killing people on sunday nights with mom

We are somewhere in Virginia in the 1980s. The browns and oranges of the 1970s still linger in the house, but they are starting to be replaced. There is a large television set in the living room, to the right of the brick fireplace. Like many families of the time, we cluster around it and wait for our favorite shows. 

(None of this on-demand stuff, you little whippersnappers. If a show comes on on Sunday night, you watch it Sunday night or you have to wait for reruns in a couple of months --if ever.)

Sunday nights belong to my mother. The television set belongs to her. You're welcome to watch, of course, but shush.

Sunday nights are for killing people.

My mother is passing down a love of hers that persists to this day: a love for the puzzles that are people and crime. On Sunday nights, it is the program Mystery! on PBS (later to be supplemented with Murder She Wrote on CBS) that provides the vehicle. My mother has a dark sense of humor and doesn't mind the bloodshed. Agatha Christie is revered in our household, and whenever a new series based on her books comes on Mystery!, we look forward to it with an anticipation normally reserved for major gift-giving holidays.

In the early 1980s, we watch Tommy and Tuppence and Miss Marple. Beginning in the late 1980s, we watch Poirot.

While we wait for Sunday nights and new programs, Mom introduces me to the books that go along with the series. Her mother (my grandmother) has a bunch of old Agatha Christie paperbacks with illustrated covers that smell like dust. I discover there are other books that don't have recurring characters, like And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that fascinate me, and my mother encourages this by discussing them. 

While we wait for Sunday nights and new programs, my mother plans her own murders. Not real ones. Don't worry.

My mother has an interesting habit of thinking about clever ways to kill people (never gruesome --always quick and clean) and noticing places. She thinks nothing of saying, aloud, "That would be a great place to find a dead body." 

My mother works at a job with the phone company during the week. She is told things at work like, "We don't pay you to think." She has a degree in Microbiology, but she works at the phone company, which allows her to raise her family with my dad. She bides her time. 

Fast forward to the present: The 1980s have faded and peeled away like old wallpaper. We kids have left, and my parents have moved houses a couple of times. My mom retires. 

Now, she gets to write her own books. She has excuses to kill people in public. She has a reason to plan her own capers. I am left with the unfortunate habit of solving plot twists too quickly (The Usual Suspects? I figured it out within 10 minutes).

They are odd gifts we get from our mothers, but I wouldn't trade the gift of killing people on Sunday nights with my mother for anything.  She gave me logic and a love of intrigue and the persistence of dreams.

Thanks, Mom.