As a child, celebrating the Fourth of July was so easy.
Sparklers, rockets, and a coffee can full of fireworks – Black Cats, Gorillas, even Lady Fingers would do in a pinch. What mattered were the sparks and the sharp bang as a small tube of paper-wrapped firepower exploded.
A picnic helped, too, even if it was just immediate family and we didn’t do anything unusual except carry our plates out to the garden instead of sitting at the kitchen table like we did practically every other day of the year. Somehow it made a difference to sit in an old netted lawn chair or on the porch step. It had absolutely nothing to do with the original Fourth of July Independence Day, but it seemed appropriate to be outside.
The nice thing about a Fourth of July meal, at least when I was a kid, was that it didn’t have to be anything spectacular. Hot dogs with mustard were a meal as long as we had potato salad. The lemonade and iced tea that came with it took on an exotic flavor when served with hot dogs and potato salad. Maybe the smell of gunpowder had something to do with that.
My mother made the best potato salad I’ve ever had. She didn’t think her cooking skills were exceptional, but she could whip up a bowl of potato salad that was out of this world.
What I remember most about my mother’s potato salad is that you had to be lightning fast to get your share, and not just because it was a dish that was in high demand at summer picnics. If you didn’t line up and serve it up quickly enough, my mother would throw her potato salad in the trash. At some point in her younger life, she developed a fear that a medical professional would call irrational that the food she prepared could go “bad.”
Dishes with eggs and mayonnaise and the like worried her. Someone must have told her that such ready meals shouldn’t be left on the counter for too long, otherwise they would spoil and who knows what damage that could cause.
I didn’t get the impression that anyone told my mother how long it was “too long” to leave potato salad out. She was too cautious, sometimes to the point of being willing to throw the dish away before we had even washed our faces and hands, let alone prayed a blessing over the food before eating. (I think my mother believed in the power of prayer. She just wasn’t sure it would protect her potato salad.)
She wasn’t so worried about hot dogs lying around. In hindsight, the hot dogs were perhaps more dangerous than the potato salad. I can only imagine the kind of food research my mother would have done if the Internet had been around 75 years ago.
The only thing better than my mother’s potato salad was the ice cream people served at Fourth of July picnics or other large summer events. The ice cream at warm-weather picnics came in canvas containers about the size of a standard garbage can. The canvas protected a type of insulation designed to keep the ice cream cool in the shade of a tree in a city park.
An adult would hand out the ice cream, putting two scoops into an old-style cone for almost everyone. I can’t remember ever finishing a cone without the ice cream melting down the sides of the cone and falling onto my fingers. I also can’t remember there being much better ice cream in the country, even if it was mostly vanilla. I guess it didn’t take much to make me happy.
As we approach the Fourth of July, I find myself concerned about the future of the country, the state of our democracy, and what kind of world we are leaving to our children and grandchildren.
Life was easier when all I had to worry about was whether the guy with the scoop would run out of ice cream before I got to the front of the line.
