Author: Jim Hagarty

I personally knew a man and his wife who were good-living farmers and strong Catholics who got down on their knees to pray every night. The man enjoyed a beer now and then but between the two of them, I doubt if they had many sins to bring to the priest in the confessional every month.

One day in the ’70s, as they were getting on in years, they made the three-hour trip to visit some relatives on their farm near Toronto. Not wanting to land in on their hosts at noon, they decided to stop at a hotel in a small town to eat some lunch before heading out to the farm. So, they found a nice table in the beverage room of a hotel and ordered up some sandwiches.

As they were waiting for their meals to arrive, a pretty young woman wandered over to a jukebox in the corner of the room and punched a few buttons. When the music started playing, she walked up onto a small platform that served as a stage, only a few feet from the visiting farmers’ table, and began dancing to the sounds. Now, the dancing was rather entertaining but what came next put a few more white hairs on the heads of the old folks.

The dancer began methodically removing articles of her clothing and it didn’t appear that she was doing this because she was too warm. It seemed as though she was intent on continuing to disrobe in an effort to entertain the mostly male clientele who had dropped into the hotel for lunch.

This was a shocking development indeed but it posed somewhat of a moral dilemma for the innocent old couple. With a meal on the way, they could hardly go running out of the place without paying. And once they paid for their food, they couldn’t leave it there and not eat it. They had lived through the Great Depression and weren’t ones to toss away their money.

On the other hand, they were only a couple of arms’ lengths away from a woman who was determined, it seemed, to keep peeling off her clothes till she wore nothing but a smile. Leave their food behind and be wasteful or dine in a strip joint and be sinful. Not an easy predicament.

However, it might have been predicted that the good-living, unwasteful farmers would finish their food rather than flee so that is what they did. They kept their heads down and ate while the dancer got down to the bare essentials. Still in a daze, they finally left town and drove to the farm they were to visit, relating their traumatic experience to their relatives the moment they entered the farmhouse.

I don’t know how the housewife who hosted the visitors reacted to the startling hotel news but her husband would laugh long and heartily every time he recalled the story in the years to come. And while the visiting woman related the harrowing tale with great concern, apparently her husband hadn’t looked so cheerful in a long, long time. The speculation was he had stolen a few glances at the stripper while slurping up his soup.

At least their priest wouldn’t be so bored next time they went to confession.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

How did it come to this? My role in life now has been reduced to Doorman to the Cats. Hours are brutal. Pay minimal. But the rewards … Oh ya, there are no rewards!

I just let Mario into the kitchen from the garage. For his fourth time today and it isn’t even 10:30 a.m. And his brother Luigi, hearing the door close, realized he needed to go outside. He will scratch to be let back in in two minutes and 45 seconds. (He scratched while I was writing this. At more like two minutes 10 seconds.)

Cat door, some of you will suggest. An option except for our fear that cat door will become skunk, raccoon and opossum door. No sweat, you say. There are doors now that are wired in a way that you put an electronic collar on the cat and only he can open that door.

Some scientists who could have been looking for a cure for cancer were busy dreaming up this instead.

During breaks from my doorman duties, I keep occupied providing a lap for my dog to stretch out on. It’s a living.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

A member of our household went to the store the other day and came home with a small item she had bought. The minute she took it out of the package, it broke. She was a little discouraged but decided to let it go.

The next day, I thought I would surprise her by going back to the store to replace it. That’s what I did. I even took the package with me to make sure I got the right one.

It occurred to me for a few seconds to throw a little fit about the poor quality of the item, but decided, what the heck, for $2.50, it was not worth the grief.

That night, I presented the new item and was thanked profusely for my thoughtfulness. Then I told her how I went to the store and told the guy the first one broke and I would like another one. “What store did you go to?” I was asked. I supplied the information. “I didn’t get it there,” she replied and told me the name of the store from where the item had come.

I am not much confused these days. Not long ago, I climbed into a family van, same model and colour as ours, to discover the key did not fit in the ignition. Taking a quick look around, I began to realize why. I got out of Dodge (it actually was a Dodge) a lot faster than I got into it.

A hasty retreat is sometimes my only hope.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Those who believe in conspiracy theories are just people who ask questions and isn’t that what we all should be doing?

