Potato Salad

By G. E. Shuman

            In this column, I would like to discuss the very serious topic of potato salad. It may not seem like much of an issue to you or me, but it’s a big deal to a potato. After all, many lowly spuds, each year, give their very lives for the privilege of being included in this summertime picnic/barbecue/cookout/pig roast/ favorite. Truly, no self-respecting picnic table would dare show its face, (if it had one,) without offering picnickers at least one version of a potato salad, or as it is called in one language ‘baa-DA-da” salad. I’m not sure what language that is, but I’m pretty sure I heard that word somewhere in the South.

            I will admit that for some people, potato salad, (as we call it here in the North) is an acquired taste. For my family, it’s always just been a part of summer, and such salads are as individual as the person who made them, or at least as individual as the places they came from. It’s true. German potato salad is great. The Germans have produced some wonderful inventions in the past, including both potato salad and my antique VW beetle. I’m not sure what else they have done, but those two things are cool. Then, American potato salad is as much a melting pot experience as Americans are themselves, and I’m convinced that almost any food that could fit into a mixing bowl has, at one time or another, wound up in someone’s potato salad.

            My salad is very well known all over (my house,) as yours probably is, all over yours. In fact, it’s hard to make potato salad without getting it all over. My salad has a few variations, depending on how ‘spicy’ I’m feeling when I make it. (Wow, you’re thinking… he gets excited over potato salad.  He must be a blast at parties!) Anyway, my recipe always includes about a five-pound bag of potatoes, (big surprise), and I also put in about a half dozen hard-boiled eggs. Notice the word ‘about’ in the last sentence. My theory is that when it comes to my version of potato salad, part of the secret is the great, wandering impreciseness of it all. The potatoes are cut into smallish cubes and boiled, and the eggs are chopped up. They have also had their shells removed. I’ve found that the salad is easier to swallow that way. I also include chopped onions or scallions, a cut up cucumber, a squirt of mustard, (Check your measuring chart to establish just how much a squirt is.) garlic salt, and the all-important completely un-measured heaping mound of mayonnaise.  (See how I slid two hyphens into that one sentence there?) Also, remember, it’s mayonnaise. That stuff called salad dressing is not for dressing a salad.  I’m not sure what it’s for.

            I’m sure your potato salad is different from mine, and that’s a good thing. After all, your potato salad is your picnic fingerprint, and if your young kids like your salad, you get to have spud salad fingerprints all over your car windows on the drive home.  Aren’t those little ones so precious?

            I thought through all of this important stuff about the VERY important topic of potato salad today, because my wife asked me to put one together for her to take to her ladies’ Bible study meeting tomorrow morning. They’re doing a Christmas in July party at the meeting, so, being Christmas and all, of course, they wanted potato salad. Huh? I made the salad this afternoon and put it in the fridge to cool overnight. As I made it I prided myself that I had finally figured out what those ladies actually do at those meetings. I guess there are worse things they could be up to than sitting around studying the Bible and eating my potato salad.  

The Technology of Their Time

By G. E. Shuman

                My grandkids have always amazed me with what they know about, and what they’re able to do with the technology that surrounds them today. It astounds me, the places they can go, and the internet-borne information they can easily glean from around the globe, nearly instantaneously.

                For years I’ve preached to my high school English students the importance of having some of that knowledge ‘up here’, as I would point to my head, hoping they got the idea of the relevance of actually KNOWING things. Some of them would reply with the question “Why?”, when, as I would have to agree, they would recite that they could reach into their pocket at any time for their device and have all the information, not just from memory, but in perfect, wonderful completeness, literally at their fingertips. Lately, I’m not absolutely certain I was correct in expounding on the importance of compiling knowledge, to those kids, although I still think there are things we just need to know.

                Our world has never been through anything like the technological revolution we are experiencing today, but, without question, it has experienced other versions of it that were likely as disconcerting to the ‘older’ people of those times as the information age is to us present-day ‘seniors’. This was the exact case when, sometime in the 1970s, I showed my grandfather my first pocket calculator. His reaction was to input the equation 2 + 2 =, and when he received the answer, stated: “That’s almost immoral.” He said this, simply, or maybe not so simply, from his generation’s point of view, because the answer was given without any effort being exerted.

                The other day I happened to see a clipart drawing of a hand, holding a quill pen, and carefully writing the ones and zeros of computer code, on a partially unrolled scroll. I thought that this image was just brilliant!  The idea of writing the language of computers in one of the earliest versions of the recorded writings of mankind was just wonderful, to me. The only thing better, I think, would have been if the code had been expressed in a cave painting.

                I thought, as I looked more at that scroll and the old quill pen, that whoever first invented the idea of ink and of sharpening a feather to a point, to apply the ink to a papyrus or other scroll, must have been in awe of one of his grandchildren, as that child picked up this ‘adult’ instrument and blithely drew a stick-figure picture of his family or his first effort at expressing a sunset.

                Then, in our history, came the binding of books, and the greatly advanced semi-permanence of the recorded thoughts of other generations, even if they had to be painstakingly copied, a letter at a time. And then came the printing press, a great advance in allowing those thoughts to be shared with countless others, followed by movable type, which further eased and advanced the task of securing and preserving the knowledge of the ages.  Those advances, as they say, are history, but I believe they’re much more than that. They’re the reason that many of us love the literature of the past. The preservation of those writings is the very reason we are even aware of what our history is. 

                As I said when I began, my grandkids have always amazed me with what they know about, and what they’re able to do with today’s technology.  This morning I felt like that guy with the first quill pen, when my granddaughter Nahla took my iPhone out of my hand as we sat together on the couch. She turned the device on, handed it to me so I could input my password, and then proceeded to take it back, search through Netflix and YouTube, skipping ads, flipping through options, and speeding to the videos she wanted to watch with me.  She was simply doing what we all have done, in using the technology of her own time. I wonder what she’ll be able to do next month, when she turns two years old.