32 Yesterday, 37 Today

Thirty two years ago yesterday, the man on the bottom was born, and his parents brought him home to their farm in Cat's Whiskers, PA. A few weeks later, his grandparents Mummy and Chiefie Plotnik arrived to see him, and Chiefie took this picture and the one that follows. In those days Baby Dan's name was Baby Dan, not Baby I's father.



One day after Baby Dan was born, but five years earlier, The Great Plotnik and The Great Ducknik had gotten married, in a ceremony so low-key they don't even have a wedding photo album. Thirty seven years have passed since Plotnik's nervousness caused him to shrink and disappear from the few wedding photos that are in existence -- you see a beautiful bride in a white dress she has made, and she is standing next to the other white suit that she has made, except there is no groom in it. He has melted. You know he's got to be in there somewhere because the suit is standing up, but where has he gone?

By the time Baby Dan was born, Plot and Duck had lived in a teensy apartment that was usually hot and an old machine shop with one heater in the middle that was always cold. Both these abodes had been in the Big Shmapple, but now they had packed up and moved to Pennsylvania, to the broken-down farm and farmhouse they and their friends had renovated. On the back of the picture above, Mummy Plotnik has written: "Yes -- we're happy! 10-13-75."

Getting married to Barbara Louise Jenkins was the smartest thing The Great Plotnik every did. He knew it then and he still knows it now. They've been to a lot of beautiful places, but Assos, Turkey, may be the most beautiful of all. So far, that is.