As a kid, I read and enjoyed Chip Hilton, Henry Higgins, The Great Brain, Roald Dahl, Little House on the Prairie, and E.B. White, but they don't reflect much of my adult tastes. Similarly, I read Nate the Great and Encyclopedia Brown and watched Scooby Doo, which helped me develop a taste for mysteries, but it wasn’t till the Hardy Boys that they seemed applicable to my world and experience and thus truly invested me. Really, I can’t recall which of the millions of Hardy Boys titles was the first I read, but it spoke of dark dealings going on beneath the placid surface of the recognizable reality of suburbia. What I do remember about it? Frank or Joe had been abducted and forced to make a phone call relaying that they were okay. But the Hardys were crafty, man; they tapped a Morse code message back and forth to each other while sticking to the script.
I got a booklet on code asap and passed it around to a small group of friends and each week we’d trade encoded notes to each other and tediously transcribe our banal little memos, which was fun for about a minute, but very quickly I came to the realization that I was not and would never be one of the Hardys.
But theirs was a reasonably familiar universe. I was a suburban kid with an imagination. I started wondering what my neighbors were up to. I snooped a little. I found out a few things I still haven’t forgotten. It never got to the level encountered by the curious teenagers of Blue Velvet or the frustrated paranoia of Rear Window's voyeur, but I sure learned that people had secrets and I’ve been drawn to stories of ‘beneath the normal exteriors’ ever since. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I read a lot to my own kids and I’m always curious about what sticks with them, which themes and stories they really latch onto, which characters they get invested in, what realities seem plausible to them. And I wonder what’s going to be their Hardy Boys revelation? How much influence can I have over that? How much do we bring to our own experience of literature? How much do we seek out the mirror to be held up to us and how much are we molded by the stories we’re exposed to? Will they continue to insist on the merits of Bakugan if I introduce them to Robert Louis Stevenson? And how hard should I push?
What say you? What of your past favorites shine telling light on you now?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
