Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I know a poor woman who’s sure
Everyone in her life has hurt her.
And she knows where the blame should belong.
Some vile, wretched soul did her wrong.

It is quite a remarkable sight
To watch her engage in a fight
With anyone who wants to know
Why she let everybody down so.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she’ll exclaim.
“My husband’s the one who’s to blame.”
Her son, the neighbour, the cat.
They were the ones who did that.

Some day as she stands before God
To account for her sins, she’ll just nod.
“To be honest, please let me explain.
“I’m afraid I was tricked once again.”

“I would have been good, but you know,
“I’m afraid this might come as a blow.
“You made too many rules from the start
“And neglected to give me a heart.”

“So it’s You, God, that needs to explain
“And You, God, that shoulders the blame.
“If You thought I should behave each day
“Then You shouldn’t have made me this way.”

By Jim Hagarty

I was listening to two seasoned radio announcers one day a while back when one of the men brought up a topic the other was not comfortable discussing.

“I’m not going there,” the second guy, who has to be close to retirement, said to the first, who chuckled in instant recognition of what his on-air partner was saying. I forget the subject. Maybe it was Monica Lewinsky.

If these shadows of long-gone radio days are now using the language of some hip young U.S. sitcom characters, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Across the country, people by the hundreds of thousands are not going there. Wives are ordering husbands, “Don’t go there!” when they ask them how their trip with the kids to the library went. Kids tell their mother, “Don’t go there, Mom!” when she wants to know why she has found mouldy peanut butter sandwiches in the bottom of their knapsacks. Friends in conversation agree not to go there when a line of discourse, pursued, might take them into an area of their relationship they’d rather not explore.

It seems not unlikely to me that some sinner at the Pearly Gates is, at this very moment, cautionning St. Peter to not go there, when the pre-admission interviewer wanted to inquire about the huge gambling debts the poor soul inflicted on his family before losing his last bet.

When the heck did we all become so reluctant to go there? What a long way we’ve come from the 1960s when we were all enjoined to “let it all hang out.” Now, supposedly, are we not only not willing to let it all hang out, we’re not even prepared to look at the thing we’re not prepared to hang out.

The irony is, though the talk was brave 45 years ago, little of substance was ever truly discussed. Today, though we say we won’t go there, we rarely restrain ourselves from doing so. In fact, we’re there at the drop of a hat. No topic is really “there” not to go to. A couple of years back, on continentwide radio, Melissa Gilbert, one of the girls on the popular TV show Little House on the Prairie, openly discussed her sexual habits, telling listeners where she did it for the first time and revealing the name of the boy who stole her virginity. Certainly no reluctance to go there on her part. If one of Charles Ingalls’ daughters is willing to tell the masses details of her first sexual encounter, it may, in fact, be time for our governments to pass laws ordering people not to go there.

What’s also curious is how quick we are not to go there when ordered not to go there by someone with whom we’re conversing. We roll over, laugh a dirty little laugh and move on, wink, wink, nod, nod. Doesn’t anybody anywhere ever insist on the right to go there any more? “Don’t tell me not to go there. I’m already there and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go there, too,” should be the response, at least once in a while.

Given the ease with which lines of questioning are deflected by simple commands not to go there, it seems unimaginable that Bill Clinton’s team of lawyers didn’t suggest the president put this potent curiosity-deflector to work. Instead of saying he never had sex with “that” woman, Monica Lewinsky, he should have just told the reporters assembled at that infamous news conference to not go there.

And they probably have wouldn’t have.

Now, that’s one there I wouldn’t have minded being left there.

I’d tell you why, but really, let’s not go there.

There. I said it.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once had a yellow Corvette.
I wish I still had that car yet.
It drove like a dream
And I liked to be seen
Flying down the road in my jet.

By Jim Hagarty

I love music. I sing, play guitar and write songs.

But I have never been comfortable being called a musician. Singer-songwriter, I don’t mind.

But a musician, to me, is someone what dedicates his life to making music and I haven’t done that.

I am fine with acknowledging I have musical talent. It’s nice to hear the applause when I play. But sometimes my guitar stays locked up in its case for a whole week without my going near it.

Musicians I have known and loved would have to be in a coma and in grave condition for them to ignore their instrument for a week. I know a guy who plays his guitar for hours every day.

But even he has other interests, other talents. Music is his living, not always his life.

And this is where I left the path. Making music for a living is not an easy road to go down. I tried it for awhile, long enough to know I don’t have what it takes to make it in that field.

But I have other interests. News, politics, writing. Those interests eventually propelled me into journalism, a life and lifestyle I was suited for. I had a good career.

Sometimes our talent can be our enemy. Because we are good at something, we think we need to pursue it. People urge us on, thinking they are helping.

But just as water seeks its own level, the human spirit finds its way. Through Happenstance and Fate, a path opens up.

Still, there is the nagging doubt. Could I have made it in music?

The answer, to me, is clear. I couldn’t have made it.

My heart wasn’t in it.

By Jim Hagarty

I’d been pulling my hair out for years and suddenly someone wanted me to put it in an envelope and send it to them.

Along with my toenails.

