By Jim Hagarty
It is colder than a witch’s teakettle (unplugged) here in southern Ontario tonight. The southernmost tip of Ontario, Canada, is parallel with the upper border of California. So I am basically living in California. California even has its own Ontario. So what gives? I don’t see no Beach Boys and I don’t see no string bikinis. I do see my breath, however. Brrrr.
By Jim Hagarty
I’ve never found a four-leaf clover.
My daughter has found many.
She has lots of Irish luck.
Poor me, I don’t have any.
If daughter buys a ticket,
We know she’s going to win.
If I bought tickets, all but one,
I’m sure I’d lose again.
If we are at a function
And they draw for some prize,
My daughter is the winner.
The cheers drown out my sighs.
Some day I’ll find that clover
No matter what I do.
Even if the extra leaf
Comes attached with glue.
Cause I am sick of waiting
For my lucky streak to start.
If I never find my clover,
The pain will break my heart.
By Jim Hagarty
Society loves its euphemisms.
They are words that soften things up, I guess. Make life less real, less crude perhaps.
So we don’t have sex – we sleep together. We don’t become bankrupt, we go broke. He wasn’t drunk – he was tipsy. She isn’t rude, she’s plain-spoken. And he isn’t a jerk, of course, just “hard to get to know”, a “little different”, an “acquired taste” or if we are feeling bold that day, we might admit that he could use an “attitude adjustment.” But jerk? Never.
But we save our most delicate words when it comes to the subject of death. Maybe because we’re deathly afraid of death. I don’t know. But people rarely die nowadays. They pass away or pass on and it seems now we can’t even be bothered to add the “away” and the “on” but simply say that so and so has “passed.”
Comedian George Carlin used to have fun with this. He joked that when talking to someone who said he had “lost his father”, he would reply (which I am sure he only did in his mind), “Oh, I’m sure he’ll turn up again.”
When I was in the newspaper business, I kept my eyes peeled (is that a euphemism?) for words meant to substitute for the real words. It became a kind of a thing with me. Therefore, in all the obituaries I ever wrote, not one person ever passed away. I’m afraid to say they all died. And whenever I found weasel words in press releases I would change them to the real thing. In my last few years on a paper, I rewrote many press releases that repeatedly referred to “the McGuinty government”, the premier of our province of Ontario at the time being Dalton McGuinty. As there was no such thing in the entire universe as a “McGuinty government”, I refused to use that term and instead, replaced it with the “Ontario government” of which there is one. Sometimes for variety I used the “Liberal government” but even that was dishonest. There is no such thing as a Liberal government. There is a Liberal party, at least for now, but no Liberal governments anywhere. There are provincial governments and a federal government and in our town, a municipal government, but no Liberal governments.
The mayor of my city of Stratford, Ontario, is Dan Mathieson. Imagine referring to Stratford city council as the “Mathieson government.” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper did the same thing at the federal level and it pained me to see so many journalists with so little thoughtfulness or backbone quite eagerly referring to the “Harper government” in their stories. For the record, I am here to proclaim that there was not then and never has been a Harper government or even a Conservative government, for that matter. Since its birth in 1867 Canada has only had Canadian governments.
The use and misuse of words, to me, is no small matter. When I taught journalism, I used to tell my students they should liken the words they use to the bullets in the gun of a police officer. Used thoughtlessly, carelessly or maliciously, those bullets – and our words – can cause a lot of harm. The pen is mightier than the sword. That is why when a dictatorship takes over a country, they don’t run around gathering up all the swords right away. The first thing they do is get control of all those words being used out there in the media, the universities and the churches.
I know “passed away” instead of “died” doesn’t cause any harm and never will.
It just sort of bugs me.
(Bugs me, hmmm, let’s see, oh yeah, what I meant to say is it makes me mad and even then, mad is a euphemism for angry.)
I see one of my cats out the kitchen window. Uh oh. I think he might have just “done in” a mouse.
