What I Don’t Know About Tacos

I could ask my mother I suppose

We had homemade tacos tonight

Tomatoes and sweet onions with patent numbers,

Mexican lettuce and Kraft’s version of cheese

Yet they were quite tasty

 

We baked the cardboard-boxed, shrink-wrapped

Pre-formed and cooked shells to a nice crunch

And I remembered tacos past

Being very young in Montgomery

Mama cooking the meat and the tacos

in skillets on the stove top

 

The tacos were the white soft, flat stacked kind

The meat a little greasy, draining on paper

Did she cook them in water or margarine?

I know it wasn’t butter, progress and all

Instant coffee, biscuit tubes, Kraft Mac and margerine

 

Where did she learn about tacos? In Mississippi?

At the ladies church luncheon? Better House Keeping?

I could ask her, but I never have, and why did she change

To the pre-made crunchy kind when I was in my teens?

And how did she cook on the stove top

In the summer in Alabama without A/C?

 

Where are the little grocery stores,

Meat in a case and fresh local produce

Stacked in bins and a few rows

of canned goods and staples

In short crowded aisles in between

 

I had a Mexican in-law for awhile

Once a year we would cook chicken tacos

An all day event and the night before, too

Tasty, but a lot of work, but they were Mexican

How did my mother come to make a taco?

How did she ever leave fried chicken

And slow oven roasted beef?

 

I could ask Mama, and maybe I will

Because there is a lot I don’t know about tacos

 

(I wrote this in 2003, unfortunately, I can no longer ask my mother, as she died this past January)