What the Dog Taught Me

As a writer and someone who must always have books around her, I would like to say that the first mystery I loved was one that I read such as Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown, but scouring my memory, the first mystery in line for my attention and that I loved with all my mystery-loving heart was Scooby-Doo.  Not glamorous, I know, but true.  

Saturday mornings were the best.  Bowl of Cheerios with way too much sugar, ugly but warm striped afghan my grandmother made, and the trusty Zenith with its clicky channel-changing dial.  Click of the switch brought the picture to life and there in full color was The Gang--Shaggy and Scooby, Velma, Daphne and Freddie, and, of course, The Mystery Machine.  For years I loved that cartoon and spent every Saturday morning in the company of those meddling kids.  

There were books, too.  I still have the boxed set of Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective paperbacks that my mom bought at The Diamond department store on Capitol Street for me when I was in grade school.  When I got a little older, there were the nicely bound Agatha Christie novels that remain on my shelf.  In between I fell for The Westing Game and The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues by Ellen Raskin.

I always came back to Scooby.  Even in my teens, I watched it on the sly.  If it were on now, I'd probably . . . okay, maybe not now.  But I have to ask myself what is it about Scooby-Doo that I love so much?  I could expand the question to ask, what is it about mysteries in general that I adore?  I think it has something to do with the monster under the bed (or in Scooby's case, behind the revolving bookshelf in the spooky library). 

The plot was the same every time.  The kids find out about a mystery, or find themselves embroiled in mysterious circumstances and go investigate.  The characters and situations change very little.  There is usually a spooky house or creepy caretaker, it's almost always nighttime, and inevitably Velma loses her glasses.  Plus, in the older episodes, there was the great musical chase scene in the middle of the show. 

Consistently, Scooby and Shaggy are scared of everything--a bump in the night, a dark hallway, a creepy basement--and they admit it.  They acknowledge the scary.  Then somehow, together, they overcome the fear and prove that the scary has a logical explanation--a man in a mask is trying to scare everyone with parlor tricks to take something that does not belong to him.  

To me, as a child, that explanation meant everything because I could apply it to the monster under the bed.  The monster is the pair of sneakers and dirty socks I kicked under the bed earlier in the day.  The monster is the toy I thought I'd lost.  As an adult, a mystery represents pretty much the same thing: the world is a scary place, full of scary things, but in the end, there is resolution.

Scooby taught me that it's okay to be scared.  Just hang with good friends, eat lots of good snacks and keep going until you find the logical explanation.  The bad guys go to jail and the good guys go to the malt shop.