Author: Jim Hagarty

I have the greatest ideas and it is a constant disappointment to me that I don’t get enough credit for them. 

Take a look at my latest one and see if you don’t agree some Hall of Fame shouldn’t be knocking on my door with a stretch limo parked in my driveway. 

I have been entertaining people with my voice, my guitar and my songs for well over 50 years. I’ve recorded some of my originals, heard them played on the radio and for a few years, cashed some very small royalty cheques. And while I’ve enjoyed most of my infrequent appearances on stages here and there, I realized early on that I was an introvert trying to do an extrovert’s job and fame and fortune would better be left to others who don’t haul around the baggage of stage fright with them. An apt comparison might be that of a man afraid of heights taking on a job as a skydiving instructor. 

But over the years, I have noticed the growing success of tribute artists who, either as a single act or members of a band, have thrilled audiences with their bang-on impersonations of their heroes. I’ve even caught a couple of these acts in concert recreating The Beatles and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was blown away both times. In fact, I wondered if each band might have been better than the original. 

So, only someone as naturally gifted as I am, in all humility, could come up with this. I am working on developing the world’s first Jim Hagarty Tribute Act. One difference from all the rest is that the entertainer performing the tribute will be the actual human the act inspired. In other words, I will appear on stage as Jim Hagarty. 

I can’t find any flaws in my plan so far. And I can already hear the chatter among the blown-away audience members. 

“OMG he looks just like Jim Hagarty. Bald head and everything.” 

“WOW! He plays an identical guitar. Left-handed, like Hagarty.” 

“His voice is so close to Hagarty’s, it’s amazing.” 

“He forgets the same words to the same songs that Hagarty forgets.” 

“He tells the same old stories between songs exactly the way Hagarty tells them.” 

“How does he manage to get his face to break out in the same beads of sweat while playing, just like Hagarty’s does?” 

“I hate to say it, but I think this guy is better than the original.” 

I have high hopes for the Jim Hagarty Tribute Act. And if the artist’s performances earn him anything, anything at all, my bet is his money haul will be far greater than the slim paydays the original performer ever enjoyed. 

Now all I have left to do is to perfect Jim Hagarty’s signature so the Tribute Act artist will be able to sign authentic autographs after the shows. 

A very important part of the tribute business. 

©2023 Jim Hagarty 

If you were to spend a half hour, face-to-face quality time with me over the coffee I hope you would have bought me, you would scream, by the end of the session and before you stormed out, “Would you please stop with the sayings,” you would have yelled on your way out the door.

I’m a sayings junkie. I live my life by quotes. I research quotes on the Internet and I have a fabulous ability to remember them. If I haven’t peppered my conversation with you with at least five quotes, it’s as if we never talked at all.

Quotes are tailor made for people with short attention spans. But for me, they are also the shorthand of philosophers. (Readers under 40 are just now asking, “What the hell is shorthand?”)

Sayings encourage thought, dress wounds, light fires under asses, and generally, keep us interested in life.

The amazing thing about my association with quotes is every little saying I stumble on is instantly my favourite one. At present, I have about 1,200 favourite ones.

Here is my favourite saying today:

“The heart has its reason which reason cannot know.”

OMG! Those nine words say it all. Why do we want the things we want? After all my long life, it seems to me, we have those wants for some very good, if mysterious, reasons. Why was Wayne Gretzky trying to score goals in his living room by shooting a ball through his grandmother’s legs when he was three years old? Who knows? I am pretty sure one of the greatest-ever hockey players didn’t know. And neither did Grandma Gretzky.

During my almost seven decades, my heart has taken me to a lot more wonderful places than my mind has ever managed to.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

I stopped at an interesting, colourful truck today to buy some french fries. No better use of a truck has ever been devised since its invention. These delicious fries are known community-wide to be the best anywhere and so I patiently waited in a long line, happily shivering in the cold, to acquire my fill.

