The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Scooby Doo schooled me in criminal justice. I most identified with Velma, as I liked her brains, brawn, and sporty eyeglasses. A fraidy cat by nature, it’s hard to explain my fascination with scary and mysterious – sometimes there’s a craving to breathe fire, even while knowing its capacity and willingness to torch your tonsils.

My friends, siblings, cousins, (and anyone else I could persuade to play with me,) acted out detective scenes under my directed intensity. The big caper was ours for the solving.  While we didn’t know what crime had been committed, we were on the lookout for serendipitous clues, and the world was safer with our investigative savvy.

One summer we uncovered a discarded Army canteen and old black boot. An open and shut case of evidence left behind by a serial killer and his unfortunate one shoed victim. My parents had a word they liked to use with me and my imaginative behavior. That word was, “nonsense.” I tried to explain that Vincent Van Ghoul had helped Scooby and Shaggy solve a similar case. My mom shook her head, used my full name, and said the word. My personal case was also on the docket, and it too appeared to be an open and shut one.

It’s possible that a serial killer, the bones of at least one victim, and a rotting shoe still haunt the woods near the farm where I grew up, but that blood isn’t on my hands. I tried to bring the lawfulness of an eight-year-old to an unreported felony but was vetoed by the word.

I’ve been dredging through this pile of my childhood because summertime makes me nostalgic for freedom which I connect to the joys of mischief and meddling. Reminiscing about the irrational fear of quicksand cracked a memory safe emptying its contents onto the floor of my mind, shiny with jagged edges.

The season of the canteen was the climax of an era. The fears of dying by quicksand, lava, or falling into an abandoned brick well sparsely covered by leaves hung hard and heavy on my generation. No google machine could dispel myths or mitigate actual risks. No seatbelts, helmets, or Life 360 Apps tucked us into a bubble. It was the wild, wild, southeast and there were dangers. While these factors didn’t dampen our reckless abandon kind of full contact, unsupervised ninja warrior play in the woods without cell phones, they were on our minds. We were brave, even if it was artificial courage.

To the best of my knowledge, Moore County was never home to quicksand or volcano. Old wells were probably the biggest risk in the 70s. Timmy fell into one, but Lassie had his back. None of this is rational. The word has appropriate application.

Late at night when darkness settled into my childhood bedroom, the glow of my Holly Hobby night light shone a path for serial killers, single abandoned shoes, quicksand, bottoms of wells, and volcanos to crawl and hide under my bed and on the shelf in my closet. They peeked at me from behind my tight shut eyes, their images swirling in the space of my brain that amplified anxiety and dread. I wasn’t so brave then. I was afraid, for real. My mom tried to comfort me, delivering the word in a tender, soothing way, but worry and reality can commingle into a blur of fright. She then reasoned with me in a straightforward, “what are the odds” kind of way and somehow that righted me, making things better.

As a grown-up, I don’t move about the daytime world in worry or fear. Mark Twain said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” While this is a solid philosophy in filtering through what to worry about, the flip side is that life does dish out tragedy in nondiscriminating doses.

As in my childhood, worry creeps into my bed at night. It comes in the form of random acts of violence against my Make-up Artist child in New York City and targeted hate crimes toward my Social Worker child in Asheville. It comes in the form of sudden onset of illness for Smokin’ Hot Love Biscuit or the unsettled spirit of our rescue dog, Toast, trusting that we aren’t going to steal her toys or abandon her. It’s in the replaying of conversations, of words I wish I would and wouldn’t have spoken, of actions I wish I would and wouldn’t have taken. It’s the past. It’s the present. It’s the future, up close and personal. I worry about bigger things too ­– about bad intentions, about those bent on causing harm to the tune of their own agendas. The stakes feel astronomical.

Most of the time, the word helps, as I hear the voice of my mama weighing the odds, gambling on the chance to live another stable day of gratitude in a happy life. In the light of the morning, there’s no invented quicksand to mire awareness of the lottery like win of being okay in my world.