However, maybe it is not the questions that are the problem. Maybe it’s the answers our favourite wingnuts arrive at that might make us nervous.

For example:

– The severe snow that recently hit Texas was actually “fake” and “government generated” as part of a sinister plot instigated by shadowy “elites” including Bill Gates and Joe Biden. “This goes out to our government and Bill Gates. Thank you Bill Gates for trying to f***ing trick us that this is real snow,” a woman says in one video on the Internet, a video in which she proves the snow isn’t real.

– The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington was organized by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not by Republicans and certainly not by former president Donald Trump.

– Joe Biden is a robot, wearing a human-like face mask.

– Donald Trump is actually still president and executions are taking place on the lawns of the White House.

– Donald Trump and Joe Biden had surgery to swap faces so when you see Joe Biden behind the desk in the Oval Office, you are actually looking at Donald Trump, and vice versa.

– Donald Trump will be inaugurated this Thursday, March 4, as the 19th president of the United States.

And as odd as some of these conclusions are, it is comforting to know that at least some people are not falling for fake news like the rest of us do every day.

Thank heavens there are the solid beliefs of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: Democrats are a cabal of Satanist pedophiles; the Rothschild family helped former California Gov. Jerry Brown build a space laser to burn down forests; members of the 2016 Clinton campaign sacrificed chickens to the pagan deity Moloch; and multiple school shootings have been “false flag” operations which used crisis actors.

Not to mention this oldy but goody: Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop.

A pizza shop that has no basement.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

There are several levels of lazy. I am sure you are acquainted with some of them, if only because you have watched the slackers around you tweedle deeing when they should be tweedle doing.

You, of course, don’t have this problem, and I am proud of you. So proud. But please, in the name of every Sloth currently hanging by its toes from a tropical tree somewhere, uninterested in any activity involving movement, I beg of you not to be too smug. Because all the Laziness Levels sometimes touch most people’s lives and even if you are strong enough to escape them, you might not be able to evade the Hall of Fame level – The Laziness of the Retired. And while you may think right now that you will have will devised strategies ahead of time to combat the temptation to sit like a frog in a pond all day and wait for insects to fly too close to your tongue, you might find yourself drawn to Total Idleness on only your second day after retiring.

I just don’t have the energy to go into all the ins and outs of Retirement Lazy, but maybe this example will do.

Leaving the bathroom after your premiere morning visit, you feel an old familiar nether region cooling wind and realize your fly is open. Now, closing your fly is something you were always pretty good at attending to, but retired, zipping up the he-man hardware is just one of those things that can be attended to later. After all, you rightfully reason, The Queen and Prince Philip don’t arrive at your home till Sunday and this is only Thursday. No panic.

You drive all other family members to their non-retirement destinations such as school and work, then hit the coffee shop. There is a breeze, somehow, under your table, and once again, the fly trouble calls for a solution. But you are wearing a long winter coat, no risk of sudden exposure. However, two hours later, upon exiting a grocery store, a blast of Arctic air works its way up into the unadjusted apparel and suddenly, the wages of your sin seem much too high to pay.

So, four hours after first identifying the issue, the matter is dealt with. Tomorrow, you will brush your teeth. The day after that, there will be a meeting of clippers and fingernails but only those nails in dire need of trimming shall be attended to. The Queen would not be amused but just watch her decadent decline once she, too, retires. Which, and there is a lesson in this somewhere, she just hasn’t gotten around to doing.

What a Procrastinating Princess!

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Nothing’s simple any more. You hear it said. So do I. You might, in fact, have heard it from me. I’m usually saying it. People of the jury, I present as my evidence, well, just about every aspect of modern life.

You don’t want to know about my underwear buying habits, I’m sure, but I just recently spent almost half an hour in a men’s clothing section trying to decide among the many options available today for the simple job performed by underwear, whatever job that might be. Colours galore, patterns aplenty, boxers, briefs. Value “paks” of six pairs, or three pairs. Special occasion briefs.

In the good old days, there was one kind of men’s and boy’s underwear and one kind only. However, you had a wide variety of colours to choose from – as long as it was white.