And fill it turned out to be as I carted my overflowing cup of goodies back to my car. I asked the server for extra salt and told her that, as a committed health-food nut, I needed the extra salt. Also a health-food freak, I believe, she obliged.

Comfortably seated in my car, I started the engine and turned up the heat. I looked especially with great anticipation at two very large consumables that had been piled on top of my greasy, vinegar-laden feast. But as I watched in horror, these two beauties jumped from the cup and fell down under my car seat and onto the floor.

I won’t say that my car floor is not regularly cleaned, but I will confess that there are creatures living under the seat. I have grown accustomed to them and even named a few. By far, Hector is my favourite. But now I realized, favourite or not, that he was no doubt chomping away on my snack and had been since it dropped right in front of him.

I tried to retrieve my two prizes but my fingers are too fat (I blame the truck) to slide down between the seat and the middle console. So I gave up. But as I gobbled down all the rest of my delicious feast, the fate of my two woe-begone strays never left my worried mind.

Where there is will and two gorgeous french fries out of reach, there is a way. There just had to be a way.

My mother told each of her seven kids that we all had to eat a pound of dirt in our lives. I can now announce that I have made my quota. I am not sure of the quota status of my siblings, but I have this idea that I might have also just filled the dirt requirements of at least two of them. I will phone them tomorrow to impart the good news.

The floor fries were a little dusty, to be honest, and it was a struggle to pry one of them out of the hungry jaws of Hector, who put up a valiant fight, but I would like to pay homage to the Great Goddess of Potatoes by saying the effort was well worth the struggle.

As it always is when dealing with most of the important things in life.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

I was happy for the opportunity one hot summer day recently to speak to a class of journalism students all about the ins and outs of headline writing and so I prepared a little talk on the subject in advance.

And when the day of the big lesson arrived, although I was a bit nervous about the encounter, I charged into my responsibility with no small amount of passion, hoping to ignite a flame or two in the 13 eager, young future newspaper reporters who sat in the classroom before me, attentive to my every utterance.

So, I began uttering.

“The biggest task of the headline writer is to capture the essence of the story and to do it with life and colour and without leading the reader to believe he’s about to read something in the article below, which, in fact, he fails to encounter,” I said. “An accurate headline, even if it’s dull, is still better than a lively one which distorts the meaning of the story it’s announcing.”

Hearing my thoughts on the topic expressed in such an intelligent way, I felt a surge of confidence and so I looked around at the group before me to see how it was being received. They were staring at me like people positively hungry for knowledge who were hearing the truth for the very first time and recognizing their need, I started laying out a veritable journalistic banquet for them.

“An important fact about headlines you always want to remember is that they represent probably your best chance to draw the busy reader into a story she might not otherwise stop and read,” I pronounced. “A reporter’s hard work and best effort can be all for naught if her article has been poorly sold off by a lazy or inattentive headline writer.”

More wise words and another glance around at the troops. But this time, not all of them were glancing back. One young man over in the corner was resting his head, face down on his desk, in obvious meditation on the statement I’d just made.

I continued, stressing how the size of the headline should bear some relevance to the significance of the story and warning against the urge to be too flippant, especially with serious stories.

Another look up, at this point, revealed a second meditator, two rows back, this one taking up a different position with his head resting on his arms which were resting on his desk and his face turned to the side. His eyes were closed, as he obviously sought to shut out other data and think only about headlines.

The lesson resumed. Getting headlines to fit. Writing headlines in the present tense. Taking care to avoid headlines clashing with other headlines on the page.

A third contemplator lowered his head to his desk and within seconds was breathing heavily, in an obviously deep, meditative state.

Apparently, I was getting somewhere.

Three down and 10 to go.

My lecture now nearing the 20-minute mark, I took another visual survey around the warm classroom to see how well the rest of the class was responding to what they were fortunate enough to be hearing. None of them had joined their three contemplative classmates, one of whom by this time had managed to curl himself into something resembling a fetal position, all the time sitting in his chair, but they all had adopted various poses which suggested apparent deep thought on their part.

