Nancy Drew and other heroines

One of my first book series that I enjoyed was Nancy Drew. After reading a couple of them I used to look for adventure. I remember one time my sister Jeanette and I decided that the way to find adventure was to follow the creek to its source. We set out on a Saturday morning and walked for what seemed like miles. We went under the busy New Street using the sewer pipe and walked past homes that were definitely “in the country”, probably acreages as we would call them today. Eventually the creek started to get soggy and undefined and a dog was barking on a leash which scared us enough to turn around and go home. Our reward for all that walking was the usual “soakers” and a scolding from our mother. At the end of it we were very dissatisfied with our adventure. At the very least we were hoping to discover treasure, a body, some kind of mystery. After all that’s how it always ended with Nancy.

Have you noticed how some people seem to always find themselves in a situation? The only situations I find myself in are the ridiculous kind, no the mysterious ones. Like going to work without my skirt or coming home to a bunch of massacred chickens. Actually the latter was kind of mysterious. The chickens were lying in the yard, dead. The odd thing about them was that they were all flat as a pancake. Not normal. I wondered if weasels, since I thought it was weasels that had killed the chickens, sucked their blood. Well, when I mentioned this at work the salesmen all started laughing and describing the weasels as vampires. I hadn’t seen a weasel until a few years later, but that’s another story! The point being that I was simply ignorant about weasels and wondered why the chickens would be so flat? I still haven’t solved that mystery.

I was quite shattered as a young woman when I read that Carolyn Keene was a fictitious identity for a series of writers of Nancy Drew. Carolyn Keene was a syndicate! But that did explain the inconsistencies in the books. One time Nancy was a blonde and then she became titian haired (as in strawberry blonde). George was supposed to be the tomboy but Nancy kept winning all the athletic competitions. And George would always chicken out before Nancy. After a while those discrepancies were bothering me. But for a few years Nancy was exciting reading and even today I love a mystery. In a way Nancy kind of grew up to be Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote!

Now what kind of adventure can I find today? Hmmm. There’s always the bus ride. I really hope that we don’t have to stand on the side of the road this morning when the bus breaks down. You see, we are breaking in a new bus and inevitably there is a reason WHY the bus was such a good buy. Will Greg ever learn?