Author: Jim Hagarty

Every once in a while, you read a piece in the news and think, “Wow. That guy’s telling my story.” This happened to me just now when I read about the fella who took on a cougar in the woods and won.

Travis Kauffman encountered the animal when it attacked him on a Colorado jogging trail last week. Bad decision on the big cat’s part as Travis killed it by stepping on its throat. I was amazed as I read because that is exactly what I would have done if I had encountered a cougar in Colorado. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

I don’t get freaked out around large animals and, in fact, sort of welcome the challenge they present.

Poor Travis did end up with lacerations on his neck and face out of the three-minute encounter. I’m thinking I would probably have avoided any injuries. With a face like mine, it would be a shame to see any lacerations on it.

Our boy Travis said he was running along the trail near Denver, when he heard pine needles rustling and turned his head only to come face-to-face with a young cougar.

“I was bummed out to see a mountain lion,” he said. He raised his arms and shouted at the cougar, but it pounced and locked its jaw on his right wrist and clawed at his face. His attempts to halt the attack by stabbing the predator with sticks and hitting it on the head with a rock were to no avail. I might have stabbed it with my car keys and bonked it on the noggin with my cellphone.

Ultimately, our young hero was able to pin the cougar down and put his foot on its neck and choke it until it stopped thrashing. He worried during the struggle that another cougar would come along and join the tussle. I wouldn’t have worried about something like that because another cougar would have run away after it witnessed my ferocity.

At only 155 pounds, Travis Kauffman has no special martial arts training. He just acted on instinct. Again, that is where we differ. I am fully locked and loaded and I don’t even carry a gun.

Mountain lion attacks on humans are actually kind of common in Colorado and it is by sheer coincidence that I do not live in Colorado.

If you are sensitive, you might not want to read this next part.

The other night, at midnight, I was out in my dark backyard when I saw something emerge from behind the shed at the back of the lot. It started moving through the snow towards the house so I stepped back into the garage and closed the door, watching from the window.

“What the heck is that?” I wondered, as I prepared to yell and wake up the household to help if things got too intense.

Cautiously, the animal crept closer to our bird feeder, preparing to eat some of the seed the birds had kicked out onto the snow. I turned the light off in the garage so the thing couldn’t see me and kept watching through the window. Turned out it was one of the biggest rabbits I’ve ever seen. But I wasn’t afraid.

I knew I could take it.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Sometimes I feel like I am living in a woolen mill. Or a knitting mill, if there is such a thing. Manufacturing of clothing seems to go on in my home from early morning till late night. The family motto is, “If I’m sitting, I’m knitting.”

I have never knit anything but my eyebrows, on occasion, when I witness all the feverish apparel making going on around me. It started, of course, with my wife and before she could even hold a knife and fork, my daughter.

I do contribute to the enterprise in one important way, however. When I leave the house, many of the garments that protect me from frostbite and public nudity charges rolled off the line at the factory I live in. Some days, I look like a very colourful sheep as I stroll down the street in my finery.

I make no comment on how stylishly dressed I am on any given day but I will attest to the fact that I am usually very warm. Every year I get invitations to speak at the Sheep Marketing Board conventions as well as meetings of the Wool Producers of America. I always decline the offers.

But to be honest. I feel baaaaaad about it. A bit sheepish, in fact. But if your drawers were as full of as many toques and mittens as mine are, you might also grow weary from being a model of fine citizensheep.

Not to mention the sheer envy being outfitted in yarn from head to foot can bring out in my jealous friends and acquaintances.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

We pamper our dog and two cats. They eat better than I do some days.

It wasn’t quite that way on the farm where I grew up and where the cat population topped out at 17 at one point. They were working cats, never in the house. Their job was to control the pesky rodent tribes and they did it well.

Our best mouser was Bobbie who raced up and down like a demon on the three out of four legs she had been left with after a run in with the haymower. Come to think of it, a cat who sported all its parts including eyes and even ears and especially tails was a prize to behold.

In later years, my father seemed to go a bit soft on them and started hauling home huge bags of calf starter from the farm supply store for them. They never gave any milk and I never heard them moo but they seemed to thrive on the cross-species feed.