One woman, who’d obviously freed her mind to follow the soaring flights of enlightenment I’d been releasing into the air before her, sat staring at me with a smile Madame Tussaud might have been proud to have achieved on one of the models in her museum. Her eyes, though appearing to be trained on me, were, in fact, wandering independently of each other, looking everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This is true concentration, I thought.

In the middle of the room, directly before me, sat a young man with his arms crossed over his chest, his head having fallen backwards over the back of his chair. His mouth was open as were his eyes which seemed glued to the ceiling tiles above him.

As the talk headed into its second 30 minutes, the surviving students went into other various learning positions and while most of them sat up straight, at least one young man’s eyes wandered upwards and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen eyes turned that far back in anyone’s head before. Several others, resting their heads on their hands, peered my way through eyes half-covered with drooping lids and at least two appeared to have developed a sort of glaze over theirs.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy with the way things were going and when I finished after about 45 minutes, they all seemed very happy too.

Except the guy in the corner who had been first to go into the meditative state and who took a while to come around. He seemed groggy, even disoriented.

But there was no mistaking that other quality on his face. It was the look of a man who now knew more than he expected he ever would about a subject.

I’ve seen that look before.

©1994 Jim Hagarty

My mother had seven children and seven jobs, all of them involving being the mother of seven children. Her husband was a farmer and while he was a very good one, feeding. clothing and educating seven children was a fiscal challenge.

One of my mother’s jobs was minister of finance and she had to be creative. As the one who kept the cupboards full of food, she needed to be strategic in her relationship with the grocery store. One item we all had a fondness for was breakfast cereal and in this department, Mom was also minister of resource development.

To this end, she kept a careful watch on which cereals were most popular with her brood. Occasionally she would bring home some new box of crispy goodies and it would catch her attention when the box would be empty by morning, not even having a chance to provide the breakfast meals it was intended to supply. A box of flakes that were frosted, for example, disappeared quicker than a wildebeest caught by a pride of lions. It would be a long time before another wildebeest wandered once again past our pond.

By such a process of careful study and merciless elimination, my mother eventually ensured that our cupboards were filled with boxes of the least appetizing cereals. We never seemed to learn.

Attempts were made by some of us, from time to time, to convince the hungry siblings to show a little less ravenous interest in the goodies that sometime were discovered in a shopping bag on grocery day. But there would always be an outlier or two who just couldn’t get with the program and who, in fact, realized that the restraint being shown by the brothers and sisters was simply an open invitation to double up on his or her consumption. The effect was always the same. Empty box by breakfast. That cereal, henceforth, was banned from the larder.

I well remember in my teenage years when getting ready to leave with the car on a heavy date, how I would wait for my Dad who had gone to the local country store on Saturday night to pick up a few essentials. He always held in his hand a document on which was recorded the food items to be purchased. At the end of the list were a number of extra items, recorded there in handwriting which looked nothing like my mother’s. In those days, the shopper handed the store owner his list and the owner would fill a bag or two with items listed on it. Therefore, Dad would eventually walk in the door with illegal contraband which had been acquired by skullduggery of the highest order.

As he entered the house, I rushed to get out to the car as he always spent too long discussing world affairs at the corner store on my date nights. I would glance into the bags in his arms to see what treasures might reside within and almost always there would be some form of what we affectionately called “treats.” This always raised a difficult question for me and more than once I considered cancelling my date to stay home and join the feeding frenzy. Because there would be nothing left of the illicit ice cream or cookies by the time I got home.

Yes, I might have scored a kiss or two from a wonderful young woman over the course of the date, but I always came home to find that those who were dateless had found their own form of Saturday night entertainment.

I thought of all this tonight as I went on a search of our cupboards for potato chips. The only thing I could find was a partially consumed bag of dill pickle chips. That same bag has been in the cupboard for weeks and I wondered if my mother’s budget tricks had somehow been passed on to her daughter-in-law who perhaps has discovered the economic value in stocking the cupboards with things no one actually wants to eat.

