Author: Jim Hagarty

I have the world’s oldest dumbphone. Seriously. I am pretty sure the first words ever spoken into it were, “Watson, come here. I need you.”

Consequently, I have never been able to access voice mail on the darned thing. And lately, people have been leaving me voice messages. I would like to hear them, especially the ones from the lottery corporation.

Two months ago, I phoned Virgin Mobile and asked how I could do that, because the phone was not co-operating. A polite woman told me how to do it and I thanked her. Except her instructions didn’t work. Today, I decided to phone Virgin and get this fixed once and for all. So I did.

Within the space of half an hour, I made five phone calls to the company and spoke to five different people. Once in a while I get determined and refuse to give up on a thing. The people I spoke with all gave me the same instructions which I tried and which didn’t work. It was kind of funny because each person who helped me was so confident that it would work.

Finally, I reached a very helpful woman – support person number 6, who seemed to really know the answer. She said she would reprogram my phone from her end and she led me through about five steps on the way to achieving that. She even stayed on the line while I tried the newly programmed phone but still no messages. Let me look up the manual for your phone, she said. And the line went quiet as she did that.

A couple of minutes later, I got the good old dial tone. She hung up on me. I know that she did because she asked for my cellphone number and I gave it to her. If she had been cut off accidentally, she would have called me back.

I was thinking of making a joke about Virgin and getting screwed but I won’t do that. (Too late?). My father always said the only way to punish a business is to not get mad, but instead to simply not do business with them so it might be time to take a little fatherly advice.

Reflecting on this later, I realized I had called late on a Friday afternoon, and my benefactor might have wanted to beat the traffic home. Even knowing that, however, I moved on soon after that day.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

It takes some of us a while to reach our goals.

Take Toby Hagarty, our miniature poodle, as an example. The mission he set for himself four years ago was to catch a squirrel, a perfectly reasonable thing for a dog to want to do, I suppose. Catching a squirrel doesn’t appeal to me, personally, but each to his own.

Toby’s daily efforts went unrewarded until last week and then, boy, were they rewarded. For some reason, we seem to dwell in the most densely populated squirrel habitat on the planet so Toby’s failures as a squirrel catcher were not for lack of opportunity. As speedy as our little mutt is, and he can really move, he is no match for one of those overgrown rats with the bushy tail.

Twice a day, when I walk Mr. Toby around the block, he practises his skills which have always fallen just a little bit short. Realizing early on that he was never going to get one, I amused myself by letting him run to the end of the leash after squirrels until I put an end to his fun.

I have never actually wanted him to catch one; I’m afraid one of those little rodents, if that’s what they are, would scratch my dog’s eyes out and another fat vet bill would soon be in the mail. Besides, I get a kick out of squirrels and all their weird habits.

Last week, as we were coming back from our walk, Toby spied a squirrel by a big maple on the neighbour’s front lawn. He went into his squirrel-catching stance – standing stock still with one paw in the air – and planned his move. I noticed the squirrel had his head buried in a pile of leaves and was distracted and I wondered if this just might be the day.

Sure enough, Toby pounced right onto the little critter and then didn’t seem to know what to do after that. Just as with many of us, he had spent his whole life in pursuit of one thing without giving any thought to how he would handle it if he ever got it. (For reference, reflect on marriage, children, etc.)

Without a plan, he hesitated and his prey escaped and was up the tree like a bullet. I couldn’t stop laughing.

But that all stopped when Toby walked through our backyard gate ahead of me and before I knew it, was wrestling on the patio with another poor bushy-tailed nut-gatherer, only this time, the dog was calling the shots.

I didn’t know what was happening at first, it all transpired so quickly. The poor squirrel ran up a fence post but fell back down again and Toby was on him, even though I was trying to haul him off.

The little animal went back up the post, but stopped right in front of me. I could have reached out and grabbed him. He was in shock. His eyes were bulging out of his head and his stomach heaved in and out because of his rapid breathing.