It doesn’t matter what you go to buy, or to eat, or to watch in a theatre. Saturday, at one of these big movieplexes, a friend and I stood gawking for 15 minutes before the popcorn stand, weighing all the various options and packages priced for value. Bargain hunters from way back, we took our time and came up with what we think, but still aren’t sure, was the best buy.

Has anyone’s life improved as a result of having all this variety pumped into it? I don’t know. I do know that simplicity is as quaint a notion as table manners, modesty and diplomacy.

Witness my main piece of evidence. When I was a kid on the farm in the 1830s, our black and white TV got three channels – London, Wingham and Kitchener. We picked up the broadcast signals from these stations by way of a space-station-looking aerial on the roof of the house which we controlled by an electric “rotor” in our living room. Amazing science.

Today, in the city, of course, my TV-watching options are much more varied although my family and I have not opted for all the channels money can buy. For 22 years, I have had a pretty good arrangement with my cable company. They’ve run a wire into my house, I’ve plugged it into my TV, they send me a bill for this luxury every month, and I pay it. Every year they send me a letter saying, sorry, but we have to charge you more for your service. I pay it. I don’t see any other cable companies banging on my door, so I have no choice.

Now, in my feeble mind, the simplicity of the relationship between me and my cable company goes like this: If I don’t pay, they take the wire away. Not hard to understand. I don’t get to have that bag of potato chips if I won’t give the cashier the money for them.

But this week, I received in the mail an “Important Notice of Changes” to my cable service. “As part of our ongoing effort to improve customer service, we have simplified the terms applicable to our various services.” I opened the document and it fell out before me like a scroll Julius Caesar might have read from. On that parchment are typed 5,493 words (I did a computer word count) defining the new relationship between my cable company and me.

Somewhere, a lawyer is basking in the south sea sun at a beautiful resort paid for with the money he or she charged my cable company to write to me with all these simplified terms.

There are 52 sections in the document and most of them seem to more or less define what awful things will happen to me if I don’t live up to the agreement.

OK, here’s a little nugget: “We may assign or transfer the Service Agreement or any of our rights or obligations hereunder without your consent. The provisions of Sections 8, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 and any other provisions of these terms which by their meaning are intended to survive termination. These Terms have been drawn up in the English language at the express request of the parties.”

I am baffled as I believe I am a party and I don’t remember expressly requesting this, or anything else, with the possible exception of being left alone.

Here is the most I can put together from all I’ve read so far. If I don’t pay them, they’ll take the wire away.

If I was writing the Simplified Terms, I’d reduce the 5,493 words to about 12: If you don’t pay your bill, you will lose your cable signal.

Words a TV-addicted couch potato like me can understand.

Expressly.

©2007 Jim Hagarty

I often get asked how I made my fortune. It is an honest question non-wealthy people pose, and it doesn’t bother me at all to explain the path I took from rags to riches.

I left home at eighteen with seven cents in my pocket and the clothes on my back. And over the next five decades, through hard work and guile, I managed to amass more money than I can count. Some day I will write a book detailing how I did it but for now, I will share one little secret.

You might think a man of my elevated status would never need to go to a grocery store but Warren Buffett still steers his own car through the drivethrough at McDonald’s so it’s important not to lose the common touch. Another thing about the elites I run with is, far from being tightwads, we like to spend, sometimes with wild abandon.

In the store today, I saw a sign advertising three bags of potato chips for four dollars. That seemed like a bargain, judging by the size of the sign announcing the deal, but here’s your first wealth tip: It is no bargain at all if all you want is one bag of chips, which is all I wanted (and one more than my doctor wants me to have). So, I ignored the bargain and bought only one bag. It cost me $1.34. If I had taken advantage of the special sale, each of the three bags would have cost me $1.333333333 (to infinity).

So, yeah, call me reckless, but my plan is to spend every red cent – literally, in this case, one cent at a time – before I die. As you can see, with my sometimes wild abandon ways, I am well on my way to achieving my goal.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Our cat Mario is 18 years old and getting kind of creaky. He has trouble going up and down stairs. So another family member regularly picks him up and carries him up the steps from the basement to the main floor to ease his journey.

Sometimes, I see him sitting at the bottom of the steps, meowing, telling me to pick him up and carry him upstairs. I don’t do that as I am not 18 and I’ve become a little wobbly on the steps myself. I imagine the disaster if I was carrying him squirming under my arm and trying to get upstairs, the two of us inevitably ending up in a horrible mess on the basement floor.