Vet services were also a little rough and ready in those days. One day Dad somehow gathered up all the cats (I don’t know how many but not likely 17 that day) inserted them into a burlap sack which he put in the trunk. He drove to the vet to get them their distemper shots. The vet came out to the trunk and needled each cat one by one right through the burlap sack. Seemed to work.

It did worry me though when it came time for my brothers and sisters and I to get our shots but we never had to experience the cats’ indignity. And I don’t know about my siblings, but I grew to kind of like the calf starter. Good with milk and brown sugar.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

We need George Carlin in these troubled times. However, seeing that my favourite funny man, who loved to play with words, has gone missing, I will have to take on this curious expression for him:

Knock Yourself Out

Who was the first person who, wanting to show someone just how little he or she cared for the outcome of what that person was about to do, said, “Ya, go ahead. Knock yourself out!”

I cannot wrap my head around this. Why would a person want to knock himself out, if it is even possible to do that, on purpose? So, there is one piece of cherry pie on the plate and you ask permission to eat it. Someone steps up, speaks for everyone in the room, and says, “It’s all yours. Knock yourself out.”

(You know, for a really good piece of cherry pie, I might actually be willing to knock myself out.)

I just can’t figure out how advising someone to violently assault himself to the point of losing consciousness can be considered anything but a hostile commentary on a situation.

Wouldn’t it be better for someone to say, “Yes, Jim, those last four pieces of cherry pie are all yours. I sure hope you enjoy them as much as you did the first two.”

If we could learn to adopt more pleasant expressions such as that one, that would really knock me out.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I’m a cautious person. Some might say I am overly cautious. That’s fair.

But I believe in looking before I leap and so far, that has prevented me from leaping off any cliffs. Many bad things don’t happen to me and I hope they never will.

I am not like the couple in Texas the other day who wanted to smoke some weed and so ducked into a vacant house to do so. So far, so good, I guess. In my younger days I used to wander through old, abandoned houses just for fun.

But if I was to go into a vacant house in Houston to smoke some weed, the first thing I would do is call out, “Here kitty, kitty!” Just in case there was a cat inside.

The couple referred to above didn’t do that and consequently ran into a tiger that was inside the house. All is well for tiger and humans, who at first thought they were hallucinating, but this is precisely the kind of thing that would never happen to me.

In fact, I can proudly proclaim that I am practically an expert in staying away from tigers. A little thing I picked up on the farm growing up when the elders told me to stay away from tigers.

And so I do.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Out here in the real world, folks avoid attaching a certain word to explain what is wrong with people, such as myself, who allow ourselves to be plagued by the scourge of clutter.

All sorts of explanations are offered by those interested in the matter but no one that I know of yet has ever had the insight or courage to come right out and say what it is that truly is the genesis of the disease of hoarding. Until we are ready and willing to admit the obvious about what really is a serious issue, we will never come close to solving the worst modern-day puzzle ever.

Only one word is needed to wrap this all up.

That word is insanity.

A month ago, in the midst of a decluttering frenzy, I donated a perfectly good, in fact, a very good, inkjet printer to a local second-hand store. It hurt a little bit to do that even though this fine machine we inherited hadn’t been used by us in years, as we have another printer we prefer.

I have given up selling stuff on the internet but I have found that is a great way to offer stuff to the general public for free. I could post an ad for a box of used bandages or a pair of running shoes that had lost their soles, and if I wrote FREE on the ad, they’d be gone in an hour.

So, I have taken to donating and with the printer gone, a wave of relief washed over me.

That was 30 days ago and this afternoon, I found a big plastic envelope filled with materials relating to the printer. Page after page of operating instructions and two big booklets. Along with a DVD loaded with software needed for the printer.

Panic set in.

Oh no!

Within minutes, a wave of thoughts and possibilities and scenarios flooded my brain. I should go to the second-hand store and see if they had sold the printer. If they had, would they know who bought it? I could track them down. If that wasn’t possible, I could take a picture of all this stuff and post it on the Internet, offering it free to the owner of the printer. (Except that guy who took my used bandages would probably claim it all.)

As this was sending me near to breakdown territory, I noticed that one of the two big manuals I had found was the French version. I thought that I could throw that one out, at least, but what if it turned out a person who speaks only French bought the printer from the second-hand store?

And where the insanity really gets cranked up to ten is when I realized that anyone under 30 would throw all the manual material out or even leave it in the store and just find out everything they needed to know about the printer on the Internet.

