Author: Jim Hagarty

Sometimes you are right about people. Sometimes, you’re not.

I was heading for the coffee shop this afternoon and while I left my house in a good mood, I was a cranky old fart when I reached the drivethrough, thanks to three idiot motorists who fried my bacon to a crisp on my way there.

I placed my order, then motioned the car beside me to go ahead of me as it was an open question which of us was next. To add to my misery, the woman in the car ahead of me brandished a bold bumper sticker that announced she was not a very nice person. Why anyone would willingly drive around telling the world you suck is a question I am unable to answer.

I looked for evidence that she was, in fact, the jerk she wanted everyone to know she is, and wasn’t long in gathering my incriminating fact. The server at the window handed her a coffee. She gave it right back and was soon given a larger drink. Crabby is as crabby does.

However, I was soon to discover there was a reason she handed back the coffee.

It was the cup I had ordered.

When I got to the window, I was handed my back-and-forth coffee by a smiling young server who didn’t want any money for it.

“The woman in the car ahead of you paid for it,” she smiled. I flashed my lights at the disappearing car ahead of me to say thanks.

Anyone who buys me a coffee, in my books, is an angel.

That woman needs a new bumper sticker.

For Heaven’s sake.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

It is with great pride, even though you are well aware that I don’t like to brag, that I announce I have the cleanest wild rabbit in my town.

A few days ago, My Bunny darted out of some bushes while I was watering some newly seeded lawn. I inched the mist spray from the water wand close to the rabbit, then directed it right over her head. (I know she is a female as I have been witness to a few sessions of bunny hanky panky in our backyard and … well, we’ll just leave it at that. She was not an unwilling participant.)

The bunny sat under this shower for about five minutes before darting away.

Yesterday, I saw her rip across the lawn and stand in the same spot where she had enjoyed the raindrops falling on her head. I was up at the house but I said to a family member, “I am going to give that bunny another shower.” And I did.

This time, Bunny sat still for at least 15 minutes and became thoroughly drenched. She shook her head when it got too soggy, blinked her eyes and licked her lips to drink the cool, fresh water. It was a very hot and humid day yesterday and she is not a dumb bunny, if, at the same time, perhaps and over-sexed one.

My Bunny didn’t show today but I know she will be back. When she does return, I will direct the spray close to her but not above her. I want to see if she will willingly move under the shower.

I enjoy these summer days but have a little trouble answering when someone asks what I’ve been up to. And while this might seem a little quirky, it makes me feel good to think that I helped that little critter get through her day a little happier.

Besides, she’ll be all spruced up for the next hanky panky session which I expect to occur soon. When I see it starting to happen now, I go into the house.

I can’t bear to watch.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

Yesterday, while walking the main street of a nearby town, I noticed a small sign attached to a brick wall outside a shop. The sign read, “No Dog Peeing.”

Now, the sign was not at my eye level but instead, about two feet above the sidewalk, about eye to eye to an average dog.

This got me thinking. Was this sign intended to be seen and read by dogs? If so, I will go out on a limb and claim that this town has the most intelligent dogs on the planet. However, if they are that smart, the dogs will already know enough not to pee on the sidewalk because the pee will run on the hard surface and soak their paws.

Hence, there is no need for the sign. And yet it is there. And some human being somewhere actually took the time to make it while another one got down on his or her knees and attached it to the wall.

This is what your life has come down to: advising dogs against peeing. I wonder how well the multiple people behind this sign know dogs. Dogs do not pee on flat hard surfaces like concrete, but on grass and trees (with the exception of fire hydrants) where the pee soaks into the ground and doesn’t spread out like a puddle.

However, they will lift their legs against metal and plastic items such as recycling boxes, bicycles and steel poles that hold signs. In other words, they like to pee on items such as plastic/metal signs affixed to brick walls telling them not to pee.

Oh, sweet irony, you are my god and my salvation!

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I don’t believe in magic. Everything can be explained. With one exception. My Magical Jar. I wish it contained silver dollars and hundred dollar bills, but it doesn’t. It contains screwnails. It’s a one-litre peanut butter jar I cleaned out about 30 years ago and into which I tossed the few screws I had at the time.

