EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/You say goodbye, and I say heaven-o?

Hello. I can say that because I don’t work for Kleberg County, Texas. Kleberg County recently became the first county in America (at least I assume this; don’t tell me if I’m wrong. I don’t want to know) to have an official greeting.

Generally, counties are not like states, which have official everythings. (Did you know, for instance, that the state dog of Pennsylvania is the Great Dane? That Georgia’s state fossil is the shark’s tooth? Or that there’s a movement in Utah to make the dutch oven the official cookware of the Beehive State?)

Anyway, a commissioner in Kleberg County decided that the word “hello” was too close to the word “hell,” so he introduced a resolution to make “heaven-o” the official county greeting. “I see hell in hello,” Leonso Canales was quoted as saying. “It is disguised by the ‘o,’ but once you see it, it will slap you in the face.” Everybody else on the Kleberg County Commission must have seen it, too, because the resolution passed unanimously.

So I’m reading this story, while the eggs I’ve boiled to make deviled eggs are cooling, and I’m thinking, “Of course! How come that’s never slapped me in the face? And, I’m almost out of Hellman’s mayonnaise, so how am I gonna finish these dang eggs?”

Then my husband, who’s got one hellacious cold, comes in to remind me that I need to go pick up some devil’s food cake mix for our daughter’s class bake sale. He’s humming “Hello, I Love You,” the old Doors’ song, which is interesting, because Tony Bennett is on the stereo singing, “Hello, Young Lovers,” and I can’t figure out how he — Jack not Tony — can concentrate.

But I digress. According to the story, which appeared in the San Antonio Express-News, Kleberg County employees are either a) very excited or b) very nonchalant about the whole thing. No one is quoted as saying, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

(By the way, use of heaven-o is optional, so the ACLU doesn’t get all hot about that church-state separation thing.)

It is nice to know that, what with welfare reform, unfunded mandates and cuts in Medicare and Medicaid breathing down its neck, there is one county in the United States that has more important things to worry about.

And it’s comforting to remember that the U.S. Congress hasn’t cornered the market on comedy when it comes to legislation. There are some local governments out there that are doing a heavenuva fine job of keeping us in stitches.