I explained my latest dilemma to my family at supper tonight. And I have to say I never saw material go from our table to the recycling box more quickly. It was shocking, in fact.

Apparently, none of the members of my family worry about the same things I worry about. And tonight I will lie awake worrying about why that is so.

I hope the guy who took my bandages is okay.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

I had an uncle who lived well into his 90s. He was healthy as a horse up to the end. He went out golfing three weeks before he died. He was the happiest, most optimistic man I’ve ever met.

But his life wasn’t trouble-free. At one point in his senior years, doctors opened up his skull and did some sort of brain operation, I can’t remember the details of. He survived it and carried on. But on both sides of his forehead, there were two big indentations associated with the operation. The skin grew over them but it was noticeable that there appeared to be two holes in his forehead, one on the left and one on the right.

I first saw him, following the operation, at a funeral. Of course he noticed that everyone who greeted him was stealing a furtive glance at the new prominent features on his head. So, rather than launch into a lengthy explanation, he put people at ease with this little quip: “That’s where they took the horns off,” he laughed. And so did everyone else.

If there was someone, somewhere who didn’t love him, I never met that person.

His wife, my aunt, was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease, so he taught himself to cook. And in his early 90s, invested in a whole new set of pots and pans.

A better example of living life to the fullest I have never known of.

©2013 Hagarty

Now and then I go to a play and I watch all the pantomime actors on the stage. They run around in fancy costumes, pretending to say words and sometimes, act as though they are singing. I’ve gotten used to this and have learned to kind of enjoy these soundless theatrical presentations. That is, I did until someone pointed out to me that these are, in fact, not silent Charlie Chaplin-type productions.

This news caused me to question whether or not I am missing the sound from the stage because I cannot hear anymore. That is an unlikely explanation as I have two perfectly good ears on the sides of my head. But someone who is convinced that I am, in fact, deaf as a frying pan, took matters into her own hands and bought me a $40 hearing device designed for people to use at live theatre presentations and in movie theatres. Yesterday, I tried it out for the first time at a play.

Thirty seconds after I managed to get the thing set up and the earplugs shoved into place, I began to hear a very disturbing growling coming from somewhere below my chest. It sounded as though there was some kind of hideous creature hiding under my seat. I was quite alarmed by this until I remembered I hadn’t eaten all day and my stomach was rumbling. In stereo. Any self-respecting doctor would sell his stethoscope if he had to listen to even a few seconds of that.

I calmed down and it was lucky I did as a few seconds later I sneezed the loudest sneeze I ever have blasted in my life. Through my listening device, which I had turned up to full volume and the earbuds burrowed deep into my ear canals, this sounded just like one of the final fireworks crackers set off at our local Canada Day display, only twice as loud.

I no sooner recovered from that when I started to hear a constant clicking sound and realized that the device must be picking up my pacemaker. That made sense till I realized I don’t have a pacemaker, my heart insisting on continuing to beat on its own without help. I did notice an old guy sitting a row or two behind me so it might have been his. I considered asking him to turn it off but decided that is probably not polite. This reminded me of our baby monitor days when we would suddenly hear a child crying and screaming and alarmed, we’d rush into our kids’ bedrooms to find them sound asleep. Some neighbour baby was the source of the howling, it appeared, its screeches somehow broadcasting through our monitor.

Pacemaker problem ignored, there started up a very high-pitched sniffling which was coming from my nostrils as I tried to hold back the stream of nostril substance they were trying to exude.

It took me a while to adjust, but I finally learned to rip out the earbuds before violent sneezes erupted and to ignore the other errant sounds. That accomplished, I began concentrating on the sounds from the actors on stage. The play was a comedy, set in England in 1897, and surprise to me, all these young Canadian actors (including my daughter who bought me my hearing aids) were speaking with English accents.

Who knew? I heard almost every word they spoke. The play was hilarious.

But if I had to review my new $40 hearing device, I would have to say it was $20 well spent.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

My back is bothering me a bit today. A little stab of pain here and there depending on how I twist and turn. It will be gone in a day or two.

I used to chalk up my back pains to the famous “Hagarty back” that plagued even the generation that preceded me, my Dad resorting to wearing a brace in his mid life. I also blamed my problems on all the hard work I did on farms and in factories over the years. And on bridge construction. Two days on a jackhammer will rearrange your skeleton in ways never thought to be possible.

