An Entertainment

When I started this blog I made the decision not to limit it to recipes and foodtalk. I uphold that decision, and in addition to posting the occasional poem I will post snippets from some fiction I have been writing. To any who might be alarmed by the idea of my writing a fiction about the goings on in a failing hospital I will repeat- This is a story. It is fiction! Since it is a chapter, and since time and modern attention spans are short I will serialize it over several days. This snippet will introduce William Lyman, the CEO hired by the Catholic Conference to fix its hospital.


A Meeting of the Board- by E.Sprague


Two days after the nurses gave Will Lyman their breakfast reception, the new CEO went to his first meeting with the Saint Sanctimonia Board of Trustees.

The trustees met in the dining room of the Executive Offices, and what a contrast those offices were to the dingy conference room where the nurses held their breakfast.The decor was elegant and restrained. There were Chinoiserie vases with real lilies. Silver coffee carafes and oil portraits of the nuns who once ran the hospital and the two CEOs who followed them who were not in jail or under indictment.

Lucille's Strictly Southern Party-Time Catering provided the buffet spread out on tables that lined two walls. Ross Midgett, COO, and Lyman's second in command was already eating. Dinner in reverse! He finished his slice of Mile-High Coconut pie as Lyman sat down.

The room smelled of barbecue, and there it was- in silver chafing dishes along with butter beans, fried chicken, Virginia ham, corn casserole, biscuits, fried catfish, and spicy shrimp. Ross Midgett grabbed a biscuit, and slathered it with peach preserves, acting as though it was the last biscuit he would ever see.

Lyman had met the Board the day the nuns hired him. Judge Ritchie was chairman then. Now the man in charge was Joe Strickland of Strickland International Motorcars.

"If we talk fast we can get on over to that sideboard", Strickland said. Meetings rarely lasted an hour, but since this was a reception no one expected the non-eating part to last more than ten minutes. "Let's do the Lord's Prayer", the chairman said. Rabbi David Plotz, on Strickland's right was the only abstainer.

News came next. Strickland read it off an index card.

"I'm sorry to inform y'all that Miss Viola Crowell, our Director of Volunteer Services for forty years, died two days ago of a heart attack. Now folks, I don't have any info on funeral arrangements,but I know somebody here at the hospital will be setting up a memorial service".

"Who died?" asked Judge Richie , who had missed the announcement because his pocket flask and his glass of ginger ale had just collided under the table. Ritchie was a great favorite Of the General John Bell Hood Boulevard Police.They regularly rescued him when he drove up the Boulevard the wrong way. As long as he missed hitting the cardiologists out riding their racing bikes and confined his hit-and-runs to possums no one said a word. Not Len Atkins, publisher of the City's one surviving newspaper, who was sitting to Ritchie's left. Not J.R. Swizzleberger, owner of Channel 15, who sat on Ritchie's right.

"Viola Crowell", ruminated Dr Sam Bush, in his deep baritone. Bush was a venerable African-American general practitioner from Speckled Fly, a town 20 miles north of the City. Six foot eight- with blue-black skin, white hair, and pale blue eyes, he was sui generis. No ER nurse in the Speckled Fly Hospital Emergency Room will ever forget his call to the Capers family to tell them that their 90 year old matriarch had driven her Cadillac across the Interstate 100 median strip and collided head-on with a pig-hauler.

"She's dead", he intoned,"Dead Dead Dead. And there's bacon all over the road".



To be continued-