He moved on up to a ledge, and stopped again, trying to recover. Soon, he disappeared over the fence, but this was not his best day.

And Toby, having experienced the thrill of catching not one, but two squirrels in the space of one minute, now walks around the neighbourhood like Muhammad Ali, itching for his next bout.

That won’t come any time soon, however. I am monitoring him closely now. One more vet bill and I’ll be living in a tree with the squirrels Toby hasn’t caught yet.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

We are being eaten out of house and home by a swelling population of non-humans that have swarmed our property like locusts in a drought-stricken wheat field.

And today, on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, while most sensible 66-year-olds were rocking in their chairs and fondly remembering the good old days, I was in my car, racing up and down the streets of my town and in and out of shops in a quest for food of every description except anything that I might personally eat myself.

The supply mission began with the purchase of 24 cans of soft food for our two cats who also eat enough kibble to keep five grown horses alive. Then, to another store, where a great big bag of bird seed was bought. It’s like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie now in our backyard when I look to see flocks of every description of winged creature landing on our oversized feeders to gobble down the copious amounts of seed plopped there twice a day.

Then it was off to the bulk food store for peanuts – unsalted, of course – to sprinkle on the tops of the bird food piles for the larger blue jays and grackles to munch on.

All this food, inevitably, doubles as squirrel, rabbit and skunk snacks as none of these imbeciles can read and are unaware that the bag of seed is clearly labelled “bird seed.”

Off to another shop to pick up a small pill bottle full of munchies for the snails that keep the aquarium clean. Fish food stock holding strong at the moment.

And finally, in today’s lineup, a fourth store where I set down $8.93 for a bag of mouse food. If my farmer parents could see me buying food for a mouse, I would be sent to my room without supper every night for a week. Because to them, a mouse WAS food for the many cats that lived in our barns. The idea that their son would someday pay for some fancy fixins for a mouse, would perplex them to no end.

Tomorrow, it’s off to the vet’s for a big bag of dog food and two bags of cat kibble, one kind to keep their teeth clean, the other to make sure they pee straight. The condition of our many barn cats’ chompers and urinaters was never a high priority on the farm, but times change.

If I have any loose change left over, maybe I will pick up a small bag of potato chips for myself on the way home.

Which I will share on the couch with the dog.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

Next week, I am moving to British Columbia from my home in central Canada and very much looking forward to it. I have been growing disenchanted with the province of Ontario as time has passed and it seems to me that B.C., which I have only visited once in my life, is a much nicer place to be.

I am especially impressed with the justice system there which seems to me to be about the fairest anywhere. To give you an example, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has awarded a Vancouver man $15,000 because he couldn’t enjoy his Ferrari for seven months. The details are not very important, but the unfortunate psychologist Lawrence Miller took his 2005 Ferrari F430 F1 into a shop for annual service and didn’t get to toot around in it again until almost a full year later.

So, the unmarried man sued the repair shop for $85,000 on the basis that a one-year rental of the same car would have cost $112,572. Now you will say that in that very same city of Vancouver, there are people being shot to death on the street, there is homelessness and child abuse, elder abuse and drug addiction, family violence, property damage and white collar crime. Is the B.C. justice system doing enough to deal with these situations, you are asking.

But really. Just listen to yourself. Repeat all those societal ills mentioned above and then say this out load, into a mirror if need be: NO FERRARI FOR SEVEN MONTHS!!!!. (Don’t forget to include the four exclamation marks when you say it.) When you are done that little exercise, I guarantee you will have calmed down. Maybe even enough to come over and help me pack.

I leave next Tuesday at 8 a.m. in my non-Ferrari, the full use of which I have had for the past seven months and, unfortunately, many many months longer than that. I believe a B.C. court will have way to deliver justice to me and my old bucket of bolts.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

You know, we’ve come a long way. Drivers have GPS and I see an ad now for a Ford that can park itself. I wonder if it also stuffs the parking meter with coins.

Amazing have been the advances in transportation over the past few years with many more to come. But in another way, there isn’t much new under the sun and in some respects, what went before was just as incredible as what we have now.

