Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I wanted to buy an iPhone on the Internet.

My phone company offered me a “refurbished” iPhone 5s, 16 gigabytes, for $550 on a two-year contract. I thought I could do better.

So, I spent a few days at my favourite on-line marketplace, kijiji, haggling with the anonymous sellers of iPhones. Prices ranged from various old phones – $50, “just for parts” – to brand new iPhone 6’s at $1,000. A bit discouraging.

But I found some iPhone 5s I liked the look of. Sizes ranged from 16 gb, to 32 gb to 64 gb. I had been told by an iPhone user that bigger would be better as the operating system and the apps eat up a lot of hard drive.

I found one phone that looked perfect: 5s, 64 gb. It was selling for $400. Too much. Would the seller take less? No answer. No answer.

Finally, “I’ll let you have it for $250,” came an email. I accepted.

I met the seller in a movie theatre lobby and bought it. It’s in perfect condition. She rarely used it.

I checked her kijiji entry again to see when she had listed it. Jan. 20. That was my birthday. My family had asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Now I can call them up and tell them. Or text them. Or get Siri to do it.

As the woman handed me her old phone, I told her of the birthday connection and said, “This was meant to be.”

She smiled. “Happy Birthday.”

Funny how that works.

By Jim Hagarty

I attended a meeting recently and because I had arrived late, chose to sit down quietly at the back of the room.

I could see a friend of mine sitting half way up the row of chairs, on the other side of the middle aisle. Suddenly, towards the end of the meeting, he stood up and strolled out of the hall, walking right by me, practically brushing my shoulder as he went, and neither looking at me nor speaking to me.

Taken aback by this unexpected turn of events, my mind immediately started performing mental gymnastics, trying to figure out all this. Unfortunately, as a gymnast, my brain is a bit of an klutz, and so it doesn’t always catch the rung it’s reaching for.

One conclusion was firm, however: My friend was mad at me. The details of how this loss of affection had developed still had to be worked out in my head but it was pretty clear that I had done something wrong to deserve such a snub.

So, I spent most of the rest of the meeting and beyond, examining the ins and outs of our relationship to see where I might have gone off the rails. I went over everything I could remember having said to him, that might have upset him. I looked at the things I had done, and not done, that might have caused him to think poorly of me. I tried to remember things I might have said about him to other people – an unflattering word, perhaps, that might have gotten back to him.

On all counts, I found lots of areas where I could now see he could easily have taken offence. Or maybe he’d just heard something about me he hadn’t known before and had suddenly decided he couldn’t be friends with someone with a character as flawed as mine.

Over the next week, from time to time, my mind resumed the search for why I had one less friend in the world. Each day the phone didn’t ring from his place to mine convinced that our friendship had ended.

Then on Monday morning, six days after the snub, my former friend dropped in to see me, smiling ear to ear, as is his style. In the course of our conversation, I casually worked it in that I had been wondering why he had taken no notice of me at the previous week’s meeting.

“You were at the meeting?” he said, surprised. “I never saw you.”

Of all the explanations my nimble imagination had come up with, this was not one it had even come close to putting on the table. Never saw me? I was sitting right there. How could he not see me? In fact, I was almost certain I could remember making eye contact with him.

So I was tempted to begin another week of heavy thinking, this time trying to decide why my friend had suddenly taken to lying brazenly to my face. But I gave it up as a bad deal. My friend is unable to lie. He’d give away vital information to a car thief who wanted to know where he kept his keys.

It goes against my nature to do this but I guess I will have to accept the simplest explanation.

He didn’t see me.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

My pet giraffe called Stretch
Would swallow peanuts then retch.
It told him to quit
But regretted it.
So I threw him some cashews to catch.

By Jim Hagarty

We marvel at the parks in our city,
Tourists are enthralled by the sight,
People come by the thousands,
And linger there by day and at night.

But if it is parks you’re wanting,
Just follow me in your car.
I’ll take you to some magical spots
And we won’t have to drive very far.

They’re the parks that are kept by farmers,
Though few people have ever seen
The wondrous yards around the farms,
The trees and the grass so green.

But why do they keep them, I wonder.
They spend their time off cutting lawns.
Maybe they just love the beauty themselves
Before our brief summers are gone.

By Jim Hagarty

My wife bit her tongue during supper one night recently. Literally, not figuratively. The next night, I did the same. (My tongue, not hers, that is.) Again, at suppertime.

