Author: Jim Hagarty

A friend of mine had the misfortune of having his pet cat Mr. Digger killed by a car this weekend. He is very upset and missing it. But so is his dog.

The day after the accident, the dog went around the house whining and looking for the cat. It went outside and saw Tony preparing to bury the cat and when he saw it lying on a bench, the dog went over and started nudging it, as if to wake it up. Then it sat down and started crying again.

We tend to think, of course, that animals don’t feel as deeply as we do or form relationships that matter much, especially with members of other species. But that has really been called into question over the past few years and researchers are even studying the phenomenon of non-human creatures caring for each other, regardless of species, in times of need.

A startling video recently showed a dog rushing onto a freeway and pulling, with his paws, another dog which had been hit by a car, off to the shoulder of the road. The dog survived because his buddy had put his life on the line for him.

Our little dog Toby has decided that he is the defender of the nine gerbils that live in two glass tanks in our home. If our two cats go to the tanks to have a look at what’s going on with their potential snacks as they run around, Toby goes on the attack and chases them away.

An article I read years ago pointed to an even odder relationship. A farmer had a horse that spent a lot of time under a particular shade tree up by the barn, a tree that attracted a lot of birds. Eventually, he became aware than one specific bird was doing a lot of squawking when the horse was near and the horse seemed to whinny back.

Every winter, the bird would fly south and when it returned in spring, horse and bird would reunite under the tree for a day before moving on with their lives.

One year, while the bird was down south, the horse died. The farmer buried it in a field and just to remember where it was, counted the fence posts from the barn back to the spot where the horse was interred. It was 22 posts away.

In the spring, when the bird returned, the farmer thought he heard a lot of chirping going on. He went out to see that a bird was sitting on a fence post back behind the barn. He counted them. It was sitting on the 22nd post.

After a day, the bird flew back to his favourite tree and spent its time there. And from then on till it didn’t come back anymore, every spring when the bird returned to the farm it would first go sit on the 22nd post and visit with its friend the horse for a while before going back to the tree.

A touching video can probably still be found on YouTube of a female dog going over and thanking the exhausted firefighter that just saved her puppies from a burning house. And another shows the back seat of a car filled with animals rescued from Hurricane Katrina and though the animals were strangers and of different species, they start caring for each other.

One summer I drove a pop truck and killed a beautiful german shepherd farm dog that ran out in front of me. I got out and went to the farmer who dragged the animal off the road. His kids were all crying and he commanded them to stop. When I apologized, he spoke sternly to me: “It was just a dog,” he said.

Is there such a thing as “just a dog?” I don’t know.

Ask Mr. Digger’s friend.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

This is a metaphor for how times have changed, literally. In our farmhouse in Canada, there was one wall clock, with a long cord reaching down to an electrical outlet. No clocks with batteries in those days. That was it. One timepiece large enough for everyone to read.

One.

When daylight savings time came and went, there was one clock to change. Somebody got up on a chair and changed it. It was always a big deal.

And even though it preoccupied us when the big day for the change was coming, we still managed to make it late (or early) to church occasionally. I am not counting the few wristwatches that might have been in our possession. The owners of those watches could manage to make the changes on their own.

Depending on which car we owned at the time, there might have been a clock in it but we could be 98 per cent sure it didn’t work anyway so we didn’t have to worry about changing it.

Today, in our home, I changed 23 timekeepers, again, not counting wristwatches. But that is less than half of the items that keep track of time in our home. My best count is that we possess 55 objects that display time and I am probably leaving a few out.

The other 32 devices that I didn’t have to physically change, alter their own times automatically.

To me, this proves that life was simpler back when I was young. Not easier, not better, just simpler.

Here’s a breakdown of our timepieces: four wall clocks; four clock radios; two alarm clocks; two stand-alone decorative clocks; a digital thermostat; four cellphones; four cordless phones and one landline phone; two TVs that display time; a cable TV digital box; one VCR; one DVD recorder; six computers; two printers; two microwave ovens; two video cameras; three digital voice recorders; four hand-held gamers (DS and PSP); one X-Box; one Wii; two iPods; two cars; and one lonely little letter opener.