Found in the mail I was sorting through one day a while back was this request from something called the Canadian Study of Diet, Lifestyle and Health, which, nobly, was trying to discover ways to prevent disease. To do that, they aimed to collect the nails and hair from 85,000 adults, including me, and test them for various properties.

Now, I thought this was a good thing and wanting to participate, I scrolled through the documents that had fallen from a plain brown envelope onto my desk. The instructions were helpful, especially for someone like me who had not been the subject of a lot of medical research.

Particularly useful were the passages describing how I was to obtain the samples needed. “We would be grateful if you would take a clipping from each of your toenails (their emphasis) and place them in the small envelope marked TOENAILS,” read the request. I was relieved, because I was tempted to put them in the envelope marked HAIR. Unfortunately, the letter did not specify whether or not I was to label to which little piggy each nail clipping corresponded, though I supposed medical researchers would have some scientific way of discerning whether it was from the one that ate roast beef or the one that had none.

The section on acquiring my hair samples was a bit more alarming. “We would be grateful if you would pull out about six strands of hair, including the roots, either from the back of your scalp (close to your neck) or from other parts of your body, and place them in the small envelope marked HAIR.” I considered how this might feel and sure enough, reading further, I found my answer: “It is possible that you will experience some minor discomfort when obtaining the hair specimens.” No fool, I am, and I saw “pain” where they wrote “discomfort” and I began to think of a shortcut but they beat me to the pass: “Please DO NOT simply cut off hair strands, since by doing so you will NOT obtain hair roots.” I guessed they’d dealt with my type before.

But most surprising, and yet useful, were the instructions detailing how I was to arrive at various body measurements the researchers wanted. Helpfully, they included a measuring tape with these details: “Measure the torso at a point one inch or two and a half centimetres above the navel (“belly button”) EVEN IF THIS IS NOT YOUR USUAL WAISTLINE.” I read that over a couple of times, thankful for the belly-button clue, but wondering whose waistline, if not mine, that might be.

Then the shocker. They wanted me to measure my buttocks.

“Slide the tape up and down until you find the largest spot between your waist and thighs,” the instructions stated. “When sliding the tape to the correct spot, be sure that it is kept horizontal.” Now I was in trouble as I began to question what the “it” that I was supposed to keep horizontal might be.

As I might have guessed, the researchers wanted me to be “either unclothed or in minimal clothing” while doing this and they had another request: “We ask that you make the measurements with the help of another adult.” They didn’t, however, suggest any dangers in having two adults, one naked, with horizontal things about, taking measurements.

I was also instructed to choose among sketches that showed people covered in various numbers of moles and freckles and indicate which most resembled me.

Although the researchers guaranteed the information about me would be kept confidential, they also said the results would be made available to the media and I imagined the press conference: “Most respondents were normal,” a white-coated scientist would say, “but there was this one guy with a really wrinkly butt with freckles all over it. And toenails thick as slate.” Friends would start guessing.

And then, the letter said I would be contacted in four years and in eight years to repeat these procedures, time needed, I supposed, to let my head heal.

To top it off, I was asked to sign a consent form giving the researchers permission to obtain information on my “vital status” from “the National Morality Database”, which is maintained by Statistics Canada. Either their typesetter’s “t” key was busted or, not content with measuring my behind, they wanted to size up my morals.

Having none, I didn’t object to this and I reached straight away for a pen to sign up, proof of my long-held contention that I’ll sign anything.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

One thing to know about me:
I always say, “I’m sorry.”
But often I’m not.
I fake it a lot.
Also I always worry.

By Jim Hagarty

If I owned a variety store
I’d stock it with guns and much more.
Bazookas and bullets and bombs
And tee shirts that read, “I love Mom.”

I’d have fireworks for kids to let off
And lawn signs that tell you, “Get Off!”
I’d sell bear traps and camouflage shirts
Car stickers that say, “Eat My Dirt!”

I’d sell booze by the pints and the quarts,
And cushions that make great big farts.
Pellet guns, BB guns too,
And stickers that read, “I Hate You!”

And magazines full of nude pics
And pot nicely packaged in bricks.
Along the top shelves in my store
Would be ball caps and jackknives and more.

Yes, I would go hog wild with goods
Like any good, good ole boy would.
Knick knacks and things for the wife.
I’d sell all the good things in life.

And when they showed up to foreclose
I’d yell, “Shove it all up your nose!
“I am free to do what I want.”
Next stop: My own restaurant.

By Jim Hagarty

It is strange the alliances a man makes as he goes through his life and the cruel way he is sometimes forced to bring some of them to an end.

One night five years ago I was in my basement office, working at my desk, when I heard a busy scratching noise in the ceiling above my head. In the fixed, stapled-on, tile ceiling above my head. In the ceiling that took many sweaty hours to affix and which simply could not be taken down to remove the source of a busy, scratching noise, no matter how annoying.