After much thought about this unhappy phenomenon, I came to realize these were not isolated incidents. We never bite our tongues except when we’re eating meals. There is a pattern to all this self-wounding: We are victims of that scourge of the modern age called “multitasking.”

After 27 years of marriage and two kids, mealtimes have become one of the few chances we seem to get any more to communicate. When the kids were young, we would talk and chew and chew and talk, all the while dodging flying food, plates and spoons coming from the direction of our toddlers, and sometimes, we chomped down on the wrong piece of meat while discussing the dramatic events of our day. We were like that gun-totin’ cartoon cowboy Quick Draw McGraw who would blast himself in the face with his pistol after losing track of when he was shooting and when he was blowing away the smoke from the end of the barrel.

Fortunately, recovery from a self-inflicted tongue bite is usually rapid. Other people, however, get themselves into predicaments more serious than that, running their cars into bridges and such, precisely because they are trying to accomplish two or more things at the same time.

I used to have a 45-minute drive to work every day and along the way, I noticed some strange sights in the cars that shared the roads with me. One day, as I was following a woman driver, I became curious when her head kept dipping below view as she seemed to be bobbing for something on the seat beside her. As I edged a bit closer, I realized that what she was doing, while steaming along at 100 kilometres an hour, was putting on makeup and planting her face an inch away from her rear-view mirror to make sure it was slathered on straight. I guess she was hoping to save the funeral director some time later on.

Not long after that, I followed a man who was weaving on the road, in and out of his lane. Looking more closely, it seemed to me he was talking on a cell phone. But when I got a better view, I could clearly see he was shaving with an electric razor and also gazing intently in his mirror to do a proper job. I felt as if I was an extra in some bizarre Mr. Bean epsiode.

We are obsessed with accomplishing our too many tasks and knowing we can never get them done one at a time, as our ancestors might have gone about them, we believe we need to do three or four of them at once. So, we watch the hockey game while playing cards with the neighbors, tape one show while viewing another, nurse the baby while checking our e-mail, read books while taking a bath and eat our meals while driving our cars, reading our papers and talking to our spouses. I heard recently of a woman who was regularly seen, on her noon break, eating her lunch, smoking a cigarette, knitting and reading, all at the same time. And the award goes to …

I know a man who never stands at a urinal without a magazine to read. How much reading can you get done during the average-length pee break? And to get even more accomplished, he usually strikes up a conversation with the fellow occupying the shiny white utility beside him, his eyes never leaving his story. Readin’, chattin’ and peein’. Doin’ it all.

A phone call used to be an event, perhaps the biggest one of your day. You sat down and enjoyed the conversation. You didn’t have much choice. The short black cord wouldn’t let you get too far from the machine which was often fastened tight to a wall. Now, telephones are just plastic appendages that hang off the sides of our heads like ugly growths. We yak into these devices while driving, cooking, doing dishes, dining in restaurants, or lying in bed. A status symbol of the new tycoon, apparently, is to have sex while closing a business deal on the phone.

I was once run down in my car at a four-way stop by a young man who was driving his nice big station wagon, all the while kissing his girlfriend. I could see the lovestruck driver through my rear-view mirror as he descended on me, and his date, with absolutely no clue that he was expected to come to a stop. Who has time for such trivia when there’s a luscious set of lips to be kissed? Whatever became of parking? Have the young even lost time for that?
In the old days, in the homes of the rich and snobby, and others with just good manners, talking at the dinner table was discouraged. First everybody ate, then they passed around the cigarettes, then they conversed.

Maybe they didn’t get the meal over with in seven minutes flat. But at least they usually went to bed with unbitten tongues in their heads.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

My parents christened me James.
Big family, they ran out of names.
So James it has been,
But I am called Jim.
I’m the guy that everyone blames.

By Jim Hagarty

I have in my head
A thinking device that
Doesn’t know when to rest.

That would be fine
If the thoughts were all good
But sometimes they aren’t the best.

I try to replace them
With happy ideas
But those never last very long.

And soon I am back
To feeling like crap
And wondering where I went wrong.

Today was one of those
Days for me.
I felt as bad I could.

But things turned around
And I don’t know why
Cause I never thought that they would.

But I’ll take it
And be glad to turn out the light
At the end of this woeful day.

And hope tomorrow
I feel good again
In my usual soulful way.