I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.
In the days before metric and when cars in North America were the size of boats and had engines that could power a train, I experienced the scariest moment of my life. Wedged in the back seat of a car with five other guys, I started freaking out as the driver let things rip on the Canadian highway that led to my village.
I don’t know why I was in the car – I knew the guys but they weren’t my friends. Maybe I had hitched a ride home from school. As the car hurtled faster and faster down the highway, I remember seeing the needle on the speedometer inching towards and finally touching the 120 miles per hour mark on a road where the maximum allowed speed was 60.
I used to think I asked to be let out of the car and maybe I did but now I think it was probably more the case that they dropped me off in my village and I walked the two miles east to our farm.
Many years later, I discovered that speed is a relative thing as my wife and I drove our little rental Fiat along the Autobahn in Germany which, if I recall correctly, has no posted speed limits. I kept up with traffic on the four-lane road which meant I ended up travelling the equivalent of 100 mph which didn’t seem that incredibly fast to me. Amazingly though, Mercedes and BMWs were flying by us in the passing lane as though we were standing still. Some of them must have been topping out at 120 mph.
Even at those speeds, apparently, there aren’t a lot of accidents. However, when a pile up does occur, it can involve dozens of vehicles.
I used to like dancing in my younger days. Almost loved it, in fact, and became half decent at it, or so it seemed to me. Others looking on might have thought they were witnessing a crazy man running around a dance floor, but I think those people were wrong, oh so wrong.
However, I’ve had to give it all up for the sake of my health. I came to that realization after I read about the Dancing Plague of 1518.
In July of that year, almost 500 years ago, Frau Troffea, a resident of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire), suddenly took to dancing on the street. Soon she was joined by others, all dancing uncontrollably. Within a month, 400 people were dancing in the city and many of them died from exhaustion and heart attacks.
The Dancing Plague of 1518, as it came to be known, had completely died down by the mid-17th century. If my math skills aren’t failing me, that means the dancing went on for about 150 years. If there has ever been such a thing as a dance-a-thon, I think that one must hold the record.
Historians can’t figure out whether the dancing was a real illness or a social phenomenon of some kind, but I am taking no chances. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers liked dancing too and how far did that get them? Where are they today?
I don’t like to be pessimistic but I have a little issue I’m having trouble resolving. Maybe you, with the wisdom and understanding I know you possess, can help me out.
After a lovely Chinese dinner from our favourite restaurant last evening, we cracked open our fortune cookies to see what messages were contained within each one. My wife got, “The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” My daughter’s message read, “If the cake is bad, what good is the frosting?” And the little slip of paper that fell from my son’s shattered cookie said, “I learn by going where I have to go.”
“Wow,” I thought. “What great little sayings.” I could hardly wait to read my fortune.
I cracked open the brittle brown cookie to find …
Nothing.
I felt a chill run up my spine. What does it mean to not get a fortune in your fortune cookie? It was like opening a Christmas present from Santa Claus to find nothing in the nicely wrapped box. Not even a lump of coal. Or phoning the doctor’s office to get the results of all those tests only to be told there are no results and never would be.
Now you, being an optimist and a happy soul, would content yourself with thinking logically that whatever process is used to insert fortunes in fortune cookies simply failed to deposit one in mine. But my mind is ninety-six percent imagination and four percent logic. It is geared to zoom from zero to one hundred in a millisecond, the higher number representing disaster.
It was as if the Chinese gods decided not to waste a fortune on me. I wasn’t even worth getting a message about a mouse and cheese or a cake and frosting.
It’s 12:30 a.m. My family are all in their beds. Sleeping.
Late last night I received a message from a life coach, offering me the benefits of her services. I replied that I already have a life coach. His name, and this is pure coincidence, is Jim Hagarty.
I did not say the coach I already use is a very good one. At times, in fact, I have thought of suing him for malpractice. However, we’ve been working together on my life for a while now and I find it hard to break up with the old bugger.