I wasn’t around in the horse and buggy days but I was just one generation removed and so the elders in my family had lots of stories to tell about the times before the horseless carriage came along. Stories such as fatal buggy accidents – not high-speed head-ons like today, but buggies overturning and the ensuing mayhem resulting in death. I imagine that was a lot rarer incident than traffic fatalities now, but it happened.

And for some farmers, the horse could double as his designated driver when too much imbibing was done by the driver. My Dad told a story about a farmer from around these parts (in southern Canada) who used to go by horse and buggy to town on Friday nights and hit the hotels, often getting completely pie-eyed during an evening’s fun. He’d make his way somehow to the buggy at closing time, crawl in and sometimes pass out. No problem. The horse promptly left town and carried its owner the almost 10 miles home, never missing a turn in the process.

Match that GPS!

Sometimes the farmer in question didn’t completely pass out, but instead provided the entire community along his route home with a free concert. On a still night in winter, the sounds of the inebriated man’s musical voice could be heard across hill and valley, seemingly for miles. And while he was in the buggy, he didn’t need to take the reins but could sit there in comfort and sing while horsey did all the navigating and steering.

A wonderful John Wayne movie shot in Ireland in the fifties called The Quiet Man has some great scenes in it involving a little old matchmaker who practically gets thrown from his buggy while on chases through the village because his horse insists on stopping automatically and suddenly in front of a pub, a stop it had made many times before.

Just like GPS, I guess, even horse sense had its limits.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

Every night when I go for my walk ever since my doctor told me I have to walk or die, I walk down Oxford Street past a factory that takes up an entire city block. Half that space is parking lot, storage for trucks, etc., and the other half is this great building that looks like what I imagine the largest ship in the sea must look like at night. Lights everywhere, inside and out. And the noise that comes from the open windows is a calming, nice sound, not jarring at all.

It is the sound of human beings making things. From stacks on the roof rises some sort of mist, whether smoke or steam, I can’t tell. But that just makes it even more like an old ship.

On the grounds outside under a bunch of young trees is a picnic table and on nice evenings there are usually workers on their breaks, laughing, having a cigarette, eating a snack. It makes me feel good to see this scene every night as I march by on my life-saving trek.

I worked in a couple of factories when I was young and I have to say, I don’t think I had the pleasant feelings about them that I do about the factory near my home. And it makes me feel bad that come the end of this year, this big, beautiful ship will be pulling into the harbour for the last time, never to go sailing again.

FRAM, which makes auto filters, has been in my hometown of Stratford for longer than I’ve been alive, but you know how it goes – bought by a big company a few years ago and we all know what big companies do. They go where they can pay people less and where the environmental rules are more lax.

What a shame for the people who will be left behind by these profit-seeking nomads. My neighbour across the street has worked there for years but she saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and has been preparing for a second career. Still, you can tell she’d rather not have to move on.

And soon I’ll have to walk by a big, darkened building and watch the windows get smashed one by one and the graffiti appear along with the grass in the cracks of the parking lot pavement. And no more smokers at their picnic table. Some of those women were not too hard on the eyes. (I didn’t just write that.) But the only thing that never changes is that everything always changes so I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and keep on walking and not dying.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

(Update 2024. Where I saw a big loss, other people saw possibilities. Thirteen years after I wrote the above story, there now sits on that same city block a construction company administrative building, an emergency vehicle headquarters, a large and very nice two-storey medical centre, a two-storey office building, four three-storey apartment buildings and a recreation centre to serve the residents of those buildings. I have never seen anything redeveloped so well. I was sad because I am a sentimental one, but I am glad that others with vision and ambition never looked back. Our city is being well-served.)

Scholars and other smartypants are debating when the decline and fall of modern humans began. I wish they would save themselves the trouble and just ask me because I know precisely when things all started going wrong.

It was June 3, 1996, at 3:25 p.m. I walked into my local coffee shop and ordered a bran muffin, as I had done daily for many years. It was then I was informed that the “store”, as these national restaurants now call themselves for some reason, would no longer – as in never, ever – offer plain bran muffins again.