Since then, that jar has never run out of screws nor has it overflowed but it has almost always had just the screws I need for any project. On Sunday, for example, I needed six weather-treated deck screws, exactly one-and-one-quarter inches long. I had no idea whether or not I had any deck screws in the jar, let alone that length. But I dumped all the screws out and went fishing. A few minutes later, in my hand, were the six screws I needed, exactly the right length. The funny thing is, there were no other screws like that in the jar.

This happens all the time. I go to that jar several times a week and remove some of its contents. But no matter how many screws I take out, the level of them in the jar, which is always about half full, never seems to change. A loaves and fishes kind of thing.

I might need two, one-inch brass woodscrews. There they are. Four, two-inch metal screws. Ditto.

I never consciously go to the store to buy screws to top up the jar. But I do buy new screws on occasion for a project and I guess the leftovers go into the jar. Also, I accumulate screws from various items we buy for the house and which seem to be unneeded.

However the screwnails get into that jar, the jar is always forthcoming. Like a golden goose or a pot of gold. Maybe even a genie and a lamp. But that would be just my luck to waste one of my three wishes on six deck screws.

I have many of my Dad’s handtools and shovels, rakes etc., which I will pass on to my son and daughter someday. I don’t know who will get the screwnail jar. Maybe they’ll have to flip a coin from my coin jar which, alas, is always running on empty.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I live across the street from a neighbourhood newsman. Almost every day, we meet on the sidewalk, and he shares information with me that I am glad to find out. He always presents this news while looking around and over his shoulder and in a low voice as though someone in authority was watching and listening. It is all very conspiratorial. All very interesting.

One day last week was especially fruitful. He had two big pizza shop announcements to make. Two shops are moving out of the downtown area (sad to hear that) to outlying malls.

I spent my career in community news but I was only half as good as my neighbour. He always reassures me that he doesn’t know whether or not what he says is accurate, it’s just what he heard, but then he tells me how many sources he has. I rarely had as many sources for my stories as he has. He is right more often than wrong. His sources are a bunch of guys he has coffee with every night. Just a bunch of local guys but sometimes they are joined by a retired police chief or retired fire chief, so the next day’s news is almost guaranteed to be jam packed.

I have often been invited to join the nightly sessions but I have begged off so many times I don’t get asked any more. One night, I happened to be there when a full, official meeting was in session, so I wandered over and joined them all. I wasn’t long in realizing I didn’t belong. To begin with, I wasn’t wearing a baseball cap.

I have better things to do. I hope that doesn’t sound like I think I am better than them, but really … And yet, every morning, I find myself, without reason, standing on my sidewalk at the end of my driveway, waiting for my daily report. I often have a broom in hand and pretend to be sweeping up.

Sometimes, the newsman, doesn’t appear. Or almost worse, he shows up, but has no news. Every conversation starts the same way. “So, what’s new?” I ask. “Not a thing,” says my neighbour. If he doesn’t look around him, worried about being overheard, I know there is no news. But if he adopts a tone of conspiracy, I am usually in for a haul.

I then take all the news back inside the house and share it with my family. I am careful to lower my voice and look over my shoulder before I do. Which reminds me. I have yet to tell them the double whammy pizza shop news. I don’t want to spoil everyone’s day. But this is big.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

When I was 10 years old, I thought my Dad knew everything.

When I was 20, I was pretty sure I knew everything.

When I was 30, I believed a fast-talking friend of mine knew everything.

When I was 40, I thought the woman I married knew everything.

When I was 50, I thought some guy who wrote a book about living knew everything.

When I was 60, I came to believe my kids knew everything.

And now that I am 70, I have finally discovered who it is that knows everything.

That person is Nobody.

Nobody knows everything and knows it very well.

I am sure this will come as a surprise to all of you and if you wonder how I figured this out, check back to what I believed when I was 20.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

I’ve always sort of envied the great singer Frank Sinatra. He had regrets, but just a few, too few, in fact, to mention. I think he was lucky that way.

As for me, while I am not flooded with regrets, I think I might outdo Old Blue Eyes in that department. I won’t go through the whole list with you, though I am sure you wish I would mention them all, unlike Frank, but I will touch on a few of the things I’ve done that I wish I hadn’t.

When I was about ten years old, I ate horse radish. I really wish I hadn’t done that and regret it to this day. But we had a rule around our kitchen table. A boy could not reject a food without trying it. I regret that rule and I have never forgiven the horses who made the radish. Or maybe it was made from horses, as I thought. I don’t know.