One clock – the one on the stove – doesn’t work.

Fifty-five objects in 2011 to one in 1956. Is life 55 times more complex than it was 55 years ago? Maybe all this says is that they hadn’t figured out how to put timepieces in every little thing back then.

But maybe it goes much deeper than that. I’d explain how for you but I don’t have the time right now.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

The miracles of modern technology never cease to amaze.

We have a brand new, streamlined medical centre in my town and if they are looking for a building to house astronauts on Mars, this one would probably do.

To conserve space, I won’t go through the centre’s many features except for one. There are two public washrooms on the main floor, used by male and female alike. The entranceways to these pristine enclaves are designed to prevent the old problem of people pounding on locked doors and being told, “I’ll be right out, for cryin’ out loud,” as a frustrated Ralphie said in The Christmas Story when his little brother Randy needed to pee.

Beside each door is a big square button. Surrounding that button, if the bathroom is free, is a bright green light, indicating it is unoccupied. If the light is red, someone is inside and the door is locked.

Easy peasy.

I used that system the other day to wander into one of the washrooms. The door opened wide and when it opens, it stays open for a long time, no doubt to accommodate people in wheelchairs.

In I went and immediately pressed the big square button labelled “Lock”. The door eventually closed.

I had just gotten down to business when I heard the door open again behind me, exposing me and my business to the people in the hallway. And it might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me a busload of seniors had just then disembarked and were gathered outside my washroom door, looking in. I imagined critical commentary from the nosy crowd.

As we all know, once you begin a washroom procedure such as I was involved with, it’s very difficult to stop it. So there I stood, losing dignity faster than I was losing the pop I had for breakfast and while, in midlife or earlier, I might have been mortified to be on full display like this, as a senior citizen now, I am less embarrassed. I was at least thankful that the operation I had undertaken did not require sitting down, as I then would have been staring into the faces of my tut tutters.

When I was finished, the door having closed again by this time, I read the instructions above the lock button. I was to have pressed it after the door had swung shut and not before, a critical error I will not repeat.

I love modern science and its inventions, but in this moment, I would have rather been Ralphie, yelling to his antsy little brother, “I’ll be right out, for cryin’ out loud!”

©2021 Jim Hagarty

This a story about A Great Mind in Decline, aka I’m Losing It Big Time.

One year ago today was my wife Barb’s birthday, so as is my tradition, I went out and bought her a book by her favourite author, Maeve Binchy. (Just to get under Barb’s skin, I used to always call her hero Maeve Bitchy, by mistake, of course. These were misfires on my part.)

Barb and I have been married 22 years and fortunately, Maeve is a very prolific writer and has been able to keep me supplied with birthday presents, Christmas presents and even Valentine’s Day presents. But apparently old Maeve is slowing down and this is complicating my life.

A year ago, I bought my wife Maeve’s 2010 release, Minding Frankie. Barb loved it. Six weeks later, I was back in the stores looking for her Christmas book. I found it, wrapped it up and she opened it Christmas morning.

“Oh, Minding Frankie,” she said. “I love that book.” The one I had gotten her six weeks before was sitting out in the open on a coffee table within sight of us all as we opened our gifts.

Ha, ha, ha. Dad’s an idiot.

So there I was today, almost 11 months later, looking for a gift for Barb again when I picked a Binchy book off the shelf. I phoned my son and asked him to ask his Mom what the words Minding Frankie meant to her and I instructed him to make sure he didn’t tip her off that this was the title of a Maeve Binchy book.

“It’s a Maeve Binchy book,” I heard her say in the background. “And I got it twice last year.”

As the saying goes, I have a wonderful memory but it’s very short. Tomorrow I am writing a stern letter to Ms. Binchy, instructing her in no uncertain terms to get off her aspirations and write some more books. This retirement of hers is killing me.

