I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.
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.
Every August for the past 30 years, my family and I have vacationed at a camp in northern Canada, a collection of cottages by a beautiful lake, where we enjoy a few days with our friends who own the place. It is idyllic in every way except one.
The cottages have no indoor plumbing so everyone has to make use of a two-holer outhouse when nature calls. It really isn’t much of an inconvenience and I used to troop out there in the middle of the night a couple of times, guided by a pretty effective yard light.
But one summer years ago, a bear was spotted behind the outhouse in broad daylight and ever since then, my nighttime visits have ended and I am a nervous wreck during my daytime sitdowns.
My fear of bears at the outhouse has been the subject of much merriment from our friends and other cottagers. What kind of city boy would be afraid of a 500-pound animal that has been known to kill humans?
Every summer they laugh and every summer I tremble.
But this summer, if we can make it there, I will arrive with some scary facts in tow. Last week, a woman in Alaska visited an outdoor john in the bush only to be bitten or scratched on the “bottom”, as the English like to say, by a great big bear that was hibernating in the depths of the outhouse.
“I got out there and sat down on the toilet and immediately something bit my butt right as I sat down,” Shannon Stevens told reporters.
“I jumped up and I screamed when it happened,” my soulmate said.
The woman’s brother Erik, who had joined her on the snowmobile run, at first thought she had been bitten by a squirrel or a mink, or something small. He picked up his flashlight and ventured to the outhouse to do an inspection.
“I opened the toilet seat and there’s just a bear face just right there at the level of the toilet seat, just looking right back up through the hole, right at me,” he said, emphasizing the word “just.”
“I just shut the lid as fast as I could. I said, ‘There’s a bear down there, we got to get out of here now.”
The next morning, they found bear tracks all over the property, but the bear had left the area. “You could see them across the snow, coming up to the side of the outhouse,” she said. They figure (being the kind of people who “figure”) the bear got inside the outhouse through an opening at the bottom of the back door.
“I expect it’s probably not that bad of a little den in the winter,” Shannon said.
A wildlife expert believes Shannon’s wound was caused by the bear swatting at her with a paw rather than being bitten. Either way, the incident might be a first.
“As far as getting swatted on the butt when you’re sitting down in winter, she could be the only person on Earth that this has ever happened to, for all I know,” the expert said.
Erik says he’ll carry bear spray with him all the time when going into the backcountry, and Shannon plans to change one behavior as well.
“I’m just going to be better about looking inside the toilet before sitting down, for sure,” she said.
As I crawl under the electric blanket on my bed every night, I am grateful that such a thing exists. I am a cold-blooded animal, constantly at risk of freezing stiff as a two-by-four, so a warm blanket doesn’t seem to be a frivolous possession.
Still, the word “decadence” runs through my warm mind now and then and while I have not consulted the University of Google to find out the exact meaning of the term, my own definition would probably lay out that a decadent thing is a thing a person doesn’t need.
For many thousands of years, people have been covering themselves up at night when they sleep to stay warm. Cavemen and women probably used some form of wildebeest hide to keep the frost away. But it took some genius in the last century to think, “If I ran electric wires inside a blanket and plugged it into the wall, I bet I could sell millions” and here we are.
In effect, I go to sleep every night inside a low-grade toaster oven.
I would have to do an exhaustive survey of all my possessions to decide which of them I don’t need, but right off the bat, the plastic ice cubes I got for Christmas spring to mind. I know why the family member gave them to me. She has suffered through many years of the tantrums I have thrown as I have tried to get frozen water cubes out of their trays.
I could list may other devices like the plastic ice cubes to convict myself of the charge of decadence, but something I bought last fall I think would have any impartial jury yelling, “Guilty!”
I am referring to the butt warmer I bought for our car. I think of the many generations of my family which got from one place to another without even a car, let alone a butt warmer to put on the seat. Did they think, as they were sailing across the Atlantic after leaving Ireland in the 1840s, “I wish I had something warm to sit on”? I am going to go ahead and guess they didn’t say that.
In fact, I myself managed to live 70 years without a butt warmer and hardly ever mentioned to anyone, “Gosh my butt is freezing” but when you run out of things to buy, I guess you buy a butt warmer.
And, of course, as is the case with every decadent thing, once you have experienced the value of the new device, you can never go back.
If I ever emigrate back to Ireland, and it isn’t impossible that I won’t, I am taking my butt warmer with me.
