Author: Jim Hagarty

There are a lot of things in life, I will freely admit, that I know next to nothing about. Examples of this spring readily to mind. Sailing (never been on sailboat), love triangles or quadrangles or however those things go, bull riding (not to be confused with bull writing, about which I do know a bit), and grandparenting.

But maybe the biggest mystery to me has always been money laundering. Maybe because I have never had any money, I have had no need to launder it, whatever that is.

However, in the life experience I have had, I have heard rumours about small businesses that serve as fronts for organized crime and money laundering. They never do any business, have no customers, and yet never close up shop. Hmmm.

I’ve even heard it said some mom and pop corner stores are involved in this and today, I think I finally got some proof. As I approached the counter and cash register in one of these variety “stores”, I noticed a jug of hand sanitizer and a big plastic bowl next to it, filled with a clear liquid. And in that liquid was cold, hard and very wet cash. Bills, coins, the works. A steel tongs lay by the bowl, with which the man there, standing behind a clear plexiglass screen (probably bulletproof), was taking currency from his customers and putting it in the liquid.

I was shocked to see him so brazenly laundering money, as though he believed he would never get caught. I wondered if he was paying off the police so they would look the other way. Another indication that he was up to no good was the fact that, amazingly, he was wearing a bandit’s mask.

Not only had I never seen a money laundering operation before, but now I was looking at an actual money launderer and he didn’t fit whatever image I might have had in my mind for such a criminal. There was a tall woman behind the counter, watching proceedings. Now she did sort of look like the type.

I don’t know what to do. If I report them to the police, and they are in on it, what trouble might I get into?

So I left the store. Shaken, but maybe a little wiser. Also, unable to process what I had just witnessed. So I went back to doing what I had been doing before I entered the place which was daydreaming about love triangles.

Whatever they are.

(Update 2024: This story probably made a little more sense when it was written, at the start of the recent Covid-19 pandemic.)

©2020 Jim Hagarty

Our ironing board fell on my head this morning. Don’t worry, the ironing board is fine, though I’ve spent most of the day a bit wobbly on my feet as a result of the blow to my cranium.

As I usually do in such situations, I looked on the event as a teachable moment. You can either get mad over a matter like this or just laugh it off.

I recommend getting mad. Profanity helps, preferably in a loud voice. It also pays to hit the ironing board as that will teach it a lesson.

Next comes the search for a culprit – there must be a culprit – someone who left the ironing board in such a precarious state as to easily fall on my head when I was looking the other way.

But it’s amazing, in a four-person household, how no one has touched the ironing board in weeks, in spite of the fact that people leave the house in the morning dressed in very neat clothes that have obviously been pressed by a hot iron. I know for certain that I am not the culprit as the ironing board and I are practically strangers. I used it once to flatten out a pair of dress socks about 30 years ago but concluded the effort was not worth the reward and gave up the practice. Besides, I never leave the house, neat or otherwise.

I will get to the bottom of this, never resting till it’s all been smoothed over and not a wrinkle is left to worry me. I fully intend to press the issue and if I get a little hot under the collar, so be it.

Because if I don’t find the answer to this latest unexpected object to smash me on the noggin, these sorts of incidents will probably in-crease.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

Jim Hagarty’s neighbours are a prosperous gang and he is happy for them.

One neighbour has a big new pickup truck, a $70,000 pricetag but he got a break on it. What a wonderful machine.

Two doors down, another neighbour bought a beautiful motorhome last summer. Hagarty had a tour inside. He speculates it comes with room service. Or should.

Across the street, one man has a Corvette. It’s used, but still, it’s a CORVETTE! The neighbour beside him has a shiny, fancy motorcycle. Hagarty is not sure of the make but it’s extremely noisy so that must be good.

Still another neighbour directly across the street has a widescreen TV that appears to cover one whole wall of his living room. If the blinds are open, and even if they aren’t, Hagarty can see all the shows his neighbour watches. He seems to be into action movies.

Next door, just yesterday, Hagarty smelled some wonderful cooking aromas coming from those neighbours’ verandah and he looked over to see that the couple there has a very fancy new barbecue. Not sure if it has a sink and running water, but it might.

Farther down the street, in the driveway, sits a new, candy apple red Kia Soul. A few doors to the east, is a new Toyota Rav4. Black. Very sleek.

Hagarty is not envious of any of these people and the proof of that is the fact that he discusses all these glorious new acquisitions with his neighbours when he sees them out and about.

But he worries that they are jealous of him. Because he has a brand new plastic pooper scooper with which to gather up his doggie’s offerings on their twice-daily walks. It is a marvel of modern engineering. Black. Easy to use. Very efficient.