The dinosaurs will return before bran muffins do.

I well remember the feeling. I thought I might collapse and lose consciousness. But, and this is a testament to my great strength of character, I pulled myself together and started screaming instead. I was the first person ever, on that day, to use the expression: “Seriously? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

The young server was not kidding me. Instead, she began negotiating, offering me alternatives. One of them was the raisin bran muffin, a complete abomination. A raisin bran muffin is a terrible creation, similar to a cherry pie stuffed with mushrooms, if someone was ever so demented as to try such a thing. But what was I to do?

I ordered a raisin bran muffin. It tasted even more awful than I imagined it would and I don’t know if I even finished it. A 10-year period of mourning began, during which time I ordered and ate a raisin bran muffin every day. Then something strange happened. One day I realized that I liked raisin bran muffins. A lot. Like in oh my God these are good. On the occasional special day, I would eat one and order another one right away.

That was in 2006 and the world seemed to be righting itself. But that was an illusion. On June 19, 2014, at 2:21 p.m., I walked into my favourite local coffee shop and ordered a raisin bran muffin. It was then I was informed that the restaurant would no longer be offering raisin bran muffins. As in never, ever again.

Neanderthals will once again roam the earth before raisin bran muffins appear again.

A shock and a sadness overwhelmed me such as I have not known since the day they stopped making Massey Ferguson tractors. I felt the tears filling up the cavities behind my eyes but I held it together.

“What else have you got?”

It turns out they had several new offerings. There was a rhubarb/flax/mustard seed/green pepper/wild carrot/burdock/clover muffin. Also a crabapple/black currant/white potato/green bean/dandelion/seedless grape/brown rice/whole wheat/chives muffin. Several other such combinations too hideous to describe were rattled off for me till I felt like someone had blindfolded me and spun me around six times just to watch me fall down.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the server. “There’s fruit explosion.” An explosion in that restaurant that day would have suited me just fine but the closest I could come was a fruit explosion muffin so I ordered it. It tasted like you stuffed 12 fruits in your mouth and they exploded. I would have rather eaten my car’s spare tire.

So I went back the next day and ordered another one. It’s going to be a long 10 years.

(Update 2019: A couple of years ago, the restaurant brought back the raisin bran muffin, probably because of popular demand. But it was too late. I had moved on. Besides, if they could bring it back, they could make it disappear again some day. On Saturday, I had a banana spice almond, or some such contraption. It was okay.)

©2014 Jim Hagarty

In spite of what my wife tells everyone every day, I am not a perfect person. When our kids were small, I used to hide the best cookies from them so I could eat them myself after they were in bed. And then there were many other sins, such as … Oh, wait a minute, that was the only crime I have ever committed. One time I did check out the two pillows on our bed and gave my spouse the flatter one, but what self-respecting husband hasn’t done that?

But whether I’m a good guy or not, here is something I have never done in my 68 years. I have never tried to crawl through the doggy door of a stranger’s home. Not sure why I never have done that. I guess the opportunity never came up. Not saying I would never do that.

And yet, this is exactly what a pitcher for the San Diego Padres was recently arrested for. He was taken to jail, charged and released on a $100 bond. Reading that, I am glad that I was not in his situation because I would not be able to afford to pay the bond.

The police description of the incident is enough to raise the hair on your head, which makes me grateful not to have any. Shortly before 4 a.m. on Sunday, the pitcher started crawling through the doggy door. He did not receive a great greeting. The homeowner kicked him in the face after which, another baseball player pulled the pitcher out of the door. But before they could get away, the homeowner reached through the doggy door and shocked the pitcher in the back with a stun gun.

The pitcher explained to police that he thought he was at his own home even though none of the entrances to his house have doggy doors. The charging documents state that the pitcher was “not considered to be sober” at the time of the incident.

Man, I am so very glad I am not a sinner!