Sad news. The Jim Hagarty Hockey School has been forced to suspend activities again.
This morning at 3 a.m., the founder/president/CEO and chairman of the Committee for Recovering the Lost Puck and Stick, walked out on the ice he had made on his backyard lawn for the final watering before today’s warm spell when his feet went skyward and he landed on his back, his head bouncing like a basketball on the ice before finally coming to rest.
The pain that shot through him was equivalent to the shock that would be inflicted if five strong men swinging 20-pound hammers flailed away at his shoulders and neck for three minutes straight.
However, Hagarty did not lose consciousness and, in fact, his first response post crash was to sing the national anthem of Portugal in a seldom used ancient dialect of Portugese, which was surprising as he does not speak Portugese.
A hockey school student rushed out to help him up and when he asked Hagarty if he was okay, the noted hockey expert recited the American Pledge of Allegiance. Finally settled in his house, Hagarty groaned in pain but found some relief in sitting in front of the TV in the basement for a hilarious episode of a popular sitcom. This was remarkable as that TV was not plugged in.
After a restless night in bed, Hagarty asked his wife to remove the straightjacket from him so he could get out of bed. This was also odd as there was no straightjacket. The one she often wraps him in when he is sound asleep was sent to the cleaners.
When he finally made it to the kitchen, he tossed his car keys in the direction of the dog and asked him to drive him to the coffee shop as he wasn’t feeling well enough. So, in other words, there were no unusual side effects from the terrible fall.
School will resume next week if and when Hagarty agrees to get off the shed roof.
I am no sociologist or historian or behaviourist or constitutional lawyer or any other kind of expert, for that matter. But, I have never let that stop me from expounding at length on any subject which might come up for discussion. The fact that I might know absolutely nothing about a thing will not slow me down for a second in explaining it to you.
I have always noticed this aspect about myself and about other men with whom I have had discussions over the past four decades. Lack of knowledge has never been considered a barrier to an analysis of a topic which might have come up, out of the blue.
For example, I might learn of the existence of a country – let’s call it, Percytovia – on a Thursday. On Friday, I might chance to read a short article about my newly discovered nation in a newspaper. Saturday night, I’ll be telling some guy at a party somewhere that the problem with the people of Percytovia is this: They have no appreciation of the democratic process. The average Percytovian thinks of his government as the natural provider of all he needs. Until this unfortunate attitude can be changed …
Now, I am soon, obviously, challenged by some other man who read the same article in the paper and who tells me it is not attitude, but geography which is defeating the good people of Percytovia.
After a minute or two of the discussion, we are about to start smacking each other just above the ears over this when another man approaches to claim he knows someone who studied last year at the University of Percytovia and we are both out to lunch. Faced with someone with actual knowledge about the subject, my debater and I promptly drop the topic altogether and go back to criticizing politicians, taxes and greedy hockey players.
For years, I have wondered why I must immediately know something about everything even when I know I don’t know everything about anything. And why are most of the men I know struggling with the same obsession?
Now, at last, I know.
I suffer from an affliction known as Male Answer Syndrome, or MAS. The term has been coined to explain why men must always appear as if they have just spent the past year locked in a library studying the very topic that has just been raised for discussion at the dinner party. And why we’ll still be talking about it long after everyone else has drifted off to other parts of the room out of earshot of our lecturing voices.
As a rule, women don’t suffer from MAS. If they don’t know something about something, they’ll admit it. “Percytovia?” will ask the hostess as she passes around the drinks. “Never heard of him. Who was he? A composer?”
I hesitate to say this, but I am convinced. Male Answer Syndrome most definitely does exist. Maybe all men don’t have it, but a lot of us do.
Now, it’s interesting that this subject should come up, because I was just reading an article on this not so very long ago. Male Answer Syndrome is a throwback to the prehistoric role of the male human as hunter and provider of the species, Homo Sapiens.
Think the passage of time can put you out of reach of the long arm of the law? Think again. Justice for many of the unfortunate citizens of the United States with all their corruption, killings and chaos is often slow to be realized but maybe that is changing.
In Pickens, South Carolina, a lawbreaking movie watcher was arrested and taken to jail this week. And well she should have been. Nine years ago she rented a video from a local store and never returned it. So, she was charged with failing to return a rented video cassette – a very serious offence – and taken to jail where she spent one night in a cell.
