By Jim Hagarty
I am not sure what this is but it’s parked outside my house at I write and I can’t find the owner to ask about it. A Google search suggests it’s a 1970 Pontiac Parisienne. Kind of funny that Pontiac got away with the “horse’s halter” on the front grille, a feature that made the 1958 Ford Edsel a laughing stock. This is a cool car, 350 hp engine. Convertible. Interior unchanged from its origins.
By Jim Hagarty
I walk into the second-hand shop.
“Can I help you?” asks the clerk.
“Yes, please. I am looking to buy an albatross.”
“Well, as you can see, our shop is full of albatrosses. Could you be more specific?”
“Sorry, of course,” I reply. “I am looking for a stand-alone cabinet with four shelves, two of them adjustable. I would like it to be made of pressed board, in other words, very cheap and wobbly.”
“And what do you want it for?” asks the clerk.
“To hold other, smaller albatrosses, many of which I have bought over the years in this very shop.”
“Certainly, sir. And how long do you see yourself owning this albatross?”
“I would like to trip over it three times a day for the next 10 years,” I reply. “At the end of that time, I will bring it back to you and donate it to the shop, hopefully with all the other albatrosses it will have been holding all those years.”
Clerk goes in back, comes out with big albatross.
“Oh, my. That would be perfect,” I comment. “How much?”
“Ten dollars,” says the clerk.
“You’re joking,” I say. I pay for it right away in case he changes his mind, load it up in my car and bring it home.
What a bargain!
These next 10 years are going to be great!
By 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.
By Jim Hagarty
There are many ways of knowing your advancing years are bringing you firmly into the territory that could be called Senior Land.
Looking in the mirror is one way.
Another way is to go into shops and restaurants in your hometown and see displayed there memorabilia from a long-gone soda pop company that you once drove truck for.
Twice in the past two weeks I have seen Kist Beverages signs – one in a shop and last night in a restaurant.
Forty-five years ago I spent a summer lugging Kist pop into stores and restaurants. Hardest job I ever had. Glass bottles, no plastic. And wooden cases, no plastic or cardboard. No cans.
Hauling those cases up and down the rickety steps of some century-old small-town stores put a muscle or two on my arms and a suicidal thought or three in my brain. In some of those basements, I had to dodge the rats to find a place to set down the cases.
Kist was a small-town bottler and yet it was popular and I was told to erect a fancy display in the grocery stores I went into. I would go back the following week to find my display had been disassembled and tossed in a back room. An even fancier display of Coke or Pepsi products would be in its place. It was a very competitive field.
I shared some of this information with the young clerk in the store where I saw the sign the first time. She looked as interested as she might have been had I been explaining to her the correct and incorrect ways to lance a boil.
And don’t even get me started on antique shops.
When half the stuff in those shops are things you had in your home growing up, you know the autumn of your life is on the horizon. A few months ago I toured an antique shop with my daughter. I was able to explain to her what most of the items were that we came across in the store. She was mystified by most of the items.
My Dad, a lifelong farmer, always said there is no such thing as antiques, just old furniture. Maybe he was right but I kind of wish I still had some of our old furniture to sell to antique lovers. Not to put them down, but apparently they will buy anything.
Even old pop company signs.
From the camera of my son, Chris. JH
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
I had a cat named Percy
Who showed poor rodents no mercy.
He chased them all day
With no plans to play.
They needed a doctor and nursey.
By Jim Hagarty
The easiest thing to do is to hate.
It requires no effort at all.
Somebody does some terrible thing,
Onto them all our hatred must fall.
But anger and hatred are two different things
As different as night and day.
While anger can bring about healthy change
Hatred just wants its own way.
Nothing permanent, nothing good
Has hatred ever achieved.
Its victories are hollow, its legacy bad,
Huge wreckage that can’t be believed.
And yet we carry on fighting,
And seem not to have learned a thing.
Hatred is gathering steam again,
Its darkness and coldness to bring.
By Jim Hagarty
I’ve eaten some dangerous things in my life. My own cooking, for starters. A few houseflies on a bet. Some horse radish. A black olive.
And worst of all. Some bread pudding.
But I see now that I got away lucky. A British woman was suffering unexplained abdominal pain for months. Not being a medical professional, I would have fingered bread pudding as the possible culprit.
In reality, doctors found a 14-pound hairball in her stomach. The 23-year-old woman had eaten two pounds of her own hair every year for the past seven years. Somehow, this interfered with good stomach functioning and pain ensued.
I am not surprised by this. I have found that the only safe level of hair to consume is one pound per year, providing no bread pudding is also ingested. In my case, nature sort of helped me along by removing hair from my menu. Being bald has meant hairless meals these past few years but I still won’t eat bread pudding.
I mock, but I shouldn’t. The poor woman has two recognized medical conditions which cause her to pull out her hair and to eat it. It took doctors six hours to remove the “trichobezoar” from her stomach. The good news is, she can be treated and monitored for her strange afflictions.
No help yet for bread pudding ingesters, however.
By Jim Hagarty
My laptop was sitting on the kitchen table one night, its power cord plugged into a nearby wall. An emergency of some description arose (a gerbil farted or a cat smacked the dog) so I jumped to my feet and took off. So did my laptop when my feet became entangled in the cord.
The little black box that has become my lifeline flew off the table and landed on the floor completely flat, exactly the way it had been sitting before its launch. I just about fainted and shouted some high seas pirate words in my startled state as I discovered long ago that this sort of calamity is made better by ear-deafening profanity, preferably four or five super offensive words strung together like some sort of garlic necklace made to ward off evil spirits.
I picked up my precious machine and placed it gingerly back on the table. The swearing worked; so far it is working as well as the day I bought it, although it froze once before I went to bed which has me a bit nervous.
This incident reminds of a similar accident at work a few years ago with the Mac desktop I was working on. It was my routine back then to munch on some peanuts and a glass of water. I would dump a few nuts from the bag in my left hand into my right hand, pop them mouthward, then pick up the water in my right hand and take a sip. But I became involved in a conversation this day and thinking I was holding the bag of nuts, tipped over the water into my hand instead, sort of like the old cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw shooting himself in the face. Remember: Bang, Phew (as he blew the smoke from the end of the gun), Bang, Phew, Phew, Bang.)
The water quickly leapt from my hand all through my keyboard. Horrified (Mac keyboards are expensive) I flipped the keyboard over to let the water drain away but it was too late. It started immediately to malfunction. I grabbed it and jumped in the car to take it home where I had another keyboard of my own.
That night my wife said not to worry about it, that it would probably dry out on its own. That’s all she knew.
I got out a hair dryer and blew away for awhile on the soggy keys. Then I went on the Internet to see what I should do. Make sure you don’t use a hair dryer on it, said one site, as the heat can melt some of the smaller elements. One site suggested ridiculously that if you left it alone, it would dry out on its own, maybe in a few weeks. Another site helpfully advised me to remove every key cap and dry everything I could with Q-tips. So I spent a long time doing that.
But every time I tried it out on the computer, its performance was terrible. When I would press on any key just once, it would just keep typing that particular letter over and over and over though my finger was no longer on the key.
I finally gave up and just set it aside, resigned to the idea that I had just donated a Mac keyboard to the company I was working for. A couple of weeks passed and I plugged the wrecked board in for one more try. Magically, it worked just fine.
My wife said it probably just needed the time to dry out.
Yeah, like that would be the answer!
Ha!
By Jim Hagarty
So bear tracks have been found on the beach at Goderich, a lakeside town about an hour’s drive from my home. What no one will find on the beach at Goderich are Jim tracks. Never. Ever.