©2019 Jim Hagarty

I suppose I should have guessed that my new baseball cap would bring the worst out in the people who saw me wear it. It is, after all, the ugliest baseball cap ever manufactured in whatever country had the gall to make it. But I like it and therein lies the problem.

It’s a nice shade of brown and when it sat on the shelf in the store, it already looked like a baseball team had taken it out behind the building and beat it to death several times with their bats. Then drove over it with the team bus. The peak was ripped and torn when I paid the clerk $21 and tax for it.

I own at least 13 other baseball caps, not counting the ones that are hiding in closets and boxes all over the premises, and I didn’t pay $21 plus tax for the whole lot, having acquired most of them for free somehow and others for a buck or two. But this little brown beauty fit my head perfectly and emblazoned across the front is the logo, “Farm Boy.” Being a farm boy, I had to have it.

The first ones to express their deep mortification when they saw me wearing the hat were some former fellow journalism teachers who could hardly eat the meal we had gathered for because they couldn’t stop staring at my ugly cap. One guy even used the word ugly to describe it.

Fortunately, I am a patient man and I let the slings and arrows bounce off me. I tried to defend myself by saying that I actually chose this cap in the decrepit state it is in and paid $21 plus tax for it. But that feeble defence did little to subdue the haters as they immediately switched from despising the cap to wondering about my mental stability and reasoning powers after admitting to this horrendous purchase.

Other groups of people also started to complain including members of my own family. But they needn’t worry. The cap is not in my will. Instead I am leaving it to a young farmer out in the country near where I live who I know will wear it with pride.

The dilemma I have, however, and this is the reason for my story, is my most cherished cap keeps disappearing. For days at a time and most recently, for an entire week. It is as though it just gets up and walks away on its own. If I was a suspicious, conspiracy-loving man, I might wonder whether or not people in my life who detest my hat are purposely hiding it on me. It’s a hard conclusion not to come to because when I finally find it, and rejoice as of course I would, the cap stays in my possession for only another few hours before it once again disappears.

Today marked Day Seven without it. I have been wearing instead various other caps from my collection of 13 but doing so has been like having my Corvette (if I owned one) break down and having to ride my old bike. With two flat tires.

Today I was going through a full recycling box, carefully transferring each item to a bigger blue bin, to make sure nothing was accidentally discarded. When I got halfway down the pile of papers and boxboard, the familiar brown top of my beloved cap was exposed. Had some other member of the family just dumped the contents of the box into the bin without checking, I would have been searching for my cap for the rest of my life.

How did my cap get in the recycling box?

Tomorrow, I meet with a DNA and fingerprint expert to try to find the traitor.

And I am sleeping with one eye open.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

I just made $100,000 so go ahead and congratulate me. After reading that a 33-year-old singer/songwriter/idiot spent $100,000 on plastic surgery to make himself look like his idol Justin Bieber, I decided this was a goal I wanted to achieve too.

So. I grabbed a picture of Bieber, held it up to a mirror and took a look at his head and mine. He has two ears, so do I. Check. He has a nose, I have one too. Two eyes, a mouth, check and check. Chin, cheeks, eyebrows, forehead. So far, the similarities are striking.

He has more hair on his head than I do but he always wears a baseball cap and so do I. So, as far as I am concerned, we’re pretty much a match. Except maybe for that 44-year-age difference thing, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re close enough.

It also doesn’t hurt (or help) I suppose (insert big name drop here) that Justin Bieber and I were born in the same hospital in Canada, though many years apart. I have never met the talented musician though his class picture still hangs in a hall of a school my own kids attended. And he did trick or treat on my street a few years back though he and his party didn’t quite make it to our place. I did meet his dog once, however, though I don’t bear much resemblance to the little guy, my not having a tail, for starters, being a big disqualifier.

So, my $100,000 is staying in my interest-bearing account where it is earning me a handsome .00025 per cent. Turns out money can buy you happiness as I am happy that I am not the surgery-loving singer/songwriter/idiot described above.

©2013 Jim Hagarty