The Legend of the Lone 'Tater

One of the questions I have gotten is "Where did you get the name the lone 'tater?" Well, most of you know, I just spent tons of time in our beautiful Mission hospital (81 days but who's counting?). If you have ever spent time in the hospital, you know that the food is not the best. However, for special patients, they will give you a special menu. And by special, I mean, those who dwell well. Since I qualified due to my length of stay, I would often order from the special menu. There were times that the kitchen would screw up my order but on the whole, they usually got it right. One day, I got a tray delivered to my bed side. At the time it came, I had a visitor so I didn't open the lid immediately. About 20 minutes later, I opened it and what did I see? A lone 'tater sitting there on the plate. Until this time, I didn't notice that I had no silver ware or the little packet of spices that come with the utensils nor were there any drinks but there was a little cup of orange sherbet. Upon inspection, I observed that the potato(for you non-Southerners) was not cut open. It was at least cooked. I began to laugh. You see, I had ordered homemade chicken salad on a bed of lettuce and tomatoes with saltines and a "loaded" baked potato. Now, I don't know about you but where I am from "loaded" means butter, cheese, sour cream, & bacon. I have never been anywhere that loaded meant orange sherbet. I laughed until my sides hurt. I called my CNA in there and she graciously went down to the kitchen to remedy the situation. She apparently hailed from the same place that I did. Well, the night staff came on and my precious nurse came in and laughingly said, "I heard about the legend of the Lone 'Tater." I proceeded to collapse into laughter again. By this time, I had been there for nigh 60 days so you either had to laugh or go crazy. I chose laughter. The Lone 'Tater became the running joke for the rest of my stay. I told my husband that night that if I ever wrote a book I was going to name it The Lone 'Tater: Finding God & Humor in Crisis Situations. When I wanted to start writing some things, he suggested that as the title of my blog. We have even bought the rights to it's domain. I was chatting (by computer, mind you) with some other women who had hysterectomies when I did and told them the name of the book. We live all over the world on this website but went through the same thing at the same time (I have listed this in my favorite websites). One woman asked, "so what's a 'tater?" I tried to explain to her that we Southerners are lazy and cut corners where we can when it comes to speech and grammar and the "po" in potato is just too much for us so we leave it off. Anyway, hope you all have a "lone 'tater" kind of day, full of humor and laughter. Doesn't that burn calories?