Dear Potato Salad

Humans are just the weirdest ever. Well, maybe it isn't humans. Maybe it's just me. I shall now provide an example.

The other day some nice person gave me some pulled pork. It was delicious. It is delicious, I mean, because I still have some, because it was a generous helping and I am like the slowest eater ever and I am still trying to control my portions especially since I have decided to add donuts back into my diet as staples.

So the pulled pork is delicious but what goes with pulled pork? My first thought: potato salad. I guess cole slaw would also go with it, but cole slaw is not as preferred by me as potato salad. I like slaw, but it's not potato salad. And point of fact, I really only ever loved my grandmother's potato salad, but if I am at an event where non-grandma potato salad is being served, I will still eat it.

I always thought at some point I would have my grandmother teach me how to make the potato salad. She is not dead yet, so I should probably still try to make that a thing. Maybe the dementia will take a holiday and she will be in the zone and we will make potato salad and I will have a memory to treasure.

My dad taught me how to make his lasagne, but it was over the phone. I still have my multitude of index cards with ingredients and the steps to follow, even to make my own sauce. I have never made my own sauce. I have made the lasagne and it is delicious. He told me he had a secret ingredient; it turns out that ingredient is actually in every lasagne. You mix it in with the ricotta and egg and cheese. For a long time I guarded it like it was a real secret. Then I started reading recipes online and everyone says to use it. It's nutmeg. You're welcome. 

That is actually a classic story about my dad. He would tell me something and I would believe it and guard it and much later find out that none of what he had said was true. Since he is no longer living and since I no longer wish to, I do not become angry about this. It is now just part of what I remember.

Since I have taken this detour, I have recently decided what I really gained from his death.

See, people always say this total crap about how you learn from everything in your life and I hate that. Like, this horrible, terrible thing happened to you, but you learned from it. I feel like I could have still had a perfectly sound and pleasant life without that horrible thing and it's all important "lesson." But the reality is that bad things do happen and if you do not find some way to process it, it will kill you, emotionally, if not literally. So, instead of thinking of the terrible things as teaching me lessons, I am viewing it as giving me a gift. I mean, who doesn't enjoy a gift and when there is a surprise one! Even better. And even though it is exactly the same as a lesson, something terrible giving me a gift makes me feel better than it teaching me a lesson.

This supports my opening sentence regarding being weird.

Anyways, my  gift (read: lesson), from the death of my father is a greater compassion and understanding for others when someone in their life dies. My relationship with my father was crappy and dumb, but he was still my father. I look exactly like him-like, exactly like him- and his health was awful, but it was still a shock when he died. And I remember everything about finding out he'd died and telling my sister and my mom and kind of ruining my friend's graduation after-party, and lying in bed that night feeling like this heavy, thick, rectangular box was lying on my chest and driving the next day and not knowing at all how I arrived at my destination. I remember how my brain was a mess for a good year afterward. I remember how isolating it felt. None of that was the gift; the gift was that when I see that look into the eyes of someone else who has had someone they care about die, I understand. I know what questions to ask and how to better listen. I know to send a card and say you are sorry, even if they insist the person wasn't that close to them or that they are fine. The gift was a depth of understanding.

He said some crazy things, like nutmeg is way super secret, but when he left, he gave me that. 


So, back to pulled pork. 

I bought three different kinds of potato salad to go with my grand pulled pork. I served it up on a place. A dollop of each type of salad to accompany the yummy pork and, in combination, potato salad tastes exactly like nothing. And so then, I ate it separately. And separately, potato salad still tastes exactly like nothing. I still eat/ate it because I apparently like the taste of nothing. Honestly, my grandmother's potato salad tastes like nothing, too. I love it and it is literally just cold potato.

Lots of things taste like nothing, frankly. Take bread. I love me some bread, but it tastes like nothing. It is primarily a vehicle for butter or jam or brie or something else. Yet, I will be picky about my bread. I want a good quality bread. I want fresh bread, so the nothing will be lighter, softer, and more delicately carry to my lips the delightful other item I have slathered upon it.

I feel the same way about cake. Cake is a vehicle for frosting. Who even cares about cake unless it has frosting? I made a chocolate cake once, like, from scratch. With Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate and the whole stinking nine yards. You were supposed to sprinkle powered sugar on top. This was fancy-times cake, humans. And the cake was good, and the powered sugar looked really pretty like, but you know what else I did to that cake? I made some cream cheese frosting and coated that cake in it and then? THEN THAT CAKE WAS THE CAKE OF THE LORD OUR GOD.  Bland until frosting.

I kept eating that bland old potato salad, even though the one variety I brought had eggs in it and I am allergic. Do  you know why I did that? Because I had paid for that potato salad. And since I had spent money on it, it had to be eaten. And I do that with almost everything in my life. If I paid money for it, it will be eaten, it will be worn, it will be watched. Otherwise that money had been wasted. Who cares if I am ill or ill-dressed? Who cares that the time I spend refusing to leave the theater because I paid for this movie so I will watch the whole thing is time that could have spent doing something I actually like? I. PAID. FOR. THIS.

What a great, big, bunch of weirdos the humans are. We eat bland foods and rave about it, and we suffer through the bad when we think we should for no other reason than that we spent money on it, and we have to make ourselves enjoy the good things that we actually enjoy because we are so accustomed to the sufferings, and we don't figure out most of the other important things until they end.

Well, like I said. Maybe it's just me. If so, then perhaps all of this long windedness made you feel less like a chump. And if it did, then that is my gift to you.

LESSON!