Author: Jim Hagarty

I met Tom about 30 years ago. For the rest of this column, I will refer to him as Tom (because that is his name.) I think at that first meeting, we were sitting in a coffee shop near my place, and he looked over with a big smile and said “Hi.” As it turns out, that is the one and only thing he has ever said to me that I have completely understood.

On that first evening, he talked and I listened and nodded. Every “conversation” we have had since that time, and we’ve had about a dozen of them, went the same way. Tom talked and I nodded. Because he seems to be a genius and I seem to not be a genius, it has been like a dog explaining barking to a cat. But maybe I am a good listener.

Tom knows all about two things very, very well: short wave radio and cars. I know very little about either one. For a long time, I thought a cattle littick converter was an instrument we used on the farm to turn a bull into not a bull. (That was fun.)

So, he talked radio and he talked the inner workings of cars and I felt like a Martian trying to understand a St. Patrick’s Day parade. (Or maybe only a Martian could.) I am polite, so I never interrupted him. Also, nothing he has ever said to me interested me enough to want to know more about it so I asked few questions.

But here’s the funny thing.

I didn’t mind listening to Tom. It was almost like watching a nice sunset. You don’t understand it, so you just enjoy it. Maybe I didn’t absolutely love every one of these sessions, to be honest, but there was something about his unrelenting enthusiasm for his two main interests in life that was infectious.

However, I usually walked away from every conversation wondering if, in fact, I am actually a stupid human being. I am not convinced that I am not. Why can’t I get any of this stuff after all these years?

Tom and I haven’t run into each other in almost a decade. Today, I pulled into a parking lot right beside him. I had my window down, he had his down and we faced each other. Tom started talking to me as though we had spent two hours in the coffee shop last night and were just completing a subject we had started. He seemed to think in his mind that he was picking up exactly where we left off talking in our last meeting 10 years ago. And who knows? He is so brilliant, maybe he does remember exactly where we left off. As for me, I can’t remember whether or not I showered this morning.

So, for 15 minutes, Tom told me about cars and short wave radios and I understood exactly as much as I did at our first meeting 30 years ago and at every subsequent meeting. But it’s the darndest thing. When he pulled out of the parking lot, my day seemed a little brighter. I had said four words, he had said 4,000 but I would say I came out ahead. Not any smarter, just somehow a little happier.

I just hope I can remember where we left off when we next talk-listen 10 years from now or so. I am sure that he will and that I won’t. And that it won’t matter.

It won’t take me long to get up to speed because when we are together, I am travelling about two miles an hour. I guess I am kind of like a long-wave radio, if there is such a thing. You know, the kind of station you can hardly hear late at night because it’s being crowded out by all the biggest stations.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

I had a stress test one recent Saturday. I had thought living in the city in a small house in 2014 with a wife, two teens, five gerbils, two cats, a dog, two cars and more bills than a pond full of ducks was a sort of 24/7 stress test but apparently the authorities did not think that was official enough.

So off I went in loose-fitting clothing (at 65, is there any other kind?) to find a clinic in a nearby city, an office I’d never been to. Driving up and down a busy four-lane street looking for a number on a building was the start of the stress test, I guess. When I finally found it, I rushed in the door to a lobby filled with older people, half of them with great big intravenous syringes sticking out of their forearms. Well, that’s too bad for them, I thought, but that wouldn’t be happening to me. I was just here to go running around on a treadmill.

I introduced myself at the front desk and was given a “release” to read and sign. For maybe the first time in my life, I read something I was about to affix my John Henry to and the blood rushed from my head to my toes as I took in the words on the page. “This test,” one sentence read, “occasionally results in a heart attack and very rarely, death.” Okay, I thought, this piece of paper must be a clever beginning to the stress test. A doctor, somewhere, watching me on a monitor fed by a hidden camera, was looking for my reaction to the news that I was about to sign a piece of paper which said to the authorities, “Yes, go ahead and kill me and see if I care.” If they wanted me to tense up, mission accomplished.

