Apples, Tomatoes and Freddie's.

The tasteless and unjuicy apples have arrived! It has taken Plotnik more than ten years but he has finally trained these beauties to grow up and over the deck where he can pick them off easily to eat with his bagel, cream cheese, onion and tomato lunch.



Of course, the apples are a bit...dry and, honestly, kind of...astringent...and, it's fair to say, really not good for anything but apple sauce; still, it's good to know that the fruit tree pruning lessons Plottie learned all those years ago in Pennsylvania are still valid.

And the tomatoes in the tubs are going nuts this year. Or at least they were until summer arrived, brrrrr.



Meanwhile, last night Plot and Duck went to The Great Fate's house for a birthday dinner, and all the food was brought in by friends who just happen to own and run Town's End Restaurant down near Braindead Stadium. It was all delicious. There were lots of (hungry) Jewish guys there so the talk, naturally, soon turned to the best pastrami sandwiches everyone had ever eaten. Nothing in Saint Plotniko, of course, but Langer's in Stiletto City got very high marks, along with the usual suspects: Katz's in New York, Maxie's in Chicago and the late Wolfie's in Miami.

So Plotnik, who hasn't been to Langer's in several years, started reading up on the place, which sits on a corner of MacArthur Park where delis are not exactly a household word because you can't put pastrami into a Nicaraguan tamale. The thing Plot had forgotten about the Langer's pastrami sandwiches is that Langer's has always bought its rye bread from a bakery called Fred's.

Freddie's! Fred's Bakery, which is down on Robertson around the corner from Brother Street's old house, definitely does have the best rye bread in the world. Fred's is the location of Plottie's story "Plotnik's Perfect." In the story the bakery is called Freddie's and the baker is named Plotnik, except he is also...well, God. Everybody takes a red plastic number and it sometimes takes a thousand years for your number to get called. When it does get called you get to order as much as you want and take as long as you like to eat it. Then, when you can't handle any more...well, you have to listen to the story. Plot recorded it a while ago and is now rummaging through his archives to find it.

(NOW Plotnik reads that the owners of Fred's sold out last year and that rye bread is no longer what it was and that Langer's has changed suppliers. As Billy Pilgrim said: "So it goes.")

(And Plottie found the story.)