Author: Jim Hagarty

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.

The Downsizing

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A hardworking soul name of Kenny
Asked for a raise of one penny.
He was walked to the door.
“Don’t come back no more!”
And severance? He didn’t get any.

Unloved and Unlived In

By Jim Hagarty

In my travels tonight I saw this abandoned farmhouse and it took me back to a younger and braver me who would park my car and take a tour through an old place like this. I don’t know what fascinates me about forlorn old homes that are no longer lived in, but I have always had an interest in them. When I was a boy, my childhood chum and I worked up enough nerve one time to take a trip through an old house during the day time. We climbed the stairs and found a lot of papers in an upstairs room. The owner had been a teacher so he left behind a lot of his schoolwork when he moved on.

Maybe that’s where my interest started. We were sort like the Hardy Boys.

In my younger days, I drove across Canada a couple of times and visited various ghost towns in the western provinces. It was an eerie experience. The largest of the communities was in Alberta. It had streets, a downtown, a community centre, a church. Even a war memorial honouring men from the town who had fought and died in the world wars. The gas pump in an old station read 40 cents a gallon. But there was only one house inhabited on the edge of the village. The grass was green and cut. The house was kept up. I was told later it was probably a squatter from the city who had simply moved into the empty house one day. Live there long enough and it’s yours.

I remember seeing an abandoned farmhouse down a gravel back road in Saskatchewan. I parked, went inside and gave myself a tour.

I have lost all my nerve for that sort of thing now.

During the Great Depression, a farm family loaded their car with whatever it would hold and moved from their farmhouse in Saskatchewan to British Columbia where they started over. Forty years later, in the 1970s, on a trip east, they decided to drop in to their old place to see if it was still standing. It was there, so they went inside. It was obvious to them that no one had been inside their home in the four decades since they left it. It was like walking into a museum of their past. Photos on the walls, furniture as they had left it, curtains on the windows. They were enthralled.

It seems as though it would be impossible that no one had ever gone into their house but the territories are large in western Canada and the farmhouses can be far apart.

I can see it happening that no Jim Hagartys happened along to have a peek.

Whatever This Is

By Jim Hagarty

Seen on my noon hour walk around town today, this hot rod. Not sure what the body is from, but it doesn’t matter much now. The roof is attached with some mighty large rivets. It has a Beverly Hillbillies charm, even though its wheels and tires suggest it has been made for racing only.

hot rod rear edited

Little Country Church

By Jim Hagarty

Years ago I was driving down a gravel road in my area of south-central Canada when I came by this little stone church. I have been fascinated with it ever since and drop by to pay a quiet visit at least once a summer.

Several aspects of the building interest me but here is the big one.

The church was built in 1863. That is no big deal. Lots of buildings that were built that year or even a century or two before that are still standing in North America. What I find intriguing about this particular building is that it was closed in 1872. It functioned as a church for only nine years. And despite the fact it has been closed for the past 153 years, it is still standing and relatively undisturbed.

The American Civil War was into its third year when this church was built. Abraham Lincoln was still alive. A lot of water under the bridge since then and yet, the church still stands. The fact that it is made of stone accounts for that. Had it been built with logs, it would be gone by now.

The church, known as St. Anthony’s, was a Roman Catholic mission church built by and for the Germans in the area near a little place called Tavistock. But as there was not a large enough German population in the area to sustain it, it closed. When it was in use, it was opened for a mass only once a month.

At some point during its post-church history, a school teacher and his chickens used to live inside the building.

church wall

Another reason I like the church is the reason it is still standing. By the 1920s, after it had been closed for almost 60 years, the church had fallen on hard times. It was deteriorating and in danger of returning to the earth. But the surrounding community of mostly Protestant church members, didn’t want to see it disappear. So a true community group of Catholics and Protestants formed a committee and once a year, a day-long bee would be held at the building. They resurrected it and looked after the church structurally as well as the church grounds.

Today, a hundred years later, the community still keeps the church going. And now it is opened once or twice a summer for a service and sometimes a wedding.

There are even recent burials on the church grounds. Because the church was open for such a short time, there are only a few original tombstones, most of them inscribed in the German language.

One thing I have never done is seen inside St. Anthony’s. I hope to do that someday.

If you are in the Stratford area of southern Ontario some day and would like to see the church, head south on the highway from the village of Shakespeare and turn left at the first sideroad. Drive about two miles. The church will be on your left.

Between Me and Breakfast

By Jim Hagarty

Most times I love our two housecats or am pretty much indifferent to them. They’re cute and a lot of fun.

Other times, they are so annoying, they could send a Buddhist Monk over the edge. Not being a monk, imagine the effect they have on me.

For instance. Every morning, the “boys”, as they are called, want desperately to get through the kitchen door out into the garage where their favourite kitty litter tray awaits. The one in the basement is too confining, it seems, with its attached hood, as it appears even they cannot stand the lovely scent left behind by their visits. Better to head out to the uncovered pan in the garage where a cat can sit upright and have a good think while waiting for nature to unfold.

SONY DSC

None of this is the annoying part.

