My Dear Fellow Hounds,
Today is a momentous day for me. I turned one year old today. It is my first anniversary as a Sherlockian.
Few followers of the Master, perhaps, can with such great precision give their "birth date" into the Sherlockian world. I can though. It was exactly one year ago today that I joined The Hounds of the Internet, and it was joining the Hounds pack which marked the real beginning of my Holmesian life.
To be sure, I had first read the Sacred Writings when I was a lass of 10 and 11. However, I then found other diversions and abandoned my friends Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. Until a year ago, I had not read most of the stories for more than 30 years. That was about to change! On the evening of September 18, 1999, I was tired and mellow and was sitting at my computer idly surfing around the Internet. Suddenly a random (as it then seemed) thought came into my head and I decided, for the sake of old childhood memories, to do an AltaVista search on "Sherlock Holmes." I hadn't the slightest notion how this seeming whim would alter my life. The search yielded quite a few Internet sites devoted to the Master and I began to work my way through them. After perhaps 30 or 40 minutes of jumping from one site to another, I came upon a site called The Hounds of the Internet. This appeared to be some sort of on-line Sherlock Holmes fan club. Membership was free and, on the spur of the moment, I signed on. O fateful day!
A year ago, I had only been online for 10 months. I had no idea what a "Listserv" was. I had no conception at all of a "web community." I thought that joining the Hounds meant that I would receive an e-newsletter every now and again, like the gardening tips I get from Burpee Co. or the "News Flash" updates which come into my e-box from the Boston Red Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies. Innocent me! I little suspected that, in becoming a Hound, I would receive, at 5 minutes past 11 each evening, a compilation of 25 or 35 or more messages from Sherlockians around the world. This was *far* more than I had bargained on and, for my first few weeks in the Pack I deleted more Digests than I read. The discussions were 'way over my head in any case. But some time in those first few weeks, the hook was set. I was a captive. I began reading along with each story of the week. The discussions became less opaque to me. I began to understand. I began to zoom up the learning curve. I began to have *fun*. I thought that the whole idea of having Sherlockian "noms" was an inspired bit of tomfoolery and I registered one for myself ("May Blunder", from a quote I found in REDC), thinking that, some day, it would be fun to post something to the List, to get into the sandbox and play with the other kids. But I was far too intimidated to do such a thing. I lurked on the List for two solid months before mustering up the courage to post to it for the first time.
I remember the night I posted my first Hounds post more vividly than I do the night I joined the Hounds. I remember coming home late from a neighborhood meeting, firing up my computer, and surfing to the Hounds web site, very nervous, to see if there had been any reaction to my post of earlier in the evening. Nobody shot me down in flames onList and, in fact, two Hounds offListed me to thank me for my post.
Thus emboldened, I sent another post to the List the following week. Then another one, which actually started a thread. This was heady stuff for a new puppy! Before I knew it, I had become a regular contributor to the Hounds list. If you are a new puppy, take heart from my example! You don't need to be a world-renown expert on Sherlock Holmes in order to contribute to the discussion here on the Hounds list. All you need is determination--and playfulness. If I do say so myself, I have started some darn entertaining threads here on the List in the ten months since I have been posting to it. Looking back over my "freshman year" has been a valuable retrospective for me as I thought about this post. It is not too strong a thing to say that becoming a Sherlockian has significantly changed my life, making it fuller, deeper, more interesting, and more joyful.
Joining the Sherlockian world has restored a sense of intellectual playfulness to my life which I had not felt in 20 years and had thought never to feel again. I have been haunting every used bookstore in four counties for the past year, buying every Sherlockian book I could find, and beginning to read my way through them. A year ago, my entire collection of Sherlockian books consisted of two copies of the Canon, one paperback pastiche, and one geography book: a total of seven linear inches of shelf space. Now, as of 15 minutes ago, my Sherlockian books and journals take up 162 inches of shelf space, and I had to buy an entire bookcase just to hold them all. You're looking at a woman who is addicted. Oh, and did I mention the 33 linear inches of Sherlockian videotapes? The most enjoyable thing about my freshman year as a Hound has been all the nice people I have met. I met nine fellow Hounds in person on a cross-country trip I took in June and I have "met" many more online, whom I look forward to meeting in person some day soon.
All in all, I have had myself a hugely memorable and surpassingly fun freshman year. And to think that it all started, one year ago, on the merest whim. The Master was certainly correct in observing "that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement" (SIXN, Doubleday 584). I hope that you, my fellow pooches, will forgive me for sending this long and rather self-indulgent post. I promise not to repeat it at one-year intervals for the rest of my life. But I was overcome with the momentousness of my first birthday. Also, I hope that my experience will inspire some puppies to become active barkers in our Pack. I did it. You can do it too! That would be the greatest birthday present you could give me.
As I blow out the candle on my one-year birthday cupcake, I am making a wish that my sophomore year shall be as full and as fun as was my freshman year as a Sherlockian.
Karen Murdock/May Blunder
To Email karen click here.