"It takes a village..."...to get your refrigerator repaired.

We live in a quaint 1968 Colonial style townhouse community called The Village. Whenever we need to get something fixed or pay our monthly fees we will refer to those repairmen or management as "The Village People." For some reason, perhaps the reference to a late 1970's music group that sings about the YMCA, I have never been that comfortable with that title for our community helpers. The YMCA is actually a place where I exercise on rare occasions and take the boys to their swimming lessons, but we never sing about it on our way over. In fact, I would much prefer "Are We There Yet?" by Elmo.

My clever boy Reed has a talent for naming things how they should be named. He calls hotels "hotellos", it has a much more romantic sound to it, Italian in a way. He calls people who are not Kindergartners "graders," a much simpler term than I've ever heard. Now my favorite, and the solution to my "Village People" dilemma, is that he refers to those community helpers as "The Villagers." Brilliant! So , now we too call them, the Villagers. "The Villagers are coming over to fix the drain." "The Villagers are coming over to repair the refrigerator." "The Villagers are coming over with their pitchforks and angry faces to run us out of the village for leaving our window open when it was 39 degrees outside! Oops."

Maybe it's time to find a "hotello!"