In any case, who ever heard of a writer retiring? Writers don’t retire, they just get the ultimate rejection notice one day from their publishers by way of their readers.

With any luck, Binchy will join other great novelists such as Agatha Christie who, after retiring or passing away, keep producing best sellers with their name on them but written by others. Great franchises are hard to abandon.

And who knows? Maybe some day long into the future, you’ll be reading Jim Hagarty stories written by some other poor sap who was also dropped on his head as a kid.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

I was driving through Manitoba on my way home from the West Coast. Sometime during the night, I got tired so pulled over to the shoulder of the Trans Canada Highway and crawled into the back of my car for a nap.

I woke up about 6 a.m., ready to take off again but my battery was dead. I had left the parking lights on all night.

So I flagged down a trucker who said he couldn’t help me but he said there was a town on the other side of the bush he pointed to and a service station where I could find someone. But it was Sunday morning and I’d have to wait till 9 a.m. for the service station to open.

The trucker told me I could walk the highway around the bend – the long way to the town – or I could just cut through the bush as the town was on the other side of it.

So, just before 9 a.m., I climbed the fence to the field where the bush was located and threw one leg over. But I stopped because of a creepy feeling I had about that bush. It was a beautiful sunshine-filled day and there was nothing sinister about the bush, but I changed my mind about going through it and walked around the long way – a half hour or so – to the town.

I found my service station guy and we got in his truck to go back to my car. When we got there, I almost fainted. The field in front of the bush was filled with a herd of maybe 50 or 60 buffalo – old, young, mothers, fathers and calves. They had all been in the bush that I almost walked through.

I grew up on a farm around beef cattle and developed a healthy respect for them but I’m afraid I would not have been able to handle a bevy of bucking buffalo. My only hope would have been to climb a tree and my tree-climbing skills have never been the best.

It’s been 29 years since that day and I still shudder every time I think about my close encounter with those beasts.

Thank God we humans have not completely lost all our instincts. In this case, listening to that wee small voice within me saved my life.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

My daughter says that I have a quirk when it comes to jokes. She doesn’t exactly say it’s an annoying quirk, but secretly, I think she believes it is.

Her contention is that if I tell a joke and no one laughs, instead of giving up on the joke, I keep telling it over and over to everyone I meet, even though no one ever laughs.

She’s right. But here’s my problem. If I find a joke funny, I come to believe in that joke, and like any good preacher, I want to bring others into the sunshine that warms my face. My jokes are my higher power and I am a humour evangelist.

When I was in university 45 years ago, I hung around with a very funny guy. He had a bunch of one liners always at the ready and he would whip them out when he wanted to make someone laugh.

And laugh they always did.

Here is my favourite quip of his.

When anyone would ask him how he was doing, he would say to them, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.” Now, the reason I found this so funny, and others did too, was the fact that he was standing there, perfectly healthy, explaining that he was just barely alive.

So, for 45 years, I have used this joke. Over and over and over. When a stranger, often a clerk in a store, asks me how I am, I tell them, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.” In 45 years, I have had a total of probably three people laugh at my reply and two of those were out of kindness. Maybe it’s my delivery or maybe I live in the wrong part of the world.

But I do know one thing.

I am going to keep using this line till the day it comes true.

The nurse will ask, “Well, how are we today, Mr. Hagarty.”

And I will say, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.”

And she won’t laugh. Instead she will fluff my pillow and hand me my pea soup.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

I did a double take while driving a highway near my home in Canada the other day. At first, I thought my eyes deceived me but they didn’t.

I thought I was looking at a yellow Caution Deer Crossing sign with an image of a deer, but instead there was an image of a kangaroo. The sign was professionally done so I’m wondering if someone had visited Australia lately and brought back this unique souvenir which they thought they’d have a little fun with.

There are a lot of exotic farm animals being raised in our area these days from buffalo to llama, to elk and ostrich. But as far as I know, no kangaroos.