It is nothing short of a crime that for sale on the grocery store shelves are jars of dill pickles, the most ridiculous food since bread pudding or even pumpkin pie, both of which are totally inedible concoctions. But an even higher misdemeanor is the manufacture of potato chips that taste like dill pickles. That is like mistaking a bowl of mashed potatoes for a dish of vanilla ice cream, another psychologically damaging human error.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Does this ever happen to you?

A close family member – wife, son, daughter – leaves the house, gets in the car and drives off. You say goodbye, have a good day, see you later.

A few minutes go by, and then arises the greatest racket from fire trucks, ambulances and police cruisers. Heading down the main street at lightning speed. You can see them out your kitchen window. They’re heading in the same direction your loved one just did.

And you think, “Oh my God. What if they were in an accident?”

There is an intersection not far from your home where, for some reason, there are a lot of fender benders at least and sometimes more serious crack ups.

Then your mind goes to all the horrible follow-up imaginings. Will a police officer be knocking on your door in the next little while?

Instead, comes a text:

“Anything you want at the store?”

“Can I bring you a coffee?”

“I’m going to stay over at my friend’s tonight, Dad.”

You go sit in the recliner and hug the dog.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

I first had a piece of my writing published 50 years ago this year, in a high school newspaper.

It was written out of love. Not love of writing. Love of a girl in my class who had my 24/7 attention. She was a writer and smart as a dewdrop. So, I could easily see that I needed to be a writer too if any of the fantasies I was having about her would ever come true.

She wrote poetry. Obscure stuff. I never understood a word of it. She was the Atlantic Ocean; I was a parking lot puddle after a light rain. So, my first published piece, of course, was a poem. In retrospect, more like an unpolished nursery rhyme. In fact, rhyming was my key objective. I rhymed everything. Not only at the end of lines, but in the middle and even at the beginning. She hated my poetry and that feeling somehow started to transfer over to the poet. And while we kissed a few glorious times eventually, she realized she could not be seen in public with such a terrible writer so she sat down and wrote me, in a very unobscure style, a Dear John letter. I understood every word of it.

I moved on. Found myself a younger student with long, flowing blonde hair and a vocabulary that was peppered with the word “ain’t.” More my style. She never wrote a word as long as I knew her. But she kissed up a storm and I was fully onboard with that.

Eventually, however, like my first love had done to me, I decided I was destined for more greatness than this and after one too many “ain’ts” and a hundred too few kisses, I moved on. For me, that was one move too many and a half century later, there is a tiny ember in my heart still glowing for her.

And in spite of my earlier cataclysmic rejection by my girl Shakespeare, I kept on writing. And lo and behold, I found people in the world who were willing to pay me for my scribblings. These people were called editors and they worked at newspapers and they gave me a desk and sent me out interviewing farmers, factory workers and firefighters.

Life was good for a few decades till one day, one of those editors told me she was sick of paying me for my writing so she sent me home but told me to keep writing. I did that. I became a freelancer. I lanced for free, day in, day out. And still do.

Sometimes I write some poetry. It rhymes very well. And is not one bit better than the poetry that caused my first love to send me packing.

But if you are a writer, you don’t have much choice but to write, well or badly. Like a cat that, despite happily chowing down its three squares a day, still goes on homicidal binges in the backyard between meals.

I have never suffered very much from writer’s block. Readers’ block. Faced that a few times.

Starting with the girl of my dreams in Grade 10.

Believe me, it ain’t much fun when it happens.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

Four years ago, at Christmas, I was given a GPS for my car. It’s a nice little jobbie which I have never used. I prefer the direction finder on my smartphone. So, after taking my gift out of the box and fooling around with it, I put it back in the box and set it on a high shelf in the garage.

There I found it yesterday when I was trying to tidy up out there. I brought the box in, charged up the clever little gizmo and hooked it up to my computer to update the maps. Then, realizing I have no use for this amazing hardware and not wanting to possess it any longer, I put it up for sale on the Internet. I think it cost about $80 or $90 new, so I decided to ask $40.

