This week, a post from the early days of my eponymous blog when I was a First Draft reader, not writer.

It’s about our wonderful former across the street neighbors, the Ginters. They moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2007. We still miss them. What’s not to love about a neighbor who was a certified electrician and HVAC tech who charged us family rates?

As usual with older posts, I’ve done a bit of strategic editing and tweaked the post including the title. I’m big on tweaking nowadays. Better to tweak than be a twit or some such shit.

Let’s set the Wayback Machine to the summer of 2006.

YOU SAY PLAN-O AND I SAY PLAY-NO

Tue, 11 Jul 2006

Dr. A mildly chastised me the other day for writing a post entitled Plano 9 From Outer Space without mentioning one of our favorite neighbors Jan the Electrician. Jan and his charming wife Victoria live across the street from us in the smallest house on the block. It works for them: they’re both quite petite.

Jan is originally from Poland and once lived in what is now my house when it was more or less a flophouse for drunken Polish sailors. Victoria has lived in New Orleans for most of her life but retains a strong Mexican accent or more accurately a variation thereof. English is their common language which has led their accents to sort of blur and merge. I call it Pole-Mex.

You’re probably asking yourself:

What is he on about now?

What the hell does this have to do with Plano, Texas?

Here’s what: It turned out that when we were in exile post-K Jan and Victoria were staying about 15 minutes from my cousin’s place in that very Texas burg. When we finally met again Jan told me: “We’ve been in Plan-O.”

I said: “Play-No?”

Jan fired back: “No Plan-O.”

I nearly launched into Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, but Jan has always been kind to me, so it seemed wrong to torture him with an off-key rendition of that Gershwin classic.

I was, however, tempted by the fruit of another pun. Oops, that was written by Difford and Tilbrook not George and Ira Gershwin. Oh well, let’s call the whole thing off…

The 2022 last word goes to Squeeze: