Fathers & Sons and Solitaire

Microsoft Solitaire

Like more than a few men, my relationship with my Dad growing up was...complicated. Worse than many but better than many others I'd say. However, one thing I always give him credit for was seeing what passions I had as a young man and moving mountains to give me the means to pursue them.

My Dad ran a string of businesses, none of which really worked out and our family was hard up for money a lot of the time. But in grade 1, I took an instant and white hot interest in computers when I first laid hands on a Commodore 64 in my school's lab. My Dad recognized this and somehow managed to get me my first computer, an Atari 130XE and later in 1991, my first PC, a clone 286. This was a time when only the nerdiest of social outcases were into stuff like computers but he didn't push me away from them to pursue more "normal boy" things, he let me embrace it. I've been into computers, technology and gaming ever since and have a successful IT career that I believe I owe to him encouraging my passion when I was young. Even as the technology world gets increasingly precarious and unfamiliar to me, I still haven't lost my love of this stuff.

My Dad wasn't into this himself at all (he was more a car and racing guy) and didn't have the patience to learn video games so it was mostly my activity. But there were occasional games that we'd play together and which served as bonding moments for us. The first of these on PC was of all things, Microsoft Solitaire, the first version from Windows 3.0. He passed by my room one day and saw me getting frustrated at my computer. I'd fired up Solitaire because I'd just installed a friend's pirated copy of Windows 3.0 and it was there but I had no idea how the game was played and there was no tutorial so I was baffled why nothing was working. He said he could show me what to do if I wanted. I said sure and he sat down and directed me through a game. That turned into at least a couple of hours as we went through a few unwinnable games until we finally saw the famous vaunted "card waterfall" animation you got when you successfully completed a game.

This turned into a number of other sessions over many months. I don't remember what would prompt one of us to invite the other to play. It may have been just mutual boredom or something else but we must have put tens of hours into this simple game that every Windows user had. My Dad never drove things, he always just sat and told me what to move where, with us eventually developing our own little verbal shorthand to make things faster. "Ace up", "Two to 3rd", "Fourth Stack to 2nd". He never chastised me when I'd interrupt and make moves of my own. Sometimes those moves would be bad ones but I got better over time and I think he noticed that. I also don't remember when we stopped playing or why but we eventually did.

Our relationship ebbed and flowed but unfortunately trended downward until I eventually cut ties with him in 1997. He passed away early in 2026, barely a month after I decided to finally reestablish contact with him (I wrote about that over on my ad-free hobby blog if you're interested: https://geekbravado.com/dont-wait/). I have regrets about how things went with us and how I handled them that I'll carry forever but with that, I also carry with me the number of unique bonding moments he and I had, not the least of which were around Solitaire.

Millions remember Solitaire fondly but this simple, packed-in card game will always hold a particularly special place to me.