This morning, as I started to climb the steps, I could see he wanted a lift. Reluctantly, I had to reject his plea again and I started my journey upwards. I am not going to admit that I’m moving a bit slowly these days but as I reached the landing before three more steps to the kitchen, I saw Mario zooming past me like an Olympics speed demon.

I don’t know what to conclude. Either the cat is pretending he can’t climb the steps anymore or I am pretending I can.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

Our little dog Toby is 13 pounds of fun and fury. He’s a poodle and smart as, well, a poodle, which, next to the border collie, is the second smartest dog of all the breeds. So I have heard. And after 10 years of living with this little dynamo, I believe it.

Every time I take him to the groomer, she finishes off his bath and haircut by tying a fresh new neckerchief on him. He looks cute as a button when I bring him home, all freshly trimmed, and with his new scarf around his neck. His latest one is bright green with white polka dots.

The other night, the poor little fella suffered a wardrobe malfunction. I was sitting on the couch watching TV when he jumped up beside me with his kerchief in his mouth. He laid it down carefully beside my leg, and looked with great concern directly at me. It was his “do something” look I am accustomed to seeing several times a day, but this time was different. He has a whole mess of toys and plays with all of them on a regular basis but he never plays with a scarf that has fallen off, which they tend to do now and then.

This seemed to be the scenario. His neckerchief fell off which apparently upset him. He then put it together that if he brought it to me, I would probably put it back on him again. He got his wish.

The other thing that intrigues me is how well, after the past decade, he and I communicate with each other now. He has a variety of barks that all mean different things. And a whole repertoire of looks that he gives me depending on whatever need he has at the moment.

One look Toby has never given me is one of anger.

What I have learned over the years is that he has certain needs and he has become very good at letting me know what they are. And those needs do not just involve food, water, exercise, play, fresh air and sleep. There are other things that also require attention. Such as love. Several times a day he sticks his nose and then his whole head under my left hand (never my right, I am left-handed) because he wants to be petted. He also brings me his toys, hoping I will play with him.

And when I dress him in his sweater to take him for his walk in winter, he sticks his nose through the hole just like a toddler would and his legs through the legholes. During a thunderstorm, he follows me around vibrating and frightened, wanting me to pick him up and comfort him. He crawls into bed with me and dives under the covers.

We talk about godsends, without remembering what that word means. Toby was meant to come live with us, that I know. One Monday morning, I found myself with an unexpected $400 in my wallet. That night, we went to a breeder to size up her latest litter of puppies. Our son and daughter fell in love with the smallest one. I asked the woman how much it would cost us to take him home. She said $400, of course.

When we returned to pick him up two days later, she asked us what we had named our puppy. My daughter had chosen the name, Toby.

“That’s funny,” said the breeder. “That was his grandfather’s name.”

Ten years ago, not long after Toby arrived in our home, I retired. With my wife at work and the kids in school, I was alone at home all day. I needed, and found, a buddy in our funny wee dog. The Universe had come to the rescue yet once again.

My God I love that little guy.

(Update: Five years later, Toby is now totally blind and deaf. He has diabetes and a heart condition. But his sniffer still works, his tail wags as fast as ever and he plays with his toys. He gets excited when people he knows come to visit. I stretched out flat on the floor last night and he gave me as good a headbath as I had ever gotten from him. Every part got a good slobbering. After all this time, the poor little fella still can’t hold his licker.)

©2018 Jim Hagarty

When Gordon Lightfoot was eight years old, he walked into the kitchen where his mother was working. The radio was playing a Tony Bennett song.

“You know Gordie, that man makes his living singing,” she said to her son, who would go on to make a very good living giving the world a lot of amazing music, all of it while staying in Canada, refusing to head south to “make it.”

When he was about the same age, Hank Williams was singing while he shined a man’s shoes on a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama. “Where did you get those words, son?” the man asked him. “I made them up,” said Hank. “They’re pretty good,” said the man.

Hank Williams would go on to write and sing a lot of pretty good words. Good enough to become known as the Shakespeare of Country Music.

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to inspire a person at any age, but especially the young who are looking for direction.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

©2016 Jim Hagarty