House of cards gets more additions

How many decks of cards does one house need?

I know we have too many.

A couple of decades ago, when I found myself doing more international work as a journalism trainer than I had ever dreamed of, one of my last stops before heading to the airport was to CVS or Walgreens or Walmart to buy a couple of packs of cards.

One deck would get a work out as I played solitaire.

Nights got lonely in places like Karaganda and Tbilisi and Bishkek and Minsk and Mazar e Sharif and Yangon and others. Solitaire passed the time.

And for some reason good decks of cards were hard to come by, particularly in the post-Soviet world. So those two decks, one used and one unused, became gifts to interpreters and fixers and friends along the way.

It may be hard to imagine, but an unopened deck of Bicycle cards was highly valued at the time.

But that was years ago, and I hadn’t bought a deck of cards in some time.

That is, until this fall when I read a column by the Chicago Sun-Times writer Neil Steinberg.

Steinberg, whose blog I read pretty regularly, alerted me to some very cool, very stylish and very unusual cards being produced for an outfit called Theory 11.

Theory 11 primarily markets magic tricks, so they know their packs of cards. Working with Bicycle, as I understand it, the company had created some extremely cool designs, both on the backs of the cards and also on the faces.

The news in the Steinberg column was that the cool and quirky cards were now being marketed by Walgreens.

I read Neil’s column one morning and stopped by Walgreens in Portland on the way home for lunch.

I bought four decks, one for each of our daughters and one for my sister Louise. Like our daughters, each deck was distinctive and unique. The same goes for my sister Louise.

So, I figured, those are stocking stuffers for Christmas.

Little did I know that I had knocked over a domino, to mix a metaphor.

After I had mentioned the Steinberg column to my wife, she also bought a couple of decks, one for me and another for my sister, for whom one had already been purchased.

Then, to make matters worse, I wandered back into Walgreens just before Christmas and bought a deck of Theory 11 cards for my wife’s stocking.

By then, we were up to our ears in cards.

Most of those have found new homes.

But after the dust settled, we started taking inventory of the other decks of cards in the house.

There’s a very cool set commemorating the Union Pacific Railroad, two decks in a tin case, that came in an unsolicited press kit years ago and was too nice to throw away.

There are two decks of Bicycles in what we call our Tripoly set that we haul out for the occasional family game night.

There’s a handsome deck with Harvard University logos that was a gift from our daughter Maggie when she was working for the university.

And there are two decks bearing the logo of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, received as a thank you for helping to judge the CNPA’s Better Newspaper Contest for several years.

That ought to be, I think you’ll agree, enough.

But on Christmas morning, there was one more.

Santa put a deck of Theory 11 cards in my stocking.

Is that too much for any house of cards?