Pickens County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Creed Hashe says a Ms. Finley rented the movie Monster-in-Law from Dalton Videos in 2005. The owner took out a warrant against Finley, who was arrested when she was at the sheriff’s office for something else and the warrant was found. (Actually she should also be charged with watching a movie called Monster-in-Law but we’ll let that go for now.)
Chief Deputy Hashe, who also answers to the name Barney Fife, says Finley had been sent several certified letters at the time. She says she never got the letters and that she will fight the charge. Ya, right. If you’re looking for any signs of the truth in that woman’s brain, I can bet you it will be slim pickins.
Also of interest. The video store in the above story went out of business years ago.
Not many of you probably know that I am a prolific inventor. My Dad was too. Most farmers are. Economics ensure they devise ingenious ways to do things as many of them can’t afford expensive new machinery.
I have several clever inventions on the go at present. For example, off the drawing board and into production is my WeinerRoaster, an aluminum cylinder slightly larger but in the same shape as a single weiner. It plugs in and cooks up a perfect tube steak in record time for diners in a hurry. The world has been waiting for this.
Then there is my PillowScape, which is doing very well. This is designed for those times in the middle of the night when, for no apparent reason, your pillow completely covers your face and seems to be weighted down somehow. There is a big panic button on the side of my pillow which, when pressed, completely deflates it when mysterious accidents like this happen, usually to longtime married men.
But my crowning glory so far is the GPISS, or Global Positioning Indicator for Seniors System, which successfully guides old guys from their beds to the bathroom for their thrice-nightly visits in the dark. It is designed solely for men as studies have shown women somehow are able to wake from their beds and make a bee-line (also known in the industry as a pee-line) to the can and back again without as much as stubbing a toe, a remarkable feet.
The GPISS has several unique features. It wakes the old fella up at just the right times and even speaks electronically “not again”, saving the man the trouble of getting the words out. It can even be taught to add a couple of swear words to the comment.
The device also has several warning sounds it issues, indicating that the would-be bathroom visitor has, in his confusion, stumbled into the laundry (with a big tub waiting there), the rec room or even into a closet.
Mission accomplished, the stylish grey and white GPISS guides the grumpy old fart (an industry term) back from bathroom to bed and even plays soft lullabies to help him saw off again.
Get yours now for the incredible one-time price of $59.95 US, and if you order in the next fifteen minutes, the manufacturers will include free of charge my automatic nose-hair puller, HonkerKleen, which fits over the nose and is guaranteed to do the job painlessly.
Watch this space for more exciting products as I develop them.
You’re welcome.
(P.S. Thomas Edison lived in my hometown in Canada for a while when he was a young man. He had an apartment above what is now a coffee shop called Edison’s on the main street downtown.)
I am a moody guy sometimes and my mood often coincides with the number of pizza slices left in the box on pizza night at our place. If they disappear too quickly before I can get my share, my mood is inclined to decline.
That is why today I was in an upbeat state of mind when I found out that my son and my daughter would not be home for supper and that my wife would be late. So, by mid-afternoon my plan was clear: I would sneak off to the pizza shop about 4:30 and return with a piping hot pie which I would enjoy all by myself. Just the very thought of this impending gorgefest made me smile – my very own pizza and pop, in front of the TV, watching shows I rarely see when the house is fully occupied.
I made sure to get the pizza early so that if someone did unexpectedly return home, all of it would be long gone. I have no conscience when it comes to pizza.
I drove to the restaurant and waited in the van while the pizza guy cooked me up a delicious meal. I drove home happily, the smell of the cheese and pepperoni filling my vehicle and my heart with joy. I walked into the house and set the box on the kitchen counter, joking cheerily with the dog and salivating at the great taste about to infiltrate my mouth.
Then I saw him. My son, sitting on the couch, surfing the net on his laptop. “Oh, you’re home,” I said, trying to disguise my chagrin. “You’re in luck. I brought home a pizza. Help yourself.” As I said that, I was calculating how much of the pie I would now get. It was, after all, just a medium.
Two minutes later, the phone rang. On the line was my daughter who said she was coming home and bringing a friend. “Have you had supper?” I asked. “No,” was the reply. “Well, there’s a pizza here.” Now, three young people would be attacking my pizza and I knew from experience, that could mean only one thing – not one morsel would be left for me. I had gone, in a few minutes, from a happy guy anticipating his own pizza and pop in front of the TV in a house all by myself to a silently starving, defeated man sizing up the remaining supper choice which involved bread and peanut butter and milk.