Pretty sure the little rodent has passed.
From the camera of my son, Chris. JH
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
Ever heard of a piggy named Slim?
Maybe you should get acquainted with him.
He has a fine snout
Which he likes to stick out
And he keeps himself well-groomed and trim.
By Jim Hagarty
“Advice is highly overrated.”
Says the man who never takes it.
The man who paddles his own canoe
Has nothing at all to learn from you.
He’s sure his advisers mean well and all
And he knows that their words are meaningful
But the man who charts his very own course
Will never give in to suggestion or force.
For he knows he can do it all on his own
And is happy to plan his path all alone
For he’s sure that he is much smarter than you
And needs no one’s counsel on what he should do.
The man who paddles his own canoe
Is happy and wishes you could be happy too.
But when he sees rapids approaching ahead
He is apt to consider your caution instead.
And as his craft tumbles and tosses him out
He finally yells “Help!” but there’s no one about.
And as he’s submerged and his head hits a stone
He wishes for once he wasn’t alone.
The easiest thing in the world to do
Is push away people who try to help you.
And sometimes that’s fine and sometimes that’s brave
But it’s too late as they gather at the canoe paddler’s grave.
By Jim Hagarty
I did my good deed for the week on Sunday, a perfect day to do a good deed, I have found over a lifetime of distributing good deeds to the left and the right of me like a Good Samaritan on steroids.
On this day, I bought someone I don’t even know five screwnails.
It cost me 50 cents but it was worth it to see this anonymous do-it-yourselfer happy although I haven’t actually ever see him or her and I don’t know if they are happy but I hope they are. I hope, in fact, they are downright gleeful.
In the middle of a construction project, I was sent to the hardware store to pick up a box of 100 woodscrews. I raced like a maniac to the store and found the last two boxes of the screws I needed. However, the seal was broken on both boxes. Someone had been helping themselves.
So I asked the manager about it and he agreed that yes, someone had pilfered a few screws. He didn’t offer to knock a few pennies of the price of the box and I didn’t care enough to ask for a discount, so I bought the screws and raced home. Once there, just for fun, I dumped out all the screws and counted them. There were 95, not 100, in the box.
Now, I am glad the screw thief got away with the bargain he or she was looking for, but I am also very interested in the thought process that went on in the brain of this person who gave themselves a five-finger discount on the product. I am thinking they are an adult, as kids don’t usually need woodscrews. They must be in the middle of some kind of project themselves and so, by definition, they must have the money to pay for the whole project.
The hardware store is located just outside of my city so the person probably went there in a car that he or she presumably owns and maintains. If they have the money for all this they must have some sort of income and therefore, probably have a job.
So, here is a responsible, job-holding, car-driving person, probably a family man or woman who is operating under a belief system that suggests that it is OK to have someone else pay for 100 screwnails and only take home 95.
I guess that person’s conscience is clear and that their workshop is not cluttered up by 95 screwnails they have no need of.
That brings me to the notion that perhaps it should be possible to go to the hardware store and buy five of these screws when that is all you need.
Does that justify stealing? I don’t know. And given that most of the shoplifting done in these big stores is done by the employees, who knows who took my screws? Maybe it was an inside job.
All I know is, I got screwed.
And not in a fun way.
From the camera of my son, Chris. JH
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
A nice little piglet named John,
Squealed cause he couldn’t find Mom.
He enquired of a cow,
“Have you seen my sow?
“She was here but now she is gone.”
By Jim Hagarty
We had a nice long autumn last year and I got well caught up on my yard work.
I trimmed all our perennial flowers right down to ground level. I worried all winter long that I had been too brutal in my pruning. Would the lilies and iris and phlox even come back at all in the spring?
They did come back and are more beautiful than they have ever been.
It occurs to me it doesn’t hurt for humans to be cut down to size now and then too.
Doesn’t hurt us at all.
