One Night in America

JJ-aka-PP is known as the person in the family with the good memory for details, but she couldn't recall much on the phone this morning. Plottie asked her for information on the first (and, probably, only) evening that Mummy P. and the Chief spent with JJ and Ducknik's mom and dad, at their home on Long Island. JJ-aka-PP was fourteen at the time, but perhaps she's getting older now. Can't remember a thing.

Ducknik remembers it was an important night, because her parents got to meet his parents, which meant they could see that Plotnik, though he may be little more than roadkill that their daughter had troweled off the highway, came from good, hard working midwestern stock, just like they did. He could grow.

Plotnik remembers almost nothing, except that he was similarly pleased that everyone got along and politics never came up. He is sure there were cocktails in advance of dinner, which were probably consumed on the back patio at 82 Valley Road. The Chief was a martini man but Joe Sr. was Mr. Perfect Manhattan (on the rocks with a twist). A few of those and everyone would end up the best of friends.

Now, as time has somehow shot so far forward at such great speed, Plottie is happy he got to see the Ducknik Family homestead, when JJ was still a teenage sprite, Joe Jr. was on a ship in Vietnam, and that next year of illness and heartbreak was still somewhere out there where nobody could see it yet, miles away from the back patio, with the brick walkway, and the rhododendrons and all that good liquor.