Rising from my chair, I followed the sound across the room as the source of it, which I quickly surmised was probably a member of the rodent family, seemed to be heading for the electrical box cupboard, the one place in the ceiling where it could probably crawl down. Flinging open the cupboard door, I saw a red plastic bag, moving on its own initiative. Grabbing the bag, and whatever was propelling it, I ran up the stairs, through the kitchen and into the garage where I hurled the whole affair onto the cold concrete floor there. From under the bag, scampered a small grey mouse which wasted no time scurrying for a small hole I could see in a corner of the garage next to the house wall. And I knew that, before I was sitting back down at my office table, the mouse was already back lounging in its comfortable ceiling apartment.

Every winter since that time, the mouse and I have shared our below-ground quarters and of the two of us, it has been by far the noisiest. I have no idea what that little guy was up to all that time but it had to be the most industrious rodent on the planet. It would tear from one end of the basement to the other in seconds. When I watched TV, I could hear it above my head. When I was on the computer, there it was again, above my noggin. And even when I slept in my bed, I could hear it dashing back and forth above me. In fact, it sometimes woke me from a deep sleep, so loud were the noises it could produce with its dashing about. I finally realized that it seemed to be following me about the place as it was too much of a coincidence that it could almost always be above whatever spot in the basement I was occupying.

The months went by, reasonably trouble-free for mouse and man, though it never sat very well with me that I had to share my space with a little furry creature who simply decided one day to take up permanent residence in my home.
But then came this past winter and the fortunes of the mouse started into an irreversible decline. To begin with, a telephone line downstairs went mysteriously dead and it didn’t take me long to realize the ceiling dweller had no doubt chewed through the wire. Relating this to a friend, I was told that next on its menu might be an electrical wire and that it could start a fire in the process.

Then my wife produced a newspaper article about a strange illness young children can sometimes get from breathing in the air around mouse poop. Having two young children and, after five years, a few shopping bags full of mouse poop in our ceiling, we realized an eviction was in the works.

The final straw came Christmas Day as we ate our bountiful meal to the sounds of our unwelcome ceiling inhabitant clawing out all the insulation from under our front-door sill, creating an ever-widening crack as it worked. In fact, I left the table to inspect at one point and could see its little leg and claws coming up through the crevice. I didn’t pass on this news to the other diners at the table or I might have spent the rest of the day alone.

However, if I have shared my home for five years with a determined little pest, I have dwelled there even longer with a human being who is even more strong-willed. On New Year’s Eve, she came back from the farm-supply store with a forty-dollar “ultrasonic” noise-maker that promised to drive all the mice in our home to distraction by upsetting their nervous systems, causing them to leave the premises immediately and to seek counselling. With high hopes, I plugged it in at one end of the basement. The sound it made drove all four humans in the house crazy but after a few days, it was apparent it was having no effect on the mouse. Surmising that the little guy probably couldn’t hear it through the ceiling tile, I found a way of fishing it through an opening and setting it up right in its living room. The ensuing, frantic mouse activity that went on almost non-stop for days, led me to realize that far from being the scary noise source the little gizmo promised to be, it was obviously being received by the mouse as a great new sound system and it was no doubt dancing up a storm to its emissions much as a teenager might go berserk at a rock concert. I am sure the mouse wondered at our great generosity in providing it with such a creature comfort.

Another trip to the farm-supply store saw me standing mouth-agog in front of racks and racks of mouse-killing and mouse-trapping machines ranging in price from ninety-nine cents to seventy dollars. After listening for twenty minutes to the sales clerk enumerating the various attributes of each device, I finally ran from the store in a panic, knowing that were I gifted with four university degrees in zoology, biology, sociology and anthropology, there was no absolutely no chance I would pick the right machine. Simple psychology told me that.

However, forced back to the store the next day by the “or else” look in the eyes of my exasperated wife who had visions of the mouse and his poop joining us in bed one night once he’d completely hacked through through the front-door insulation, I impulsively settled on two yellow, easy-to-set traps that promised that our mouse’s final meal would consist of the peanut butter slathered on the “bait cup.” I rushed home with my purchases. Carefully installing them by the hole in the garage wall, I spent the evening running out there to check on their progress.
Saturday night, the mouse had a farewell party, I guess, dancing up a storm to the music from its new sound system and generally having a ball.

Sunday morning, bright and early, I found it, head-first in one of the yellow traps, its mouth covered in peanut butter, its body cold and stiff. I released it into a garbage can, announced the news to my wife, and celebrated victory with a nice cup of coffee.

That night, I went down to the basement, dismantled junior’s sound system, and sat down to watch some TV. But my earlier jubilation at my tormentor’s capture and execution was slowly replaced by a strange and forlorn feeling.

Something, it seemed, akin to loneliness.

For a brief few minutes, I missed the little fella. And I felt just a little too smug in my big, blue easy chair in my big, blue, warm house while my old rec room associate lay stiff in a garbage can in my back yard.

However, sense soon overtook sentiment and I settled down to a relaxing evening, content in the knowledge we all wouldn’t have to die in a house fire or contract some mysterious disease from mouse poop.

Still, when I went to bed, I had trouble drifting off. It was just a little too quiet in the vacated apartment above. An apartment that will no longer be available for tenancy, as soon as I can get back out to the garage to pour some concrete down that darned mouse hole.

Look for that to happen sometime in the next five years.

Jan. 14/02