This reminded me of a true story from years ago when I worked on our local daily newspaper. A farmer plowing in a field near the village of Rostock in Southern Ontario, not far from my home, overturned a large bone. Authorities got involved, called the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and sure enough, the farmer had uncovered a wooly mammoth, an animal that died out in these parts 12,000 years ago.

So, we did big stories on it, of course, but then something else happened which caused a few more stories.

Someone (identity still unknown) erected a great yellow caution sign along a highway near the extinct animal find warning drivers that this particular spot was a “Mammoth Crossing”. Soon, another sign went up further on down the road, pointing in a farmer’s lane to the Mammoth Conservation Area.

I went in one day and interviewed the farmer in his kitchen. At the end of his lane was a woods and very wet marsh. Every once in a while, he said, he’d see an unfamiliar car go speeding by the window, another wooly mammoth enthusiast, off to the conservation area to see the big beast, seemingly unaware they were 12,000 years too late.

The farmer and his son took turns getting the tractor and pulling the wayward cars out of the swamp.

For some reason, I am fascinated by the wooly mammoth, and am pretty sure they once roamed across the property my family and I live on today. They also were plentiful out in the Rostock area apparently, and people alive when the woolies were lumbering around in elephant-like fashion would chase them into the Ellice swamp (still in existence today) where they would sink and drown. The natives would leave them down there because the cold swamp acted like a refrigerator.

Every once in a while, they’d wade down into the swamp, hack off a large chunk of the beast and bring it up to roast over a roaring fire for supper.

How would that compare to dropping into the local grocery store for a few chops for the barbie, mate?

©2011 Jim Hagarty

I recognized a neighbour woman at an event I attended on Sunday and went up to her to say hi. Normally, when I chat with her while we walk our dogs, I have to tilt my head down a bit if I want to talk face to face, as she is shorter than I am. This day, there was not much tilting needed and I came to the conclusion that she had grown which I thought odd as she is in her fifties. I then thought maybe she was wearing high heels or boots but that theory fell through as well.

On Tuesday, I took my svelt five-foot, eight-inch frame to the hospital for a bone density scan. The nurse checked my height. Five feet, six and one half inches. I was shocked. I told her I was a steady five eight and had been for decades.

“Well, you must be shrinking,” she replied, with all the bedside manner of Vlad the Impaler.

“Shrinking?” I thought. How the hell does a man shrink? All my identification cards and papers say I am five eight. A $50,000 machine says I am shrinking. Where in hell did the other inch and a half of Jim Hagarty go? This is not news you toss over your shoulder at a man as you are walking away from him.

This reduction seems to have happened since my last bone density scan three years ago. Assuming the machine is not causing this, it appears I am losing a half an inch per year.

If I live another 33 years, to age 100, which I expect to do, I will apparently lose another sixteen and one half inches. This will leave me a diminutive four feet, two inches tall, or short, whatever. We’re getting into Seven Dwarfs territory here. I will be able to go on kiddies rides at fall fairs and my poor neighbour, if she is still speaking to me by then, and assuming she does not also shrink, will have to look way down to have face-to-face chats with me.

If, by some ungodly chance, I live to be 110, I will by then stand only three feet, seven and one-half inches. At 120, not out of the question, I suppose, given the advances being made by medical science, I will be only a little over three feet, two inches. If I live any longer, I will be getting close to two feet something and my wife will be able to push me around in a toddler’s stroller.

And you know, come to think of it, I’m not sure I will mind that one bit.

P.S

By 2091, I will apparently be only one inch tall and will have to hide from my cats.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

My grandfather John Hagarty (1866-1950) believed that two things sometimes kept the Irish in America down – alcohol and superstition. He lived up to his ideals. He took his first drink when he was 80 and had the occasional beer for the last four years of his life.

And he was not quiet when it came to expressing his views about the non-existence of ghosts. He enforced a rule that no ghost stories be told in his home by his family of six kids.

