I took the bus to church Sunday because our car is in the shop. It was a special day that I did not want JellyBean to miss, so I brought her on the bus with me. I strapped her into a light umbrella stroller and headed for the bus stop. JellyBean was all eyes. Waiting for the bus she saw cars and big trucks whiz by. On the bus she watched the traffic out the window, or the people inside the bus, and said almost nothing. Only the occasional “We’re riding the bus,” in a tone of wonder.

After church she had ice cream and saw a mounted Police Officer who let her sit on his horse. We walked on retaining walls and looked at fountains. It was lovely. To top the day off, we went to the library together.

The library had not yet opened when we arrived, so we joined the crowd waiting outside. There were about twenty of us. I am content to people-watch when I wait, so I looked around. There was a young man in drag waiting near the door. Low-waisted jeans with a cropped denim shirt, showing lots of belly. It took me a second to realize he was not a woman, and he saw me looking at him. He is probably used to that.

I moved to a shaded corner where I could see more of the crowd. There were two teenaged boys sitting on a garden wall, talking loudly enough for everyone to hear them. They were threatening the guy in drag. “… gonna tear him up, cause she thinks she’s a girl,” I heard, noting the strange use of pronouns. Everyone else pretended to ignore the boys. I stood in the corner and watched them.

Our city is one of the most racially-segregated in the country. I used to walk for exercise before I had kids, sometimes for 12 miles or more. When a white woman walks alone in a perceived black neighborhood, some men assume she is a prostitute. And trust me, I do not look like a prostitute. But men (of diverse ethnicities) would stop their cars and expect me to get in, or someone would address me as “Hey, ho!” I learned not to go back to the neighborhoods where that happened.

But things are different since I became a mom. No one assumes the lady pushing a stroller is looking for business. But it’s more than that. Motherhood has transformed me in the eyes of people in my neighborhood from an Opportunity to a person worthy of respect. Now on the street I am either treated with courtesy or mildly ignored. Even the pushers don’t mess with the mamas. I don’t mean that bad things never happen. I have had one scary incident which I may write about another time. But I don’t spend my days scared, and I make eye contact with strangers.

Back to the library. I stood in that shady corner, watching the boys who were threatening the drag queen. And then the boys looked at me. Our eyes made contact, and they shut down. I did nothing threatening, but their voices lost the bragging tone, and they started talking about something else. They acted like two kids caught throwing spit balls by their Sunday School teacher. Because they had been seen by The Mom, and they were suddenly self-conscious.

I am a mom, and I look like it. I am frumpy, lumpy and unadorned. I can feel the same regret other women feel about the loss of youth and beauty. But I think sometimes we forget the good things that come with looking like a mother. Respect is a big one. I enjoy the fact that I get hit on less, and obeyed more. And I feel an aching sympathy for young women in my neighborhood who decide to have a baby while they are unmarried teens because they think it will get them respect. My heart breaks for them because I know in some ways they are right.

I thought I’d share with you again some of search terms that have brought people to my blog.

charlotte murder 2006 dredge I am fascinated. Please tell me more. Really. PLEASE.

are bickering couples soulmates Ah, you mean this.

ancient castration methods You were looking for me, weren’t you?

spy supervisor That’s my next career.

looking askance in a conversation Yes, sometimes I do. But you needed to search this?

spitting while speaking Never. Okay, lots.

Since I get such a kick out of seeing the search terms that bring people to my blog, I have started visiting blogs based on the weirdest search terms I can think of. I like to imagine their faces when they see that someone came to their blog looking for hoppity sneeze or addlepated horse sense.

I am a big fan of the classic detective story. When I don’t have anything else to think about, I regret that Agatha Christie only wrote 70 mysteries or so, that Josephine Tey died after six novels, that Dorothy Sayers turned her attention to translation work. While other women turn to comfort foods during pregnancy, I turned to the comfort literature of the mystery. I spent my pregnancies reading everything by Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh that I could get my hands on. God bless the public library.