I regret jumping into a pond and coming out of there with blood suckers attached to my legs. Those creatures were literally bloodthirsty. I regret accepting a hitchhiker’s ride with a speed demon who buried the needle on his speedometer at 120 miles an hour before he agreed to let me out. I also regret that the hair started falling out of my head that day.

In my first year of university, I regret dating two sisters at the same time. The words of the Lovin’ Spoonful song, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”, still ring in my brain today. The sisters, upon finding out they were dating the same guy, made up my mind for me. I further regret that the three of us were in most of the same classes that year so I was able to relive the error of my ways almost every day.

But that was a long time ago, and I have piled up new regrets. One of them involves a tee-shirt I bought a few years ago. It’s a very nice shirt but it had an oversized tag inside the collar that scraped against my neck.

So, I ripped it off.

I really regret doing that because when I put on the shirt, which I do almost every day, I don’t know which is the front and which is the back. And I regret that there is such a thing as the law of averages because 90 per cent of the time, I pull the darned thing on backwards.

But, like Bugs Bunny said when he defied the law of gravity in one episode, “I never studied law.” And I regret having never studied it too.

Still, not as much as I regret eating horse radish.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

With all the awful things going on in the world right now, maybe we could bow our heads and spare a thought for this poor schmoe.

A Missouri drug possession suspect hiding from police farted so loudly, he led cops straight to him. The Clay County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook a picture of deputies searching for the suspect in question, along with a warning that if you’ve got a felony warrant for your arrest, the cops are looking for you and you pass gas so loudly it gives up your hiding spot, you’re definitely having a shitty day.

The cops ended the post with a poop emoji.

Police added, “We’ve gotta give props to Liberty PD for using their senses to sniff him out!”

Only one word left to say: Bummer.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

I am just now drinking a bottle of lime pop. Tastes okay. I haven’t had one in many years. I wonder how much lime is in it.

The ingredients are listed according to the amount with the biggest amounts at the start, dwindling down to the smaller ones. No surprise, carbonated water forms the biggest part of this drink. Second, of course, is sugar/glucose-fructose. Third is citric acid. “Citric” might be lime, but I don’t know.

Then comes “natural flavour.” I wonder what that is. Then modified corn starch. Sounds reasonable. After that, sodium benzoate. I’m guessing salt.

Acacia gum?

Then we leave the fairway and are into the rough: sucrose acetate isobutyrate, glycerol ester of wood rosin (there’s wood in my drink?), brominated vegetable oil, colour and guar gum.

What is ester, what is brominated, what is guar? When I was young, I would go into pubs and emerge a few hours later inebriated. Never did I ever get brominated, at least I don’t think I did.

The point is, nowhere in the ingredients is the word “lime” listed. How can you make a lime drink without any actual lime being included? But what would I know?

Somewhere there is a lime pop tycoon tooling around his mansion, probably sucking back a drink of freshly squeezed real lime. Probably wouldn’t drink this pop I am holding in my hand on the threat of death.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

A groundhog is living in our backyard. Not just any groundhog, either. This fat brown beast is the stupidest groundhog in the world. I admit I have not met all the other groundhogs and have therefore not been able to make an assessment of them, but I feel pretty good about my judgment that this silly critter is one dumb bunny, if you can call a groundhog a bunny.

Why do I say this? Here are the deets, as they say nowadays.

A groundhog digs a hole at each end of its tunnel, for airflow and for escape if being chased by a predator. Now our GH guy is either dumb as a post, as previously stated, or a terrible urban planner. His two holes are thus located: Hole #1 is under the edge of our shed. Not a terrible choice, perhaps. Hole #2 is not so well chosen. It comes up right in the middle of the neighbour’s firepit. Smack dab in the centre.

Once a week, my neighbour starts a huge bonfire on that pit, a fire that was so big one time, the fire department roared up to put it out. I wonder how life is in the hog’s home when these massive fires are burning. A little on the toasty side, I suspect.

But dumb as he may be, he’s no quitter, I’ll give him that. I filled in the hole he dug under our shed. Two days later I went back to find the hole had been dug out again. You can’t keep good a hog down, I guess. However, if he wanders out of the hole he dug out at the neighbour’s place at the wrong time, he might be the main feature at a community pig roast.

I would try to feel sorry for him, I guess, but really, what was he thinking? As smart as I think I am, I have never been privy to the thoughts of the mighty groundhog.

©2013 Jim Hagarty