Two things happened. Within an hour or two, half a dozen people declared their wish to buy it. This had the effect of making me think I was charging too little for it and my greedy nature took over. But it was too late. I will have to live forever with the knowledge that I could have gotten another $20 for it.

The second odd thing that developed was a little feature of human nature I have noticed before many times in my life. Because so many people wanted this thing, I suddenly wanted it too. I have no use for it. I could use the 40 bucks. But it’s kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend and then seeing her walking down the street with someone else a week later. Suddenly, the enormity of your mistake becomes very clear to you in situations like that.

However, I soon won’t own my GPS and out of sight, maybe it will be out of mind someday too. And I will try to comfort myself with the notion that someone else is making good use of something that has sat on my shelf for four years.

But there is one fear that haunts me. The eventual buyer of the item, realizes he got it on the cheap, puts it back on the Internet for $60 and makes the $20 I should have had.

I will have to go lie down now.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

What I know about Buddhism could be written on a Post-it-Note with room left over for a Christmas gifts shopping list. But one feature of the belief system that I think is true is the reverence adherents have for all life, not just human and not just animal.

There is a certain sect of monks, for example, who carry a brush with them and sweep the sidewalk in front of them as they walk so they don’t step on and kill any bugs. I thought of that the other day when I was sweeping the floor. I noticed that one of the pieces of dirt in the pile was moving so I watched it. It was a mid-sized spider and it soon extricated itself from the mess and took off. I kept sweeping and thought, “I really don’t need to kill that spider,” so I made a pact with it. If it could disappear by the time I finished sweeping, I wouldn’t bother it. (The truth is I haven’t purposely killed a spider in years).

Turning back to my job, I soon noticed something else. Three tiny spiders were scrambling across the floor in all directions. My sweeping had disturbed a nest, I guess. Momma was the big one and these were her babies. I carefully kept working and avoided the little kids and soon, like their Ma, they had safely crawled out of sight under a baseboard. The next time I see them they will probably be huge and will crawl into my bed and bite me on the nose, but for now, all is well.

As I round third base and head for home, I find myself feeling more connected to all living things and less superior to any. Like that Francis of Assisi guy. When the gigantic outer space aliens invade and are vacuuming us up for breakfast, maybe I’ll catch a break from one of them!

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I always have thought this was one of the best business strategies I’ve ever heard of.

Peter, a friend of mine, owned a business and sometimes had trouble getting his customers to pay their bills. He could send out reminders that an account was overdue and there would be no response. Threatening letters served no purpose either.

But, being a student of human nature, he hit on an idea. If a client owed my friend $300, he would send him a bill for $900. The wrongly billed customer would be on the phone immediately, protesting strongly the incorrect billing.

“Well, how much do you think you owe me?” my friend would ask. “I owe you $300,” would be the reply. “Well,” Peter would say, “if that’s what you think you owe, then I guess I’ll have to accept that. Just send me a cheque.” A cheque would be in his hand in a day or two from the customer who was grinning with satisfaction while writing it out, knowing that he had shown my friend who the boss in this relationship was. Darned if anybody was going to overbill him.

I also know of a trick another business owner used to employ. This man, a restaurant owner named Bill, paid his waitresses in cash. When a new girl got her first pay, she would find $10 more in the envelope than there should have been. If the girl reported the overpayment to her boss, he would let her work the till. Any girl who kept the extra $10, never got near it. His reasoning was that the girl was either a bit dishonest or not very observant and didn’t notice the extra $10. Either way, not a good candidate to be handling the money. I’ve always thought that was pretty clever.

Also using creative thinking was Tom, a friend of mine, who opened a small diner and who wanted to be able to sell great homemade pies. Asking around, he found out who entered the prize-winning pies at the local fall fair and he went to see them, eventually hiring the second-place winner. His diner became known for its great pies, just as he hoped it would. I can still taste those cherry pies today. Mmmm good!

©2011 Jim Hagarty