What are the odds of playing the exact same game of Solitaire twice? Given 52 cards, it’s beyond my wimpy powers of calculation. I play Solitaire a lot. It’s my go-to avoidance trick but this morning I was noodling around with it and it struck me that as much as I play, the random deal always seems fresh. Hmm, given the number of words in my vocabulary, my random deal of language must be way out there. So, do this:

Get a deck of cards, preferably one you don’t plan to use in Texas Hold’em because you will definitely mark these cards. With pen or black marker (Because cards are slick the words may blur, so experiment with the jokers, which you won’t need.) build a word deck, 26 black nouns and 26 red verbs. Shuffle them and deal out seven like the base row for Solitaire. Now make something of that hand. Cheap entertainment and good exercise for your imagination. Finding new connections among random words is creative. Go play, write. This is one card game you can’t lose.