But the real source of my problems, I see now, were the years I spent in a local rodeo. I didn’t rope calves or try to stay on bucking broncos as long as I could. Instead, I was the animal on which two lively rodeo riders spent a lot of time, trying not to be bucked off.

My name was “Horsey” and I would be mounted when I would make the mistake of getting down on all fours to fish out a remote control from under a couch. The only warning I would get in advance of another gruelling ride would be the yell, “Horseeeee!!!!” after which I would feel the weight of a rider leaping from a couch onto my back.

My job then was to race across the livingroom, neighing loudly as I galloped and now and then, rearing up on my hind hooves in an attempt to dislodge the rider.

Eventually, I would return to the couch onto which I would buck the laughing rider, using the soft landing of the cushions to prevent any broken bones. Successfully riderless, I would then hear “Horseeeee!!!!!” from the other rider waiting there just before that one hurled herself onto my saddleless and nearly broken back.

Across the room Horsey would go again, rearing up now and then, and returning to the couch to buck off the new rider.

If I recall correctly, there would often be accusations from one of the riders that the other rider had been given a more thrilling romp, so the exercise would be repeated until the rodeoers were satisfied or their favourite cartoon came on TV.

I wonder on what specific day our final rodeo was held. I am sure Horsey and his riders didn’t know that would be our last big appearance before our one cheering fan known as Mom, who, curiously, was never called on to participate as a horse in the rodeo.

To this day, she never complains about an aching back.

On the bright side, even now, I still have knees of steel. Horsey’s hooves have gone a little soft, however.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

I was asked a while back whether or not I had ever taken driver training. I am not sure what prompted the question. Was I being told it was obvious I had been trained or clear as a bell that I hadn’t. In any case, I was happy to answer.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am taking driver training.”

“You mean you have taken it. Right?”

“Oh, I see, you are asking whether or not I ever took instruction from someone on the proper way to drive an automobile. And yes, I did take a course offered by my high school when I was 16. And I am still taking lessons, almost every day.”

“What the hell are you yammering on about? You just turned 72. Do you mean to tell me you’ve been taking driver training for the past 56 years? What do you take me for. A fool?”

“Yes, I do, to the second question and same for the first. Every day I drive, I am in training.”

“What kind of drugs are you on?” asked my inquisitor.

“If you would like a list of my drugs I can supply that to you. But as far as I know, none of them impair my thinking.

“Every time I drive my car, I have a number of driving instructors showing me what to do. They don’t sit in my car like my first teacher did, but drive along in their own vehicles, and they point out what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong.

“Sometimes, they will wave at me with a middle finger extended. Apparently, this is a signal that my driving skills are excellent and it is their way of congratulating and encouraging me.

“But other times, my instructors honk their horns when it is obvious to them that I have done something wrong. I feel badly about that and try to correct my ways.

“Some of my instructors get very angry with me, their faces turn red and they shake their fists as our cars meet on the road. This is helpful as I take note of my mistakes and pledge to correct them in the future. The last thing I want to do is make my driving instructors upset with me.”

A common driving error I make these days is going too slow. In the world of driving, this appears to be a cardinal sin. I try to drive a few clicks over the speed limit but it has been shown to me many times over the years that I am holding up all the other drivers.

For example, I was driving through a sudden and brief terrible snowstorm in the dark one night last week and trying hard to not kill or be killed when I was impressed to suddenly see a qualified driving instructor passing me in his car and thereby telling me I was a menace on the road. I absorbed that lesson and will work on it.

Have I done any driver training myself in the 56 years I have had a licence? The answer is I have done a bit of it over the years but gave it up for good about two decades ago following an unfortunate incident. I gave the common middle finger salute to a male driver to congratulate him on his skillful maneuvers and the man chased me all over town for the next fifteen minutes, his car right on my tail, wanting me to stop, I guess, to provide him with more explicit instructions. I guessed the driver had just been released from prison that day and his skills were a little rusty. I finally led him to the police station where I stopped, intending to get out and give him some helpful tips. He must have been in a hurry, however, as he sped up and disappeared down the street.

It can be a complicated thing, this driver training.

©2023 Jim Hagarty