My favorite reading genre is the mystery. This is my mom’s favorite genre also, and while I could blame my literary predilection on her, I choose to blame Nancy Drew.

Nancy came into my life as soon as I could read well enough to tackle her books. I don’t remember who introduced me to my first Nancy Drew book; perhaps my mom, or maybe a sympathetic teacher or librarian. No matter, I devoured as many of the books in the series as I could get my hands on, spending many happy hours following clues with Nancy and her friends.

As a quiet and shy child, I deeply admired Nancy, and would have loved to be more like her. Nancy, the motherless daughter of an attorney named Carson Drew, was spunky, fearless, intelligent and compassionate—a fine, and somewhat unusual role model for girls at the time the books first came out (see below). She solved mysteries in her fictional hometown of River Heights with the help of her friends, cousins Bess and George (a girl).

The story of Nancy Drew is an interesting one. She first made her appearance in 1930 in The Secret of the Old Clock. The first 34 volumes were published between 1930 and 1956. Eventually, 175 volumes were published in the “classic” Nancy Drew series (there are several “spin-off” series that bear her name). Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, created Nancy, wrote many of the plotlines and hired ghostwriters to complete the books. All the Nancy Drew mysteries have been published under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, but were ghostwritten by a number of different people, including Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote 23 of the original 30 mysteries. Stratemeyer’s daughter, Harriet Adams, edited and wrote many of the Nancy Drews until her death in 1982. She also revised the original 34 stories beginning in 1959, to eliminate racist stereotypes. In the process, she also shortened the books slightly and toned down Nancy’s independent personality.

According to Wikipedia, more than 80 million copies of the various Nancy Drew series’ books have been sold. The books have been translated into 45 languages and Nancy has been featured in five movies, two TV shows and numerous computer games.

One of my happiest childhood memories revolves around Nancy. When I was about 8 or 9, one morning when I came to the breakfast table, there was a pile of books sitting next to my place. While I ate my cereal, I cast wondering glances at the stack of perhaps 10 to 15 Nancy Drew books. Where did they come from? We didn’t have the money to buy many books, certainly not this many at one time. My mom was rushing around getting ready for work so it took me a few moments to get her attention to find out what this unlooked for treasure was all about. She found the books, she said, when she went to the apartment complex’s dumpster to throw out our trash. The books, though not brand new, were in good condition, though most were missing their dust jackets, exposing their tweedy blue covers.

A windfall of books like this seemed like a miracle to me. I still remember the amazed reverence I felt when those books appeared on the breakfast table. Through many years and many moves, I’ve managed to keep a small selection of these treasured books, and I have them displayed in my office. After researching Nancy for this blog post, I pulled down several of my remaining volumes. To my delight, most are the original, unrevised copies from the 1930s. Only one still has a dust cover. The rest retain their tweedy blue glory.

Through the years I moved on to other authors—Erle Stanley Gardner and his Perry Mason mysteries, everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, and eventually many, many more mystery authors like Patricia Wentworth, Rex Stout, and Marjory Allingham. (I do read more “modern” mysteries, but they aren’t quite as cozy and comforting as the vintage authors I keep returning to.) But my heart will always have a special soft spot for Nancy, the teenage girl who chased villains in her blue roadster.

What were your favorite books from childhood?

For more information on Nancy Drew, click here.

Anne Coray is an Alaskan, and in this beautiful meditation on the stillness of nature she shows us how closely she’s studied something that others might simply step over. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

The Art of Being

The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.

Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds

and relearn the beauty of absorption.

There is nothing beyond the rotten log

covered with leaves and needles.

Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.

Raise your face to the water-laden frond.

A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Anne Coray from her most recent book of poetry, A Measure’s Hush, Boreal Books, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Anne Coray and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

For a long time, I’ve known that I reveal different aspects of myself to different people. There are certain acceptable activities and topics of conversation with each group of friends and family, certain facets of my personality, likes and dislikes, that appear and disappear as needed. Like a chameleon changing colors to blend into her surroundings, I’ve become good at fitting in. Only a very few get to see most of me, and possibly no one has ever seen all of me, even my husband of 24 years. I don’t go so far as to do or say things I don’t believe in, but I keep in hiding aspects of myself I feel either would not be interesting to the other person or that might make them think less of me—not because I think whatever-it-is is boring or unacceptable, but because I think the other person does.

There are times when this is acceptable social behavior. Every single person does not need to know every single thing about me. But what if I’m only hiding myself because I want people to like me? How can people like me if they don’t know me? I have to accept that if I allow others to see me, all of me, some of them won’t like me. But some of them will, and it’s much better to have people like you for who you are than to try to change who you are so they will like you. This sounds to me like a lesson I should have learned long ago—but somehow it has escaped my notice until now.  Why now? Because of something that “asked” to be put on my vision board for 2012:

 I’m not sure yet what this will mean for me. I think it might mean taking more chances in my writing life, figuring out what I want and asking for it instead of just making do, not waiting for something to happen but taking charge and making it happen. Guarding my inner life a little less closely.

All my chameleon-like behavior sometimes leaves me wondering what, exactly, I do want or believe. Like La Rochefoucauld says, too much disguising can cut me off from an understanding of my true self. In some ways, I am still figuring out who I am. There are many things I’m still learning, many points of view I’d like to understand. 

Writing for this blog has helped me expose more of myself to the world than I would have felt comfortable doing in the past, even though, of course, it doesn’t express all of me, either. It has helped me think through and express some of my beliefs and opinions—sometimes opinions I didn’t know I had or had not yet put into words. I expect I’ll continue to write my way out of hiding because that’s just something that I do. (Thank you for coming along on the journey!)

Do you hide parts of yourself? What is the cost and what are the benefits of hiding?

I’ve been wanting to take a walk on the nature trail in my neighborhood with my camera for a long time. Usually when I’m on this trail, which winds for about four miles around my subdivision, I’m walking briskly for exercise and I don’t have the camera with me when something appealing comes into view. Yesterday, in the spirit of nurturing myself, I took half an hour to wander the trail near my house.

 A little breeze kept it from being too warm for comfort, but it was definitely warm enough for the shorts I was wearing. So much for winter. I turned right out of my back gate, and came to a large retention pond, now dry because of an ongoing drought, and the architectural skeleton of a tree. Every time I walk past this tree I think it would make a good line drawing. I took its picture, and maybe next time I’ll bring my sketchbook out instead. New growth has appeared on the branches—I’m not sure what kind of tree this is. Anyone know?

 Next, I snapped a shot of a neighbor’s purple martin house. Purple martins are murder on mosquitoes, something we have quite a lot of in Florida.

 The large oak tree and bench near a second retention pond, deserted today, but usually a good place to see birds:

 A four-legged neighbor:

Another tree dressing itself for spring:

I wish I was here:

…but I think the neighbors might object to my taking a nap in their back yard.

I turned around and explored the trail on the other side of our house, looking for signs of a return of the wild hogs (there was plenty of old churned-up earth where they foraged, but nothing new) when—surprise! I found this guy/girl sunning itself on the bank of a third small pond.

 As I walked home, I listened to the bird songs and the little rustlings of lizards in the dry leaves. The sun shone, the breeze blew and all was right with my world, at least for a little while. I’ll have to remember to wander with the camera or my sketchbook the next time I want to soothe an anxious soul.

Where do you wander to soothe your soul?

“There is little success where there is little laughter.”

—Andrew Carnegie