I love a good mystery. I grew up on Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie and can still devour a juicy mystery when i want to escape into a good book.

Of course, in most of those books, the mystery is resolved in the end - the murderer is revealed, the hidden jewel is found, the strange clues are explained. But not all mysteries are resolved, and frankly, I think that's good. Take the Loch Ness Monster. If we found out it really was just an overgrown catfish, what fun would that be?

My eight-year-old neighbor Marcie was visiting the other day and asked me to tell her a story. The first thing that popped into my head was a story my father used to tell called "The Blue Note." As I child, I used to beg him to tell it to me over and over. So I told it to Marcie:

This story is about a man visiting a foreign country. Oh, let's say it was Liechtenstein or some place like that. On the last morning of his travels, he was sitting on a bench in a large park, admiring the peace and quiet since no other people were around.

Suddenly a strange woman rushed up to him and started speaking to him urgently in a foreign language. The woman was clearly distraught and seemed to be trying to communicate with him, but he didn't understand a word she was saying. Looking over her shoulder in fear, she reached into her purse and pulled out a blue piece of paper and handed it to the man, then disappeared out of site as quickly as she had appeared.

The man was quite perplexed. No one else appeared, and he had no idea what it all meant. He thought the note she had handed him might clear things up, but when he looked at the words scrawled across the blue paper, he saw that they too were in a language he didn't understand.

Quite confused, he took the note to his hotel and told his story to the manager. The manager said, "Let me see the note. I will be happy to read it to you." The man handed him the blue note hoping for some answers, but as the hotel manager read the note, his face turned white as a sheet. "Sir," he said abruptly, "This is unbelievable! You must leave this hotel at once!" The man replied, "But why? What does the note say?"

"I cannot tell you," said the manager, his face still white, "but I must ask you to leave immediately." And with that, the manager left, wiping the sweat from his brow.

Since it was the last day of his trip, the man did indeed leave the hotel, still very confused about the blue note. He traveled to the airport and got on the plane. As he sat on the airplane flying back to America, he took out the now crumpled blue note and looked at it.

The stewardess came up and asked him about it. Since he was flying Liechtenstein Air, he thought perhaps she could help him, so he told her the crazy story. "Well, of course I will read the note for you and tell you what it says," said the friendly Liechtensteiner stewardess. So the man handed her the blue note. As she read the note, her hand went to her mouth and she looked like she might faint.

"Oh, my," she said, then, "Oh, my," she said again.

"What is it?" asked the man, almost shouting. "What does it say?"

But the stewardess didn't tell him. Instead she said, "If we weren't flying over the ocean right now, we would have to let you off this plane immediately. Oh, my!" Then she scurried to the back of the plane and didn't speak to the man again.

The man was really worried now and didn't know what to do. Then he remembered his friend the language professor back home. His friend could read any language, and the man trusted him. He would take the note to him, and he was sure he would read it to him.

As soon as he arrived home, he called up his friend and told him the story, and they agreed to meet. When the man got to his friend's office, he said, "You must promise me that you will tell me what the note says, no matter how terrible or strange it is!"

"I promise," said the professor. "You can trust me. No matter what the note says, I will read it to you."

"Okay," the man said, relieved that he would finally find out what the note said.

So he reached into his pocket to get the blue note, but it wasn't there. He had lost it.

Marcie looked at me blankly. "Is that the end?" she asked.

"Yes, it is," I said.

"But what was in the note?"

"I have no idea. We can only guess."

Marcie looked at me a little longer. "I think that's a dumb story," she said, then added, "No offense."

"None taken," I said and I meant it, because I used to tell my father it was a dumb story too. Nevertheless I asked him to tell it over and over. Since then I've come to realize that the best mysteries are often the unsolvable ones: the beloved pet that appears after having disappeared for six months, the gift of life-giving medicine that appears in the mail at the exact moment it's needed, the message from a loved one at the moment of his death a thousand miles away.

I don't need to have such mysteries explained; they are just part of what makes life on this big beautiful world so absolutely grand, just like not knowing what's in that blue note makes it such a doggone good story.

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