However, he might have been a little too sure of himself on the matter of ghosts, perhaps, as a group of his farmer friends and neighbours decided to put him to the test. They told him that if was so sure there were no such thing as ghosts, then he wouldn’t mind going into a haunted farmhouse in the neighbourhood after dark and retrieving an object from an upstairs bedroom that one of them had bravely put there during the day. He said he would do it, no problem (that’s when no problem meant no problem, not you’re welcome).

So, that night after dark, a group of men gathered on the road outside the abandoned house and watched as Grandpa, lit oil lantern in hand, walked in the laneway, entered the pitch black house, proceeded to the second floor and returned to those who had issued the dare with the hidden item in hand.

My Dad, his son, asked him whether or not he was scared going into the house and he admitted he was borderline terrified.

Visiting Ireland a few years ago, I was told by the woman who lives on the farm my ancestors once dwelled on that some folks believe that “wee people” live in the hills within sight of her home.

“Nobody really believes in leprechauns,” I said to her.

“Of course, nobody believes in them,” she smiled, “and nobody goes up there.”

I wonder if my grandfather, if he could have ever made it to that spot in his lifetime, would have gone up into those hills. I think he would have if he were challenged to. On the other hand, a dark farmhouse at night was something he was used to. Unfamiliar hills populated by tough little buggers with ill intentions in their hearts towards him might have put him off a bit.

I once agreed to look after a friend’s farmhouse while he and his family were away. It was an old house, far in from the road, and a bit spooky to me. For some reason, I never managed to make it there till dusk. I also had to go into the barn briefly every day.

I was pretty jumpy.

One night when I went into the house, I turned the light on in the entranceway before I went upstairs to water plants. When I came back downstairs, the light was off. Thinking maybe the bulb had burned out, I flicked the switch and it lit up again.

My trip from house to road was made in record time and I almost had to change my clothes when I got home.

People I have told this story to say the light thing was just a result of my overactive imagination. I am not so sure. There had been at least one death in that house which is almost 150 years old.

I try to be brave but I am not my grandfather.

Happy Halloween.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

In January, my doctor sent me for diet counselling. That’s a bit humbling at my age but we all have our blind spots.

I met three times with a very nice dietitian who didn’t pull many punches. Among my formerly favourite foods that had to go was my daily chocolate bar, most of the time coming in the form of a bar that has the word “big” in its name. I sometimes joked with people who saw me eating one that the best way to become big is to eat a chocolate bar with the word “big” in its name every day.

Go big or go home.

But there they were – gone! Banished by my counsellor.

I thought I would die from that prohibition but I’ve been getting by pretty well. The theory is that eventually your body wants what it’s being fed on a regular basis so now I get my sugar from natural sources such as fruit and interestingly, my body craves it.

Tonight, however, all this goody two-shoes business was getting me down so I headed for Joe’s Variety to buy me a “big” chocolate bar. If that gets me into the ground a few days earlier, I am willing to go with that, just for the pleasure of that nutty, chewy bar in my mouth.

When I got to the store, I started carefully perusing the shelves trying to find my nectar. The clerk finally had to help me out and when I picked up what she said was my familiar “big” snack, I thought the Chocolate Bar Gods were playing a heartless trick.

My big chocolate bar is not big anymore. It’s more like “puny.” This change was apparently made with absolutely no consultation with me.

I was crestfallen. A development like this can rock a guy’s world. The clerk tried to talk me into buying the gigantic “big x 2” which is double the dose in a huge package and is meant for those who have set obesity as a serious life goal (there is one in my Christmas stocking every year).

I bought the now diminished-sized regular one. I ripped the package open the minute I exited the store and enjoyed every miniature chaw all the way home.

First they stopped making available in Canada a salty treat with the title “bugle” in its name – I searched every store for weeks for a bag of the crusty corn twist – and now this.

Life is cruel for hungry guys who lack willpower sometimes.

©2011 Jim Hagarty