Author: Jim Hagarty

I stepped out into my backyard through our garage door very late one night last week, when winter still had us in its grip. There I saw three big male wild rabbits, feasting on the seed I had scattered earlier below our platform bird feeder (an old sheet of plywood on an even older steel post).

These three guys aren’t friendly and I was surprised they didn’t bolt when they saw me. But hunger must have temporarily dulled their caution and they hung in there. I was careful not to make any sudden moves.

Missing from the gang was My Bunny, the sweet little female who is about half the size of the Three Amigos and who behaves as though I am her best pal. In fact, one of the Hardboiled Hares might have been the only one she was able to keep alive during her first season as a mother last summer.

As I was watching the Ravenous Gang of Three make short work of the feed I had put out, I suddenly spied My Bunny out of the corner of my eye. She had ripped around the corner of the shed and hopped right up to me. I thought I understood what was going on. She was too timid to approach the Backyard Bullies but was probably as hungry as they were on this cold night. This was not the first time she had come to me for help.

I knew what I had to do. I talked to her calmly in a sing-songey voice and slipped back into the garage to fetch her some grain. I reappeared and sprinkled a moderate amount on the ground a few feet from me. I knew the Nervous Nellies under the birdfeeder would never make a dash for what I had left my fuzzy little pal, at least not while I was standing there. And even My Bunny, though she had asked for something to eat, stood back a piece after I had dumped her food on the ground. I had to sweet talk the girl into hopping up near me and chowing down. Finally, she gave in and raced up to within a few feet of me and started filling her belly.

Now I knew I was stuck. As cold as it was out and me with no coat, cap or gloves on, I had no choice but to provide security while Bunny got busy gobbling. Fortunately, she filled up fairly quickly and took off again behind the shed.

It is one thing to be seen by a wee rabbit as a reliable source of food, but another to be hired on as a bodyguard.

Or as her bunnyguard, which maybe suits a bit better.

©2023 jim Hagarty

Having been, for many years now, a committed, self-admitted, practising loner and the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian National Association of Hermits, I was disappointed that our convention in April 2020, in Toronto has been cancelled due to the pandemic.

On the other hand, the combined attendance at our last ten conventions has been exactly zero, so the effect on me will be temporary.

Still, on some level, I will miss the non-company of my fellow hermits. I would call some of them on my telephone but then, you know, there’s the whole hermit thing.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

A Wee Bit Moist and Soggy

A young man going to university in Ireland wrote home to his mother in Toronto and gave a weather report: It rained only twice last week, Mom. First for three days and then for four days.

Oh great. Just what I need.

As if it isn’t bad enough that the birds of the world love to crap on my car, a man in the United States has taken to imitating the feathery dung dive bombers, and now that he is receiving publicity for it, I bet it will catch on.

Police in Akron, Ohio are searching for a man who’s come to be known as the “Bowel Movement Bandit.” The man is accused of defecating on as many as 19 cars in residential neighbourhoods. He wears a black beanie cap, a black hoodie and only poops on cars in the early-morning hours, police say.

Things are under control for now, but if this guy ever gets a pilot’s licence and takes to the air I will sell my old buggy and start walking.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Why I Hate White Chocolate

There are so many wonderful small moments in life. A child laughing, for example. A bunny hopping across your backyard.

Then there is going home with a chocolate bar you just bought in a corner store, peeling back the package, and finding the chocolate has been inside so long it has turned white and hard. This is not, however, enough to put you off eating it, although you do it begrudgingly. And the next time you are in the store, you will forget this little fiasco and buy another bar, completely repeating the process.

Time to go find a laughing baby and cheer up.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I was never a big fan of the Drive Clean program in Ontario, the Canadian province where I live. I know its intentions were good when it started – to catch automobiles that were belching too many pollutants – but most old clunkers are off the road now and it’s time to retire it.

Since it started, our family has spent almost $1,500 to have our two vehicles checked and never once has a flaw been found, even though they weren’t always the newest of cars. So, every two years, one or other of the vehicles has to be taken in for testing and I dutifully hand over the $45 because I can’t get a new licence plate sticker if I don’t.

But one year in particular I had steam coming out of my ears and maybe I should have been checked for faulty heart valves or something. I went to the licence office with my forms all filled out and the woman said, “Oh Sir, you have to have a Drive Clean test done.”

Now for some crazy reason, I always renew my licence right on my birthday so I couldn’t put this off. So out to auto shop I went with the Oldsmobile and sat in the waiting room for what seemed like an hour before everything was done. Surprise, surprise. Nothing wrong. I handed over my $45 and headed back to the licence store with my certificate showing that the car had passed its test.

“Oh dear,” said the same woman behind the counter when I brandished the document, almost defying her to find fault with it. “You’ve done the Drive Clean on the wrong car, Sir. It’s the Chevy that needs to be done. The Olds will be done next year.” Close to heart attack territory, I inquired if the Drive Clean I had just had performed on the Olds would still be good next year. I was told no, that it would expire the day before my next birthday.