Hagarty steers me in the wrong direction, on average, about three times a day. He’s often grouchy and on occasion has stopped speaking to me for hours on end. When things get tense, about the only useful suggestion he ever seems to offer is to go get myself another coffee and pick himself up one while I am at it. When I have questions, half the time he has no answers for me. When I could use some encouragement from him, more often than not, he offers me none. When I could use a shoulder to cry on, he’s usually missing in action. When I go to him looking for a bit of wisdom to get me through a predicament, he tries to buy me off by telling me a joke instead.
In fact, the more I think about him, the more useless he seems to me to be as a life coach and probably as any other kind of coach unless a person needs coaching on how to go for coffee. And yet, he has stuck with me through thick and thin and we have a history together that goes way, way back. He has promised, in fact, to stick with me till the end.
He may not be great, but at least he’s there for me. Twenty four hours a day. Oh, and he always promises to send me a bill. But he never does. He has cost me a lot buying him coffee though. Maybe he needs a life coach of his own to help break him of the habit.
As it turns out, even as a Canadian, I can join the U.S. Republican Party. My registration kit came in the mail today. I was excited to open it up. It is a 12-page booklet entitled, “How to Become an Asshole.” For another $150, I can send away for the gold edition, “How to Become a Total Asshole.” The kit I got helpfully leads me through the 10 steps I need to take to become a basic member.
1. Cranium Reduction Surgery. I am instructed on the procedure for removing 90 per cent of my brain. Great advances have been made. No need now to open up the skull. It can be done with an unintrusive laser procedure.
2. Anger Heightening Management. I am instructed to write down the top 10 things that make me mad. Then add 10 more things to that list. Then another 10 and so on until my lists tops out at 100. It is okay to include “list making really pisses me off” as one of the 100.
3. Hatred Quotient Testing. This is flagged as the most important of the 10 steps. There is a helpful list with checkboxes beside each of the 35 items on it. I have to deeply hate a lot of things. Muslims. Foreigners. Non-white people. Toyotas. Gays. Hollywood. Mexicans. Bankers. Michael Moore. The list is extensive. The two top items: Women. And Myself. The instructions regarding hatred helpfully spell out, “Trying to hate a lot of things without hating yourself, is like trying to take a sip of water by tipping a rain barrel up to your lips. Try as you might, you will be wet all over when you are done. Go ahead. Self-hatred is not that hard to achieve.”
4. Reality Uncheck. This section lists 100 “so-called” facts. I am to memorize them and then deny that any of them are true. Number 56: I am a human being. No, I am not.
5. Selfishness Meter. The kit includes a handy and stylish silver bracelet I can wear, the face of which turns various colours depending on how I feel towards others. The face goes ruby red when I am successfully thinking only about myself. Green shows up if I find myself caring about anything other than my own well-being. A helpful warning beep sounds if I begin to slide out of red to yellow and a horn sounds when I slip into green.
6. Violence Appreciation Scale. There are various tests to assess my acceptance of violence as a useful everyday life skill. And questions to guide me along. Such as Road Rage is: Fantastic, Wonderful, Amazing. (Check one only.) And would you be willing to shoot to death someone who keyed your new SUV. This is an easy one for me. Of course I would.
7. Lying Liar Workout. Again, a number of tests and questions to assess how well or poorly I am able to lie. I talked to someone who took this test. As it turns out, the only way to pass it is to lie when answering each and every question.
8. Religious Fanatic Puzzle. This was tricky. If you saw Jesus hugging a lesbian, would you be willing to walk up to Our Lord and tell him to knock it off. The correct answer is yes. You are also asked to rate yourself regarding how close to the front of the line you expect to be when the Rapture starts. (Easy for me. I will be number 9, right ahead of Mother Teresa.)
9. Education Eradication Pledge. I am instructed to sign a pledge promising to learn absolutely nothing new for the rest of my life. I will also need to attend one of 10 Un-Education Centres (privately run) where 20 weeks of intense instruction will cause me to forget 85 per cent of everything I ever learned. This will be easy for me as I have already forgotten 75 per cent of everything I ever knew.
10. Da Do Ron Ron. Last on the list is a series of 10 prayers I will need to learn to recite. They are all directed towards the ultimate Lord and Saviour St. Ronald Reagan.
To look at me, I don’t think you would take me for the kind of person who likes to torture other people. And to be honest, I myself never thought I could enjoy that morbid activity.