I know I will smile again someday, but as of now, my heart is broken. Sliced in eight pieces, you might say.
(Update: Had a do-over the next night. Kids away, Barb left to pick up one of them. I was left alone with a large pizza. Five big slices and a pop later, happiness overtook me and I smiled for what seemed like the first time in days. What a turnabout. Last night the pizza appeared and so did everyone else and tonight, everyone fled just after it arrived. Sweet!)
Sometimes I feel like I am living in a woolen mill. Or a knitting mill, if there is such a thing. Manufacturing of clothing seems to go on in my home from early morning till late night. The family motto is, “If I’m sitting, I’m knitting.”
I have never knit anything but my eyebrows, on occasion, when I witness all the feverish apparel making going on around me. It started, of course, with my wife and before she could even hold a knife and fork, my daughter.
I do contribute to the enterprise in one important way, however. When I leave the house, many of the garments that protect me from frostbite and public nudity charges rolled off the line at the factory I live in. Some days, I look like a very colourful sheep as I stroll down the street in my finery.
I make no comment on how stylishly dressed I am on any given day but I will attest to the fact that I am usually very warm. Every year I get invitations to speak at the Sheep Marketing Board conventions as well as meetings of the Wool Producers of America. I always decline the offers.
But to be honest. I feel baaaaaad about it. A bit sheepish, in fact. But if your drawers were as full of as many toques and mittens as mine are, you might also grow weary from being a model of fine citizensheep.
Not to mention the sheer envy being outfitted in yarn from head to foot can bring out in my jealous friends and acquaintances.
I recently wrote a piece about the Soup Situation in our home. Asked to go to the store to buy more soup, I did an inventory of our supply instead and discovered our shelves were bending in the middle under the weight of the 41 cans we already had. However, with the two of us eating soup as fast as we can, the stash has fallen sharply to a dangerous level of only 30 cans in the past 16 days and with one of us suffering through a bad cold and consuming chicken noodle almost faster than the chickens and the noodles can produce it, it became necessary today for me to once again head out and stand in the soup line.
One thing to know about buying soup is every store has its approach to soup pricing and so in-depth research is required before purchases can be made. The first thing that must be done is to fill up the car with $49.52 cents worth of gas to ensure you do not run empty before the investigations are complete.
Being soup frugal, we often wait till Groceries Galore puts it on sale for 57 cents a can but these bargains are as rare as alligators in Alaska. Nevertheless, that was my first stop today. The soup was on sale for $1.19 a can which seemed almost reasonable for the emergency chicken noodle for which I was in the hunt. However, though the store covers the equivalent of about four city blocks and it would not be unreasonable to call a taxi to get from one end of it to the other, there was not even one can of chicken noodle to be found anywhere, as I guess half of my fellow citizens are currently down with a cold.
So, it was off to Fantastic Foods only to find that the price there is $1.29. That store did have lots in stock but the price was exorbitant by any standards so I left. Back in the car, I hiked off to Wealthy World where, shock of shocks, the extortionists there are trying to pawn off their supply for $1.99 a can. The people I saw there in three-piece suits and formal gowns seemed happy to pay that fee but I would die face down in a ditch with a cold before I’d even consider it.
So, with hope dwindling and thoughts of driving to the four other grocery stores on the other side of town beginning to dominate my brain waves, I suddenly remembered I was within range of one of the three Pennyrama stores in our town, so I drove there. And I came away with four fine cans of chicken noodle for $1 a can. I checked the best before date on each can to make sure I wasn’t five years younger when each container was filled and was thrilled to see that the contents will last till sometime in 2021, long after, I presume, the common cold will no longer be an issue in our house. And given our newly replenished soup supply, neither will famine.
So, we’re back in business and as of this writing, we have:
19 cans of tomato;
6 cans of cream of mushroom;
4 cans of chicken noodle;
2 cans of cream of chicken;
1 can of vegetable;
1 can of pea.
And lest you think you know of better ways to spend an hour on a cool day in the middle of February, let me set you straight. I cannot think of even one thing I would rather do, on any day in any month, than shop for soup. Like a Neanderthal tracking an ancient wildebeest, I was in my glory wrestling all those chickens and those noodles to the ground.
I’ve gotten good at it. I would gladly enter a televised Soup Challenge if any Food Network had the good sense to air one.