And not one of his neighbours has made any comment to Hagarty at all about his new device. When people will not even acknowledge something new you have, you know they are burning up with envy.

To be honest, Hagarty is a little disappointed in this obvious character flaw in the spendthrifts living around him.

So, he is super fortunate.

So what?

©2020 Jim Hagarty

When I was 55 or so, I walked into a fast-food restaurant and placed an order. The kid who served me, who appeared hardly able to see over the counter, took the details of my simple request and then asked me, “Would you like a senior Coke?”

In the few seconds I had to process this request before I gave my answer, I pondered what on earth a senior Coke might be, having never before been offered one. Was it a Coke served by a little old man named Perkins wearing a beanie hat with the restaurant name on it after he emerged from a small room where some senior citizen servers were kept, or was it a Coke that had been formulated in 1945 and, like a bottle of fine wine, was just now ready to be uncorked? Or, would a portion of the cost of this Coke be given by the restaurant to a benefit organized to help needy seniors in the community?

I was confused.

So I asked, “What is a senior Coke?”

Well, as it turned out, it was a small Coke given for free to seniors.

Which begged the next question.

Why was I, a young whippersnapper still wet behind the ears, being offered a senior Coke?

Perhaps the youngster who offered me this thought I might want it for some old guy standing right behind me who he mistakenly thought was my grandfather. I looked behind me to see no one there.

“Yes,” I finally decided. “I would like a senior Coke.” It wasn’t my fault the kid had screwed up so badly.

Fourteen years later, I don’t even have to ask for a senior Coke anymore. They just plop one down on my tray like they might include a toy if I was a kid.

But there were a few years there when my status as a bona fide senior was in doubt. This restaurant had other specials for seniors and if I wanted those, it took some planning.

I would stand back and size up the servers. If a kid took my order, I was a shoo-in as he or she had not likely ever seen anyone who looked so ancient. But if the server was an older adult, I might have to produce five types of identification before I could score a cheaper hamburger and fries.

So, I would hang back, and hope to get a younger server. I got pretty good at that over time.

Alas, probably because shysters such as I were ripping them off too badly, the restaurant dropped all special pricing for old folks except for the senior Coke.

But it’s a just world and there are always compensations. A few years ago, they introduced a junior menu. It feels a bit strange ordering a junior burger and a senior Coke, as though one might cancel out the other, but so far, so good.

Besides, I have a ball at night playing with the free toys.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

I’ve lost interest in hockey and probably couldn’t even make the cut in the beer belly league now. Same with baseball. Never was big on soccer, tennis, bowling. I was terrible at football.

But there is one sport I am thinking of taking up and it’s one I think I might even be good at. That is the sport of shin-kicking and over the weekend, a Vancouver man was crowned world champion at the Cotswold Olimpicks in Chipping Camden, England.

I’ve always been good at kicking and am usually mad enough to want to hurt somebody’s shins. And here’s the clincher: I have been to Chipping Camden. If that isn’t a sign for me to take up this cool activity, I don’t know what is.

The sport is 400 years old. It involves kicking your opponent’s shins as you try to throw him to the ground. That must hurt, you say? Maybe, but participants do get to shove hay down the legs of their pants for protection.

Growing up on the farm, it seemed at haying time I always had hay in my pants. The sport was waiting for me.

I’m a bit disappointed the shin-kickers have gone soft over the past 200 years though. They used to cap the toes of their boots with metal but that is against the rules now.

Today’s shin-kickers might be wimps but with some practice, I think I could take ’em. Yes, wind me up and I would gladly kick the shin out of all of them.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is helping me a lot these days. I have been reading his biography for the past couple of months and will continue to do so for a few more at least.

And while my bank account has not magically expanded, I have learned one major thing about him. Reading the words on 816 pages detailing the life of Warren Buffett is the best sleep inducer I have ever found.

It is not that his life is boring; far from it. But trying to follow the minute details of every deal that resulted in his achieving a net worth of $60 billion is a challenge that this human, for one, cannot meet without passing out.

The other night, for whatever reason, I lie in bed wide awake. Tossing and turning, stopping and staring at the ceiling. It looked like a long, restless, sleepless night awaited me. I was frustrated.

Then I remembered Warren. I dashed upstairs and grabbed his hernia-inducing tome. I crawled back into bed, book in tow, and began reading. Two to three paragraphs later, I couldn’t have kept my eyelids open with toothpicks.

I turned out the light and slept like a billionaire.

It worked again last night. I am hoping that eventually, just the sight of the book on my bedside table will bring on the slumber.