But here I am, these past few weeks, driving people absolutely crazy and I have to admit, it’s putting a smile on my face.
This all came about because of an epiphany I experienced one day, after trying my best to turn right on a red light into oncoming traffic. After doing this for the last 57 years since I got my licence to drive a car, I have finally given up the practice. Now, when I approach a red light in the right lane, I just stop and wait till it turns green. This has made my life so much easier after decades of near-crashes and dozens of pedestrians I didn’t see and almost ran over and bicyclists who came out of nowhere and I almost knocked down.
But in the process of making my life easier, I have made it very, very hard for the poor, impatient schlubs who pull up behind me at the red lights. Since I saw the (red) light, I have heard more horns honking than a wedding party driving through town on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
I don’t actually intend or want to torment the drivers behind me who insist I turn right, but I can live with the results of my intransigence. A driver in the right lane at a red light CAN turn right but there is no law saying he has to.
So I don’t.
Not everyone who has sat behind my car has experienced a nervous breakdown, but the mental health of many others has been seriously degraded. Amidst all the honking coming from behind me, I sit unmoved and unmoving. I await the day when some driver inevitably exits his car and comes up to mine to bang on my window. My plan, at that point, is to turn to the irate soul and smile before blowing him a kiss.
I know I shouldn’t derive pleasure from the misery I am causing others by my traffic habits but my only regret is that I didn’t start this don’t give a damn approach to things a long time ago.
It got me wondering what else I can do to spread even more dissatisfaction among the people with whom I share this fine city of ours.
I have shot a gun before, but always a long gun, never a pistol. The dozens of times or so I pulled the trigger growing up on the farm in Canada were a complete success in the sense that I did not shoot myself in the genitals even one time. If I had, I might remember such an occurrence, but I am pretty sure I didn’t.
And yet, there are men walking (limping?) around in this world who have done exactly that. Take this middle-aged brainiac in South Dakota, for example. He stuffed a loaded pistol in his pants one recent night. I am not an expert, but to me, this would be similar to having to have a bowel movement in the woods and deciding to squat right over a bear trap.
In any case, our hero’s gun went off somehow and the bullet lodged in his penis. That is some bad luck. But what is a fine upstanding man of the community to do to explain his unfortunate accident? He could hardly go around town known as the man who shot his own penis. Now could he?
So he did the next logical thing. Naturally, he told police that he was shot by a “black guy” who tried to rob him. This made sense as black guys always make it a point to shoot men in the penis when they are robbing them. You and I have read so many stories about that.
When the injured man showed up at an emergency room to be treated, police asked him how a bullet happened to strike him in the crotch, and our gunslinger – who is white – showed that he has some talent as a storyteller and might want to pursue that when everything heals and he can sit in a chair again.
The man told police he had been putting out the trash at a dumpster outside his apartment when the robber shot him during an attempted mugging. Police went to the dumpster and found no evidence of a shooting. They started to doubt his account of an African American gunman staking out dumpsters after midnight to rob people.
However, they did find a witness who said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the man’s apartment that night. Obviously, the mugger must have broken into his apartment.
As for me, I am just glad it is almost impossible to stick a .22 calibre rifle down your pants. Or I might walk with a limp too.
I had coffee with a woman today who moved to Stratford from Toronto a few years ago for all the reasons a person would move from Toronto to Stratford. She loves it here, she told me. “You are in your territory,” I remarked. We explored that concept for a few minutes.
I am a big believer in territory. We are most content when we are where we belong. We think of territory as geographical but it can be other areas of our lives too – relationships, career, interests, etc. And territories can change with time.
It is said a wolf that is blown out of its territory by a violent storm and can’t find its way back to it will lie down and die. Members of the animal kingdom invest a lot of energy, not to mention gallons of pee, in marking their territories. Those boundaries are very important to them. They will defend them to the death.
Sometimes when people get driven from their territories and can’t get back to them, they will suffer, like the wolf. Richard Nixon almost died of a blood clot after he was forced to step down as president. It was not the humiliation that almost killed him. He was driven out of his territory and couldn’t get back. He eventually made it back as an elder statesman of the Republic and served his country again before he died.
