I Love a Mystery

I love a mystery. It's the thrill that seems to excite me when I try to figure out who did what. Mystery doesn't necessarily have to be that someone was killed, missing, or has met with a bad fate. A mystery can be, “Where’d I put my keys?” At my age, I have that mystery far too often. Or it could be as simple as “Who is that new person who moved in down the block? They seem kind of strange. I wonder what is going on down there?” That is a mystery. And there are real, horrible mysteries, which reminds me of one from the famous poem by Robert Service,

‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,
where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam
‘round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold
seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way
that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way
over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold, through the parka’s fold
it stabbed like a driven nail..........

Now this is a real mystery, as a matter of fact there are a number of mysteries here. What brought Sam McGee all the way from Tennessee to Canada to mine for gold? Was it because of a lost love? Was it because of an insatiable desire to be rich, or did he just seek adventure? Another mystery is, even though the title talks about cremating Sam McGee, was he actually cremated? Now I didn’t finish the poem because I want that to be figured out by you, the reader. If he wasn’t cremated, what happened to Sam McGee? Did the barge sink before it could happen? Was it impossible to get the boiler hot enough for the cremation to take place? We won’t know unless we finish the story.

That’s why ‘Meal and a Mystery’ is going to be so important for you to come, to try to figure out the story. Will you figure it out between your main course, and dessert? Or will you figure it out as soon as you sit down, just because of your intuitiveness? Or possibly you won’t understand even after the story has been told to you because it may seem so outrageous. It may seem impossible, implausible that that could actually be the mystery that unfolded in front of you. The only way to know, the only way to be in the game, is to attend ‘Meal and a Mystery’. It will be held every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening from October 21st to November 14th at the Black Hills Amp.

See ya at the Amp!