Lively Potato Salad

Reader Contribution by Ellen Sandbeck
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Last year I spent my birthday in the one place I most wanted to be, where I usually am on my birthday: celebrating our friend Carolyn’s birthday at her birthday party. Carolyn is about five days older than I am, though light years ahead of me in soul and spirit.

Every year when Tim, Carolyn’s husband, invites us to Carolyn’s birthday barbeque, he asks me to bring my “famous” potato salad, which I am happy to do, because I am terrible at making the small decisions in life, such as deciding what to bring to a potluck. Put a Baskin Robbins’ 32 flavors of ice cream menu in front of me, and I become a quivering mass of indecision, yet I seem to have very little trouble making the really big life decisions: “Let’s get married!” “Yes!”  “Let’s have a baby!” Yes!” And I routinely volunteer to do very large jobs that I have never done before in my life, at the drop of a hat, all the while thinking: “I can do that! I already know how to do part of it. I’ll figure it out as I go.” I call this my “Sewing the parachute on the way out of the airplane” philosophy. Astonishingly, this usually works just fine, because I never volunteer to do anything that I am not convinced that I can figure out. But the small decisions in life stymie me: “Which ancient outfit from my woefully inadequate wardrobe should I wear to a reception?” I have no idea. “Which entrée should I order?” Maybe the waiter could come back in a year or two when I’ve had time to figure it out. Actually my restaurant indecisiveness has gotten a lot better in the past few years, because I’ve finally figured out that it doesn’t matter whether or not I order exactly the most delicious item on the menu. It’s just one meal; there will be others.

Back to the potato salad: When I pulled the bag of potatoes up off the floor of the spice cabinet, I discovered that there had been a magical transformation. The potatoes had started to sprout and now

resembled a very homely flock of sea anemones. (Which made me sadly ponder the fate of sea life in the Gulf of Mexico: surely sea anemones cannot survive the toxic tentacles of spewed oil.) It was that potatoey time of year when even incarcerated potatoes are trying to reach the light, and the ones bedded down in my garden were shooting up so fast that I could barely keep them adequately covered.

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