I wandered in the wilderness for a while. Moved many times. To Alberta for a few months. Worked all sorts of jobs. But then a few decades ago, I stumbled into my territory. Journalism, a little blue house. A wife, a family. Contentment. After all my wandering, I live just a few miles from the hospital where I was born. I always joke that I never got very far in life.
Only one of two things will remove me from my territory: a cannon or a court order.
Many years ago (only old people can use “many” in front of “years ago”) I worked in an office that had a brilliant maintenance man who could fix anything. His one failing, however, was that he could be easily distracted.
One day, he took on the faulty urinal in the men’s washroom on our floor. He disconnected the pipe below the porcelain fixture and, called away, left the job temporarily unfinished. He also left with the pipe for some reason. And he failed to put up a sign warning potential users of the room that the facility was out of order.
The washroom was in plain sight of my desk and I watched as digusted fellow male employee after enraged worker, left the washroom less happy than when they entered it. After seeing this parade of unhappy men leave the washroom, I suspected something was up, but no one said anything, as I recall.
But I have a very short memory and I soon paid a visit to the bathroom with its dysfunctional urinal to take care of some business. As things proceeded, I thought I heard an unusually loud sound of running water and finally looked down to see my shoes covered in moisture of some sort whereas they had been dry when I entered the room.
I left as miserable as my fellow workers had done before me. What made matters even worse, if that was possible, the washroom was carpeted for some reason so the fun never ended.
I think someone finally put up a sign. I don’t remember how this unfortunate incident was brought to a resolution, but I have a feeling the maintenance man’s projected pay raise was put on hold. Also on hold was the reason for our visits to the washroom. Instead, there was a steady stream (unfortunate word choices) of the males among us heading for a restaurant across the street. One after another, we all returned with a coffee in hand as our price for using the facilities there.
However, if I remember this right, that place didn’t have the best coffee in town and it went through us like you-know-what through a goose and so the cycle continued. Back home, I left my shoes on the front porch overnight to dry out.
I personally knew a man and his wife who were good-living farmers and strong Catholics who got down on their knees to pray every night. The man enjoyed a beer now and then but between the two of them, I doubt if they had many sins to bring to the priest in the confessional every month.
One day in the ’70s, as they were getting on in years, they made the three-hour trip to visit some relatives on their farm near Toronto. Not wanting to land in on their hosts at noon, they decided to stop at a hotel in a small town to eat some lunch before heading out to the farm. So, they found a nice table in the beverage room of a hotel and ordered up some sandwiches.
As they were waiting for their meals to arrive, a pretty young woman wandered over to a jukebox in the corner of the room and punched a few buttons. When the music started playing, she walked up onto a small platform that served as a stage, only a few feet from the visiting farmers’ table, and began dancing to the sounds. Now, the dancing was rather entertaining but what came next put a few more white hairs on the heads of the old folks.
The dancer began methodically removing articles of her clothing and it didn’t appear that she was doing this because she was too warm. It seemed as though she was intent on continuing to disrobe in an effort to entertain the mostly male clientele who had dropped into the hotel for lunch.
This was a shocking development indeed but it posed somewhat of a moral dilemma for the innocent old couple. With a meal on the way, they could hardly go running out of the place without paying. And once they paid for their food, they couldn’t leave it there and not eat it. They had lived through the Great Depression and weren’t ones to toss away their money.
On the other hand, they were only a couple of arms’ lengths away from a woman who was determined, it seemed, to keep peeling off her clothes till she wore nothing but a smile. Leave their food behind and be wasteful or dine in a strip joint and be sinful. Not an easy predicament.
However, it might have been predicted that the good-living, unwasteful farmers would finish their food rather than flee so that is what they did. They kept their heads down and ate while the dancer got down to the bare essentials. Still in a daze, they finally left town and drove to the farm they were to visit, relating their traumatic experience to their relatives the moment they entered the farmhouse.
I don’t know how the housewife who hosted the visitors reacted to the startling hotel news but her husband would laugh long and heartily every time he recalled the story in the years to come. And while the visiting woman related the harrowing tale with great concern, apparently her husband hadn’t looked so cheerful in a long, long time. The speculation was he had stolen a few glances at the stripper while slurping up his soup.
At least their priest wouldn’t be so bored next time they went to confession.
