Praise Be to the Family Potato Salad

My greatest potato salad memory as a kid involves my school district’s “Kennywood Day,” when we spent the whole day at the Kennywood amusement park.

My mother packed the cooler full of her amazing fried chicken and potato salad. We’d arrive at the picnic pavilion in the morning, hit the rides and roller-coasters and play all day.

Then we’d return to the pavilion for dinner at 5 p.m. absolutely famished. The chicken and potato salad were ice cold and to this day the most delicious things I have ever devoured.

Since potato salad is a fairly labor-intensive creation and hard on my mother’s aging hands, it’s now my turn to carry on the family recipe.

Unfortunately, the festivity long associated with my mother’s recipe — the festivity of family gatherings and forgetting our adult worries — is not so strong anymore.

With COVID variants spreading still — my sister recently caught one, and is back to good health, but two elderly family members died because of their infections — we have to keep our distance from our elderly parents.

Members of our large extended family, as is probably the case with most extended families, hold differing points of view about the efficacy of the COVID vaccine and those differences are causing squabbles and discontent.

There’s also great sadness from the chaos in Afghanistan and the deaths of 13 young U.S. soldiers. We’re sad, too, that it seems nobody is in command of our government affairs and we’re worried that even greater unpleasantness is about to visit our world.

As hopeful Americans, however, we will do our best to carry on. We will pray for our political leaders, our country, those suffering around the world and our family.

But at the small gathering at my mom and dad’s this weekend, we’ll do our best to momentarily forget the troubles of the world and concentrate on the joy that my mother’s potato salad always brings.

The pressure is tremendous, but I can’t wait to see how well I did.

Tom Purcell is an author and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.