THE POTATO SALAD RECIPE BINDER | Dixie L. King
I pause in the doorway of what I call my “junk room.”
Nearly everything in this room survived the dumpsters and yard sales and donation runs that reduced my father’s property from 3,000 square feet of home, garage and shop to two hundred and forty cubic feet of storage boxes. My “junk room” was Dad’s sitting room during the year he spent with me after his stroke, before his needs exceeded my capacity and I had to put him into an assisted living facility. That was seven years ago. Now this room stores the remnants of his life.
I’ve avoided going through these boxes for a very long time, but Dad has asked me to bring him the pictures from his two eight-day raft trips down the Colorado River. I think I know the general vicinity of where they might be stored.
I resolutely pull down the first of three possible storage boxes and open my father’s life as it once was. The box is a microcosm of the larger chaos around me. I stop and put my head between my knees as I fight down what is either nausea or anxiety. Or maybe it’s just grief, the one emotion I haven’t had time for in seven years.
***
Dad was a collector. Stamps, coins, glass insulators found along railroad tracks (he was a brakeman and then conductor on the Santa Fe Railroad for forty-two years), belt buckles, pocket knives, Arizona Highways magazines, postcards, wood carvings, woodworking tools and books (mostly unused and unread), souvenirs from the California missions and every one of the dozen trips he took all over the world, and receipts for everything he’d bought in the thirty-one years between my mother’s death and his stroke.
What to keep and what to get rid of has haunted me, a discordant accompaniment to everything else I have to deal with as Dad’s caretaker.
Some things seem like obvious discards. For example, a few years before the stroke, Dad had taken to collecting recipes. I’m not sure he ever prepared a single one. He just collected them, buying cookbooks from every small town he passed through on road trips, from church sales and swap meets, and from the racks that line the checkout stands in neighborhood grocery stores. These are not gourmet cookbooks. They are “hot dish” recipes and meals redolent of the Standard American Diet (SAD), using ingredients ranging from Spam to Tater Tots and Campbell’s soup, and bearing names like “Family Fun Meatloaf.” In one closet of his house, nearly two months after his stroke, I found a box of crumbling newspaper clippings, stacked and neatly tied with string, with recipes dating back at least fifteen years. Dust mites had found them irresistible.
Now I find a binder of potato salad recipes, over sixty of them. It’s an eclectic set. There are recipes attributed to people (three different recipes labeled “Mom’s Potato Salad” as though reflecting the character of the modern American family, plus “Grandmother’s Potato Salad,” “Aunt Lily’s Potato Salad,” and “Uncle George’s Potato Salad”). Some salads are tied to places (California Potato Salad, Dublin Potato Salad, Allegheny Potato Salad); other salads are reflective of events (Picnic Potato Salad; Fourth of July Potato Salad). Certain recipes are clearly titled to tantalize: Zesty Potato Salad; Tangy Potato Salad, and my personal favorite, Potato Salad Cha Cha Cha with Lime Vinaigrette.
I’m not sure when he started collecting them, but the recipes are organized, neatly typed and printed, three-hole-punched and in alphabetical order—but with no references, so I have no idea where he got them. I imagine they are from friends, from newspapers and from magazines in waiting rooms. The only recipe not present is the only one I know he ever made: my mother’s.
This is an obvious discard. I open the binder and pull out the pages, ready to toss them into the recycle bin. Then I stop, paralyzed. What if a miracle occurs and he regains his cognition? What will it mean to him that I’ve dismantled his life as easily as I might have dismantled one of the many jigsaw puzzles we used to put together?
It’s the stroke that has dismantled his life. And mine.
I replace the recipes and drop the binder back into the box. I know I’m not going to be able to do this today. I lean against the wall, defeated and my gaze roams the room. On the second shelf of the bookcase to my left are two small albums. I reach out in disbelief. They contain the pictures of his trip down the Colorado River. I clutch them and back out of the room, closing the door carefully behind me.
***
Dad is waiting for me. Of course he is. He always is.
His face lights up. “I thought you were coming earlier,” he tells me. We hadn’t actually discussed when I would be coming next, either the day or the time. I look at my once robust father: the high school football star recruited by the Detroit Lions in 1948 before a massive facial injury ended his nascent football career; the Korean War veteran; the world traveler who made friends literally everywhere: a Chinese tour guide, an Australian fishing crew, a priest serving a leprosy colony in the Amazon, an Egyptian riverboat boy, a Samoan dance troupe. This is the man who was my favorite playmate as a child, my favorite travel partner as an adult, my greatest cheerleader and supporter as I pursued my doctorate, then started a business. This is the man who started college at 67 years of age and graduated at 73—the day before he suffered the massive stroke that brought him to this: a frail, big-boned man with watery eyes staring hopefully at me from a wheelchair.
“I thought you were coming earlier,” he repeats.