Now that would be rich.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

There are 40 houses on my block in the Canadian city where I live, bounded by Romeo Street on the west end and Burritt Street on the east.

When I moved here in 1986, I was number 40 on the list of homeowners on my street. Mr. Newbie. As fresh as they came. All 39 other homeowners had been in their houses before me, were here when I came.

That is 26 years ago and now, as far as I know, I am number 5 on the list. Thirty-four of the 39 homeowners that used to be ahead of me have moved on, one way or the other.

I am gunning for number 1 so I can legitimately be called the King of Albert Street, although I suspect that’s what everyone calls me now anyway (because of my vast wealth – and the moat I dug around our castle.)

Before I got here, I had moved 11 times in my life. When I first walked in the front door of the house I’ve called home for the past 26 years, I said to myself, “They can carry me out of here someday.” That prospect is looking more and more likely, not because I am deathly ill (I’m not) but due to my absence of itchy feet. I like it here.

Around the time I moved to Albert Street, I encountered the saying, “Bloom where you are planted.” If you drive by my place and see a guy in a straw hat, whistling, that’s just me, blooming the best way I know how.

If you’re lucky, I might even give you a royal wave.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

I was watering a section of new lawn at a back corner of our lot yesterday when My Bunny came dashing out of the long grass.

I hadn’t seen her there.

Some background. I gave this friendly little wild rabbit three showers with my garden hose in the very same area of our property on the hottest days of last summer.

So here we were again. She stopped by the tree and I slowly brought the mist over her, so as not to scare her off. She sat there absorbing a lot of water, eventually licking her lips and blinking her eyes.

Now here is a new wrinkle in these shower stories I presented here last year.

Seemingly all showered out, My Bunny dashed into some bushes by our wooden fence, a few feet away. I wasn’t surprised by that and just carried on watering the grass.

But I did a double take when the little critter left the bushes and returned to the very spot where I had just finished administering an over-the-top soaking. She stood there, facing me, looking right at me.

So, I did my duty and brought the mist over her again. For the next five or so minutes, she took in all the water I could toss her way.

Finally, she returned to the bushes.

But I had to water the grass back there too and I could see her little bum sticking out of the weeds, so I put the mist over her again.

No complaints.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a rabbit that comes and gets me when she is out of food and occasionally, will come hopping up to me when I call her.

But for my little friend to ask for “more water, please” is the strangest – and nicest – encounters I have ever had with a wild animal.

And I am grateful for the experience.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

You might get the feeling that you live in a small town when your aunt calls you up and asks if you don’t have a better picture of yourself you could put at the top of your weekly column in the local newspaper where you work as an editor.

“A woman I know asked me the other day if that’s what you really look like,” my aunt said to me, “and I told her, ‘No way, he looks a lot better than that.”’

That said, how it is you really know you live in a small town is when you take your relative’s word for it and get a new picture taken so she won’t have to apologize to the neighbours about her homely nephew anymore.

So, you can thank my aunt for the new mug shot of me at the top of my column in the newspaper today.

(Some of my cousins who read this will wonder which of our many aunts tuned me in 37 years ago about my headshot in The Beacon Herald, the daily newspaper published in my hometown city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. I won’t be able to be of much help to them because I honestly cannot remember which one it was. Whichever aunt called me, she did me a favour. My new photo was much better than the first one – the darkroom boys did wonders and even added a touch-up or two by means of which I was suddenly endowed with a full head of hair – and maybe even helped me attract the woman I married two years later.)

©1987 Jim Hagarty

As you know, I like to provide periodic crime updates from around the world.

In the latest news, it appears that clues are coming together in the mysterious death of a person found in a pit in Spain. Authorities are suggesting the victim died after two heavy blows to the forehead.

This is a cold case – the victim is 500,000 years old – and the perpetrator has had lots of time to get away. But there is hope yet that the mystery will be solved.

So, if you see someone suspicious walking around, call CrimeStoppers immediately.

One identifying feature of the suspect will be that he or she is pre-human, a human ancestor, in fact. You know, high brows, caveman-like. He may be trying to pass himself off as an enforcer on a hockey team, a rock star bodyguard or a gun enthusiast in Tennessee.

Approach carefully if you encounter him, but make light conversation and if he answers to the nickname “Bubba”, we might have our guy.

Some might say there are current unsolved murders that are more important than the oldies, but how would you feel if your ancestry search led you directly back to that poor woman in the pit a half million years ago?

By the way, no word on whether or not a reward was ever posted as a way of helping find the murderer. But it has been speculated that a prize of ten coconuts might have been offered.

©2015 Jim Hagarty