from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces (1989)
The day I married, my mother
had one piece of wedding advice:
“Don't make good potato salad,”
she told me, “it's too hard to make
and you'll have to take something
every time you get invited somewhere.
Just cook up beans; people eat them too.”
My mother was good at potato salad
and part of the memories of my childhood
have to do with endless batches made
for family get-togethers, church picnics,
Civitan suppers, Democratic party fund raisers,
whatever event called for potato salad.
I'd peel the hard-boiled eggs.
My mother would pack
her big red plastic picnic bowl
high with yellow potato salad
(she used mustard),
and it would sit proud on endless tables
and come home empty.
What my mother might and could have said is:
Choose carefully what you get good at
’cause you'll spend the rest of your life doing it.
But I didn't hear that.
I was young and anxious to please
and I knew her potato salad secrets.
And the thousand other duties
given to daughters by mothers,
and sometimes I envy those women
who get by with pots of beans.