The history major who never forgot a date and who had an uncanny ability to retain trivia of all types, no longer understands time; he cannot sequence, meaning he can’t tell you whether Wednesday comes before or after Tuesday. He can read a clock but can’t process visual clues to know that daylight signifies that it’s 3:00 in the afternoon, and not 3:00 in the morning. He can’t tell you whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner time, and he occasionally complains bitterly about being served dinner for breakfast.
“If the day comes that I become incapacitated,” he once told me, “You don’t hesitate. You put me in a nursing home. You have to live your own life.” He said it in the healthy assurance that this would never happen, because he knew he’d kill himself first. And anyway, he knew I’d never take him at his word.
“Sorry I’m late, Dad.”
He doesn’t speak, but the look in his eyes says he can’t believe I’ve put him here, can’t believe that the daughter who adored him has now abandoned him like an unwanted pet.
I can’t either.
***
“When is lunch?” Dad asks.
“He’s always hungry,” the nursing assistant laughs. “You just ate, Mr. King. Remember the sandwich?”
Since outside of his usual breakfast of sausage and eggs he will only eat turkey sandwiches, I’m sure he remembers the sandwich.
“I’m hungry,” he tells me. It is exactly one hour and thirty-five minutes since his last meal.
“Sorry, Dad. You have to wait.”
He pouts.
I hand him the little picture albums of his trips down the Colorado River.
“Bye,” I tell him. “Have a good day.”
“I thought you’d stay for lunch,” he tells me.
“You just ate lunch.”
“Dinner, then,” he says, annoyed.
“I have to work,” I say truthfully.
“I thought you’d want to watch me eat.”
“I know you can eat, Dad. I have to get to work. Stay out of trouble, okay?” I ask.
He smiles a little, the gap in his teeth prominent where he knocked out a tooth in a recent fall. “I can’t run fast enough to get into trouble.”
I smile back and leave.
He calls me before I get to the door.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you, too.”
I am out the door and ten paces down the hall when I hear him calling for me again. I keep walking, feeling my gut twist and knowing the day will come when he’s no longer there to call and I will hate myself for the fact that all I can feel right now is anger, resentment, resistance, impatience. I walk on and think about what the last eight years have brought me to—a person who meticulously cares for my father’s financial and medical needs, and who forces herself into the caretaking role that love should render a privilege.
It doesn’t.
They call it “compassion fatigue,” this inability to feel or display human kindness toward even those we love most, because the internal well has run dry.
Everyone raves about what a good daughter I am. And outwardly I am. But the resentment festers, taking its place in the catalog of crimes against my own and my father’s humanity.
***
Another hospitalization. They occur monthly now. I work on my computer in a chair near his bed for an hour or so, thinking he’s asleep. He speaks suddenly, startling me.
“I’m going to ask you something and I want a straight answer.”
He sounds for a moment like the father I remember.
“Okay,” I say cautiously.
“Am I dying?”
I breathe. “No. You have a urinary tract infection.”
He stares at the ceiling, and I ask, “Do you want to live?”
“Yes!” The word is forceful. “I have things to do.”
“What is it you still want to do, Dad?”
He looks at me and smiles, both rueful and hopeful, as though his intellect is warring with his compromised brain cells. “I want to travel again across northern Arizona and southern Utah’s canyon country.”
He’s been all over the world, and his two eight-day sojourns down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon are still the highlight of his travels.
The tears rise involuntarily. He won’t be going back to canyon country until the day I scatter his ashes there.
“You don’t have to cry,” he says.
***
Weeks later, I am back in my junk room, looking into the box with the binder of potato salad recipes. I pick up the binder, open it, and pull out the recipes. I make a motion to throw the fistful of pages with their neat lines of ingredients into the recycle bin. Then I stop once more, on the edge of epiphany.
For the first time, I understand why this room has remained a storage room for seven years. When I break down the last box to put into the recycle bin, the father I loved so dearly, my best friend and greatest supporter for so long, will finally and irrevocably be dead and gone, leaving only the avatar sitting in the assisted living facility that wears his face but is otherwise not my father. The father with whom I picked strawberries in the backyard garden as a child during warm spring days. The father I loved.
I put the potato salad recipes back in the binder.
And I add my mother’s.
Rose’s Potato Salad
Four large baking potatoes, boiled in their skin
until tender and refrigerated until cold
Two hard-boiled eggs, chopped
Half a cup of celery, chopped fine
Six green onions, chopped fine
Half a cup of sweet pickles, chopped fine
Half a cup of green olives, chopped fine
Mayonnaise—just enough to hold the salad together
One tablespoon of Dijon mustard
Two teaspoons of salt
Paprika
Peel the potatoes and chop into bite-size chunks. Mix with the other ingredients, except the paprika. Press into a bowl and sprinkle with paprika. Chill for one hour.
Dixie L. King received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UCLA and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She served as executive director of the International Women's Writing Guild from 2014 to 2018. Her work has appeared in the Home Health Care Quarterly, ERS Spectrum, Women's Studies Journal and Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations. Her first fantasy novel Ithia's Dance (Atmosphere, 2026) was published. She lives in Prescott Valley, Arizona with three cats who regularly critique both her and her work.