I’m kind of surprised by the fact that I didn’t expire before my next birthday.

I raced home, grabbed the Chevy and back out to the auto shop for my second DC test within an hour. When it was finished, I handed over $45 and told the fellow behind the counter that I would not be back, that I was fresh out of cars.

Someday I will be fresh out of cars for real and Drive Clean Hell will just be but a bad memory.

(Update: The program has been cancelled.)

©2012 Jim Hagarty

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 have 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?

My point exactly.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

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.

They are so fortune-ate.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

I am generally not a jealous guy, but I will admit to a bit of envy when I read about the leaders of North Korea. Why can’t Canada’s prime ministers be this good? In comparison, our leaders are pretty much duds. It is no wonder Donald Trump is in love with the current head honcho of North Korea.

For example, Kim Jong Il, the now deceased father of the current dictator Kim Jong Un, was really good at sports. He bowled a perfect 300 in the first and only game he ever played. He also broke a world-record score during his first and last round on a North Korean golf course. He got 11 holes-in-one and didn’t score more than a birdie on any other holes, ending up with 25 for 18 holes, 38 under par.

He was also a literary wonder, having written more than 1,500 books. More impressively, perhaps, he wrote all these books during the three years he attended Kim Sung II University. After graduation, he composed six operas which are better than any other music ever written in the history of the world. He also invented the hamburger.

But what else could be expected of a man who was born under a double rainbow? Following his birth, a new star appeared in the sky. Not only that, a swallow predicted his birth. And when he grew up, he could control the weather with his mood.

Kim Jong Il was a genius baby. He was walking at three weeks old and talking at eight weeks old. And he and his father, Kim Il Sung, never used a bathroom because they didn’t urinate or defecate. Their bodies were so well calibrated that they used all of the foods and liquids ingested and produced no waste. The current leader, Kim Jong Un, does have bowel movements, however, and travels with his own personal toilet. Anyone caught using his mobile restroom is put to death. So his aides are well-advised to go before they accompany him anywhere.

And even though he has to poop, Kim Jong Un is still no slouch himself compared to his ancestors. He could drive a car at three years old. He began winning yacht races when he was nine. And he excelled in the arts as a child. He was particularly good at painting masterpieces and composing musical scores. He climbed to the peak of the highest mountain in his country. These wonderful attributes of Kim Jong Un are part of the curriculum in North Korean schools.

But I guess it is natural these amazing men would emerge in a country that has invented a pill that cures AIDS and cancer, where there are no people with disabilities, and where they have invented alcoholic drinks that don’t result in hangovers and a soda pop that actually grows the brains of its drinkers and makes them smarter. Plus, North Koreans found the remains of unicorns which used to live in their country and on which their leaders once rode.

But, maybe the North Korean leaders have met their match. News today that Donald Trump was named 2018 Men’s Champion in a Florida golf tournament in which he didn’t play, a tournament he won five times between 1999 and 2013.

I don’t know how we’ll ever do it, but we Canadians simply need to start producing better politicians. Every one of them is a sheer embarrassment to our once proud nation. They suck at sports, never invent anything, and regularly use toilets.

How low have we sunk.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

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.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

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 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 and shoot them in the penis.

However, they did find a witness who said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the man’s apartment that night. Obviously, then, the mugger must have broken into his apartment, where he robbed the victim and shot him, earning him the nickname “Dead Eye Dick.”

As for me, I am just glad it is almost impossible to stick a .22 calibre rifle down your pants. Or I might be walking with a limp too.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

When a man starts his day and heads out to complete a few errands, he does not expect disaster to strike. But strike me it did this afternoon when I discovered my favourite grocery store had hiked its price of peanut butter by 50 cents a jar. At the rate I go through peanut butter, it didn’t take me long to realize what a hit this was going to inflict on our food budget.

And while I don’t begrudge the store the extra 50 cents, it was the lack of notice that sent me into a mini shock. They didn’t phone me to let me know that the price, which had been the same since back in the day when John Wayne still went by his real name, Marion Morrison, was about to shoot up. No letter in the mail. Not a text message, no email. No Facetime chat on my phone. Nothing. That’s what is so disappointing.

So now that the one-kilogram jars are out of my reach, I noticed they hadn’t gotten around to increasing the price of the two-kilogram buckets so I lugged a couple of them home, though I pulled a muscle in my left arm dragging them to my trunk.

With enough orange juice and peanut butter and with the passage of time, I will get over this. But I have been let down.

And I have to admit, I don’t like being let down.

Also, like a slap in the face, they tacked an extra dollar onto the price of raspberry lemonade.

I won’t lie.

It hurts.

©2021 Jim Hagarty