"Window Puns Are a Real Pane"

By Jerry Zezima

If it weren’t for Venetian blinds, it would be curtains for me. It also would be valances, drapes, shutters and other coverings for windows that I haven’t washed in two years, which is why my wife, Sue, has been throwing shades at me.

We recently got new blinds in the family room because the old ones, which came with the house when we bought it in 1998, were getting increasingly difficult to open, forcing me to use all my strength, which at this point is practically nonexistent, to pull the cord on each side of the blinds every morning and let the sunshine in.

Except when it was cloudy.

The only good part of the daily battle was that it was tough to see just how dirty the windows are.

Not anymore. The new blinds let the grime shine in.

While Sue isn’t happy about it, and often shoots me looks that are even dirtier than the windows, she loves the new blinds.

“They make the room seem larger,” she said.

“Great,” I replied. “Now we’ll probably have to pay more in property taxes.”

“Nonsense,” said Robert Montalvo, an independent contractor who had come over to install our new blinds. “This means you can sell your house for a lot more money.”

Robert should know because he has been in the window treatment installation business for 30 years.

“Those blinds,” he said, referring to the old ones, which he had dismantled, “look to be 30 years old. I’ve done a lot of work in this area, so I might have installed them.”

“Now you’re taking them down,” I pointed out. “And you’re giving us a window into your life.”

“Please,” Robert said, “I’ve heard all the window jokes.”

“Like no pane, no gain?” I guessed.

“Yes,” he said.

“How about the blinds leading the blinds?” I inquired.

“I hear that one every day,” Robert said. “One customer told me jokes for four hours.”

“I bet he was a pain in the glass,” I said.

“I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said.

“You must have felt like jumping out the window,” I noted.

“One time,” Robert said, “I was working in a school and an announcement came over the loudspeaker: ‘The blind guy is here.’ The principal said, ‘Somebody go help him.’ Fortunately, the kids weren’t there to hear it.”

“Do you wash windows at home?” I inquired.

“Not at all,” Robert replied.

“What does your wife say?” I asked.

“I married a girl like my mom,” he said. “When she’s doing things around the house, I have a list of things to do. Washing windows isn’t one of them.”

“What kind of window coverings do you have?” I wondered.

“We have shutters on the high windows and silhouettes on the regular windows,” Robert said.

I asked him if customers complain about a national window chain that seems to advertise 24 hours a day and bugs people so relentlessly, with texts, emails, postcards and phone calls, that you feel like inviting a salesman over just so you can throw him out the window.

“All the time,” Robert said. “And they’re not cheap. I had a friend who kept at me to buy them. He’s not my friend anymore.”

“Our windows may be dirty, but at least they look better now,” I said.

“You picked great blinds,” Robert said as he gave us a demonstration. “Your old blinds had vertical slats. The new ones have horizontal slats. You don’t have to pull cords and chains. You just raise them from the bottom. Or you can gently pull them down. And you turn the wand to open and close them.”

Sue beamed and said, “I love them! Next I’m going to replace the blinds in the dining room.”

“When you come back,” I told Robert, “we’ll tell more window jokes.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

“But let’s not do it for four hours,” I said. “Even I would shutter to think about it.”

Copyright 2026 by Jerry Zezima