten up before sunrise to find him downstairs in one of the loungers in the TV room, flipping through channels or watching a movie. Escape. Escape from the worries of his mind. Will his business survive the recession? Will his kids find their way? Will my father fall down in the shower again or what will my mother do when my father is gone? Will that damn sister of his ever get her crap out of his garage? (I just added that because it's one of my early-morning worries.)

Solitaire. It's comforting, mind numbing, necessary. For my brothers and for me. What would our lives be like if we emptied the worry from our minds? Would that new form of silence be deafening? Would we worry that without all of our worrying the world, and all the people we love, would fall down in the shower? Will planes lose their lift and come crashing down into the earth? Is our worrying the only thing left that keeps the world from exploding?

I'm afraid to find out.