I am always a little sad that the mystery’s Golden Age is past. While some mysteries today are excellent (PD James springs to mind), the concisely written, spare descriptions of the whodunit of the 30s and 40s is a neglected art form. Mysteries today tend to be driven either by a new arena of specialized knowledge (”set in the heart of Samurai Japan” “fourteen new quilt patterns included” “) or exist as a way to provide a plot for characters the author doesn’t know what to do with otherwise. The use of a mystery as a mystery - a conundrum to be solved by the reader using the clues provided - seems rare, at least to a casual reader like me. So I was delighted when I discovered Patricia Moyes.

Moyes died in 2000, but she left behind nineteen novels, published between 1959 and 1993, that test the mettle of any armchair detective. Like Christie and Marsh her characters are revealed more through dialogue than description. Concision is a skill, and Moyes has it. Her books are roughly the length of Christie’s novels, and must be read as closely. The clues are provided, and the series detective, Henry Tibbet, mentions his suspicions in asides not given to the reader. “Tibbet explained,” Moyes writes, but the words of the explanation are not given to the reader. Until the very end, you must use your wits and figure things out for yourself, much like reading Miss Marple.

Angel Death, published in 1980, is Moyes’s fifteenth novel. It and it’s predecessor, Who Is Simon Warwick? rely too heavily on ideas trendy for their day, trends that are now a couple decades old. The modern reader spots the plot point too quickly for the purposes of the mystery. This ruins Who Is Simon Warwick?, but Angel Death is good enough to overcome the problem. Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy visit fictional British possessions in the Caribbean and stay at an inn managed by friends. While there, they meet an old lady named Betsy Sprague, who disappears after leaving a message for Henry. The search ensues, drawing the Tibbets deeper and deeper into the hidden dangers of the islands.

One of the reasons I love the classic mysteries is that they tend to recognize the same moral universe I do. Good and evil still exist. Truth is still a governing principle for those who follow the good. Moyes’s novels do not always fill my hunger in this regard. Tibbet, though he fiercely and unstoppably seeks to uncover the truth, frequently decides that justice would be better served if he presented to his superiors a story more plausible than the truth. I find this personally dissatisfying, but the pleasure of reading a skillfully written whodunit outweighs my dissatisfaction.

As I’ve mentioned before, we don’t have a television, though we do watch dvds on our computer. But during our recent visit to the in-laws, JellyBean watched PBS children’s programming in the mornings. She loved it.

More than I realized. Now when she gets out of the bath tub, if she catches sight of herself in the mirror, she announces at her reflection:

“Naked Pink Cookie Monster!”

I think I missed that puppet on Sesame Street.

When we first married, Az claimed that he wanted his children to learn to write by the same process humanity did: starting with Sumerian. I usually rolled my eyes and sighed loudly, which is what he wanted. Life has more spice with an exasperated wife.

Now our oldest girl is fascinated with books. She doesn’t read yet, but she memorizes. She will “read” the book to me or to Pooh Bear, or recite them freestyle in public places. We walk down the grocery aisle looking at cans of beans and suddenly she yells,

“Samma is the stinkiest fish in all Japan! How dare you spoil my appetite?” (from Yoshi’s Feast).

I nod encouragingly. Mustn’t dampen her enthusiasm for books. We sit down to lunch and she shrieks

“Manure? That’s disgusting!’ But Woody laughed. (from A Busy Year).

I murmur supportive noises and she collapses in giggles. Or we drive down the road and she repeats thirty times:

He felt a tickle on his back. ‘Wow!’ Wormie said. (from Hermie The Common Caterpillar).

I join in the first dozen times.

I have been thinking how I can turn this to my advantage. It was handy on Father’s Day, but isn’t there some more Machiavellian use for it? Perhaps by implanting the right books in that memory of hers, I could prompt her to pipe up with an appropriate phrase at an appropriate time.

So in preparation for the next time Az and I have a big argument, I am considering reading her selections from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Then I can tickle her under the chin and get:

“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say.”

Wouldn’t that be precious? And the next time I meet that particularly obnoxious professor, maybe she can sing-song this nugget from the Canon of Dort:

blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity and perverseness of judgment.

A two-year-old can do that, right? I might get away with it if it came from her.

Okay, okay, it’s unrealistic and a little exploitive. At least it’s not Sumerian.