This is what infuriates:

Among the truly awful things in life – you can devise your own list – is soggy breakfast cereal. I make sure every day that I have all necessary items in place at the table before I take the irreversible step of pouring the milk on the crisp new flakes, or rice puffs or mini wheats, or whatever. Because once that liquid hits the solids, the window of opportunity for eating your cereal at its tastiest best is a very small one. We’re talking seconds, not minutes. The flakes begin to degrade the moment they are soaked and must be inserted in mouth quickly or they become milk-saturated corn mush before your very eyes.

Now, this is where the boys come in. Literally, come in.

I know cats don’t understand anything about soggy cereal but I am perfectly aware of the fact that they have very good hearing. In light of that, I don’t know whether they wait for certain sounds to impress their eardrums before making their move, but here’s how it goes.

I pull out my chair, sit down, pour the milk, lift two bites with my spoon and…

Scratch, Scratch, Scratch, Scraaaatchuhhh!

Ignore the sounds of cats scratching at the door to get back in, I am advised, but I cannot. I bolt from my chair, and rush to the door. Sensing my annoyance, they hang back when the door opens, not sure what awaits. When they finally make their move, they shoot through the opening like bullets through a gun barrel.

Back at the table, I face a mess of steadily deteriorating flakes.

This does not amuse.

I have tried to outsmart them but the only sure thing I have discovered in my 65 years is that the cat always wins.

So, I pull in the chair and bang my spoon against the cereal bowl a couple of times. In short, I make all the sounds I would if l were actually eating.

Not a scratch to be heard.

I recently waited five minutes to prove to my unbelieving family that I was not imagining things.

No scratches.

I picked up the milk, poured it carefully across the flakes, and sprinkled on some sugar.

Two bites.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scraaaatchuhhh!

Can cats possibly hear the sound of milk being poured on cornflakes from 15 feet away through a thick, wooden door?

I believe they can.

And I believe in another old saying about these strange creatures we allow to walk around our homes: The cat is always on the wrong side of the door.

Back to my opening paragraph. Sometimes I love ’em, sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I’m indifferent.

Other times, I look down to see this little defiant bundle of flesh and bones walking across our floors and wonder what odd creatures humans are to willingly share their space with such beings.

Someday, I know, they’ll be gone and I’ll feel bad.

Except at breakfast time.

Calm, crispy breakfast time.

Backyard Zoo

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

Our backyard is like a small zoo.
There are raccoons and pigeon hawks too.
Squirrels there aplenty,
Fifteen or twenty,
Mice, moles and ants, just a few.

Telling the Truth about Lying

By Jim Hagarty

A popular TV program in the U.S. called Nightline ran a segment a while back on how comfortable people in our modern society are becoming with the practice of lying.

ln an earlier age, deceiving others as to the truth of things was considered a pretty classless, immoral thing to do. But apparently, there has been some sort of seismic shift in the way we look at truth and facts, as though they have somehow been disconnected from any concept of honour in our modern world. Appearances now, it seems, trump reality. How easily we shrug our shoulders these days both when we ourselves tell a whopper and when the other guy lies through his teeth.

Nightline produced a few examples, such as people padding their resumés when applying for jobs and students cheating in a hundred and one ways rather than doing the work required of them by their teachers. If a bit of b.s. will push us along the path we want to go, it seems a growing number of us are perfectly OK with that. Or at least it doesn’t bother us as much as it might once have.

An amusing example of Nightline’s thesis was a survey that was done on people who can be seen talking on their cellphones in public. Apparently, and I’m not sure how such a figure could be arrived at (hopefully Nightline wasn’t lying about this or lied to by the cellphone users), something like 35 per cent of all the people we see supposedly talking on their cells are speaking to no one on the other end of the line. Those bogus conversations are all for show, so the owners of the phone can look cool, important, etc.

We all have our secrets but withholding those, as far as I’m concerned, is a lot different from lying. Those fall more into the realm of privacy and unless we’re breaking laws by withholding information, we should be allowed to hang onto a few bits without divulging all.

When I was teaching journalism to students in their late teens and early 20s, I encountered the odd bad apple who sometimes chose expediency over honesty and honour if their backs were against the wall. Typically, they’d turn in work they didn’t do themselves and in a couple of celebrated cases, these fledgling reporters went ahead and made up interviews with non-existent people. I used to check out some of these “sources” and it didn’t take long to prove how bogus they were. In one case, I phoned up a real doctor who was quoted all through a story. He told me he’d never heard of the student who had apparently interviewed him.

A bit shocking, at first, to know that some people have that much nerve, but then, I’m probably pretty naive about the ways of the world. When some politicians think nothing of playing fast and loose with the facts, it shouldn’t surprise us I guess that the ethical bar keeps getting lowered for the rest of us.

When I was a kid, I didn’t always tell the truth. Maybe that’s a kid thing. It was rare for me, however, to totally make up things. As I often hear others say about themselves, I was not a good liar. My body language would give me away too easily and although I’m a reasonably good storyteller, under pressure I’m not very good at all.

Exaggeration, however, was my forte. These days, I usually can’t be bothered to tell anything but the truth, even though I concede there are times when being totally honest is not in a person’s best interest. Nevertheless, the other day I was shocked to hear myself tell someone something that wasn’t entirely true. Where did that come from, I wondered.

But if you see me on my cellphone, I swear, there’s somebody on the other end of the line.

Somebody important, of course.

Like me.