My Adult Nancy Drew

Last Friday on Women Are Not Funny Radio my featured guest was the delightful Paige Worthy, a woman so accurately named that her parents have developed legendary status and are revered as seers and soothsayers by the knowing and unknowing who know her.   Because her name chosen, as long ago as her birth, is a delightfully descriptive yet modestly complimentary homophone that is perfectly suited to both Paige and her occupation.

Paige worthy is a writer and a writer worthy of the page.

They say, and who are we talking about really but the they who are constantly saying stuff and who then are always quoted as having said whatever they said, or were said to have said, that “every writer needs a reader.”  If Paige is the writer, I will volunteer.  To read.  I volunteer to be her reader.

Because you see, Paige has become my Adult Nancy Drew.

That is what I called her when we spoke on Women Are Not Funny radio.  I just blurted it out and hadn’t even known it was true until I actually said it at the time it came to me as an idea in my my perfectly coiffed head.  An idea that came from where many ideas originate, both welcome and unwelcome with great abandon and spontaneity and energy enough for all.  It could be said and shall be said that I coined an idea, which is a phrase both over used and under used and overlooked by the US Treasury which permits the coinage of ideas and even taxes them if and when they result in income that is reported.

Paige, somehow knowing that this spontaneous coinage was of the truthful and complimentary persuasion, thanked me for saying so and mentioned her own fondness for the other Nancy Drew.

Later in memory and wary celebration she wrote about the incident on her blog at paigeworthy.com, the website where she blogs brilliantly and almost daily.  Paige wrote a post about her Women Are Not Funny appearance and in it she said she didn’t know what it means to be my Adult Nancy Drew.

Generosity being my nature along with my frequently noticed by me adorability and modesty, I shall tell darling Paige and you, my Darling Reader, exactly what it means.

When I was a child, of the girlish nature, I loved to read.  Books of all kinds with prevalent words that could not be ignored because visiting  the words there and inhaling them was the nature and purpose of the enterprise known as reading.  I inhaled.

And much of the time, the words I was inhaling were on the pages of a Nancy Drew book, so called because it was named for Nancy Drew who it was also about: a teen-aged heroine so seductively exemplary of the life we in girldom longed someday to lead that the books in the series were like childhood heroin.

I was addicted to the thoughts that the words in the books inspired–thoughts that I myself might someday drive a red convertible, go to dinner without adults, have a boyfriend exactly like Ned, and, even better, well not really better, but still rather swell, solve crimes.  By being smart and tenacious while having pretty hair and while wearing a fresh, stylish frock.  I inhaled the words and the vision of a life so well lived and well ordered.

And that is my best martini-style explanation for why I would now describe Paige Worthy as my Adult Nancy Drew.  I am addicted to her words and inhale them for their intoxicating richness and enjoy the way they temporarily overwhelm me.  (I was made to be overwhelmed and while some decry overwhelm and well they should, unless they are you, and then it is you instead of them, in need of crying or in the act of decrying or just so overwhelmed you can’t even imagine surfing in overwhelm for the sheer natural joy and hellishness, sought and unsought.  By me.)

But this post is not about overwhelm which was only mentioned by the writer of this post who wishes to shift to third person for the love of pretension and grandiosity which, similar to overwhelm are among the most beloved nouns of this author.

Instead this post is about being somewhat older than twenty-seven, possibly only weeks older, and yet enjoying reading the musings and deep revelations of someone who is, as my Adult Nancy Drew, twenty-seven years old, and imagining myself, like her, who is a character in her own book, hopping on my bicycle and setting off for the train station. Or nurturing and being nurtured by an upstairs neighbor very much like and unlike me and finding common ground above ground.  Or buying  the groceries with the healthiest reputations, instead of the signature cookie dough I constantly desire, and doing so for the physical me, knowing  all the while that it is the emotional me who is in need of nourishment.  Or convincing myself that being alone is doable, see-able, and tenable until Ned reappears or another Ned appears, or however she and I conceptualize such complications as men who are and are not in our lives.

Craving the fantasy of  living her life, even on days when my own life is better, is what keeps me in welcome anticipation of the lovely uncontrolled substance that I so enjoy when I read the worthy pages of my Adult Nancy Drew.

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