It was all becoming clear to me now in an instant. On the phone with a sister the day before, I was planning a family Christmas party for Sunday. “But aren’t you having a stress test on Saturday?” she asked, as though she knew I would not be at the party. That was also why my wife wanted to come with me – so she could drive the car home as she knew I wouldn’t be. And why she called on my cellphone before I went into the clinic to say, “I love you.”

OH MY GOD! THIS IS IT!

It occurred to me to set down the paper and run out of the building but I have been trained to trust the authorities in all matters and so I signed it and said my prayers. One by one the syringe people were called into another room but I don’t remember seeing them coming back out. They were probably being taken out the back door and driven away in hearses.

Finally, as in a dream, I heard my name being called. And a few minutes later, I was sitting back in the lobby with a great big syringe taped to my arm, about the size they’d use to inoculate a giraffe. An hour later (do you know how many thoughts can go through a person’s head in an hour? I don’t either because there was only one in mine: I AM GOING TO DIE!!!) I was called back into the other room which was very pleasant looking, almost like a fitness centre or a very modern mortuary. I was placed on my back in this tube-like thing to have my heart photographed so they could recognize it later after taking it out and putting it in a cooler, I thought. I was told to lie perfectly still with my arms above my head for 15 minutes and under no circumstances, was I to fall asleep. So, I fell right to sleep. I often do that when I am COMPLETELY STRESSED OUT.

Back to the lobby for another hour to mull over my impending doom along with the doctor’s scolding for my having fallen asleep. Called back in finally, I went into a small room with a very nice-looking young woman with the most intoxicating smile I’ve ever seen. The first thing she did was pull off my sweatshirt which was a struggle as she had to somehow get the sleeve over the IV in my arm without yanking it out.

“Women are always trying to get my clothes off,” I joked with her. “Well, it looks like I was successful,” she laughed as the top finally popped off.

“Believe me,” I replied, “any women who try to get my clothes off are always successful!”

She seemed to think that was a reasonable reply so to punish me she put me on a treadmill. After a few minutes of huffing and puffing I thought they may as well warm up their hearse. But the worst was yet to come. This nice young woman, obviously offended by my low-brow humour, kept speeding up the treadmill and tilting it higher and higher till I felt like one of those fancy dancers in Singing in the Rain who somehow dances right up the side of a wall.

A doctor came in and started taking my blood pressure every few minutes. In my imagination, I thought I heard a great big Cadillac – the kind funeral homes like to use – warming up in the parking lot. But eventually, just when I thought St. Peter would soon be giving me a scolding, the treadmill slowed down and stopped, the nurse smiled at me and handed me my top and she told me my fast was over and that I could go out and eat whatever I wanted to.

Like all health-conscious people who’ve just had a heart test do, I headed straight to a restaurant for a pizza and can of pop.

A week later, my doctor called to tell me the results: My heart is as good as new. When the Toronto Maple Leafs call me up, I’ll be ready.

(Also, if that nurse calls me.)

©2014 Jim Hagarty

Years ago, a farmer in southern Canada not far from where I live made a series of very bad decisions one night.

The first one was to leave a local hotel in a drunken state and start up his car for the ride home. His second foolish move was to try to outrun the police who attempted to pull him over. A high-speed chase ensued through the countryside.

The farmer drove straight (well, maybe not so straight) home, in the laneway and right up his barn bank. He jumped out of his car and following another very bad bright idea he had, he hauled open the gigantic doors at the top of the bank and drove his car into the upstairs of his barn. He then closed the doors. The perfect crime.

The police, still in hot pursuit, would never find him.

In one final dumb decision for the ages, the farmer then climbed back into his car to move it ahead but tramped too hard on the gas and crashed right through another set of doors on the other side of the barn. The car went flying out the second storey of the barn and landed in a huge pile of cow manure in the barnyard.

I am not sure of the outcome of the whole sordid episode but I do know he had landed himself in deep shit.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

I hate it when things such as this happen and there is no one around to study them.

For the past 10 years, my face has endured twice-daily (and more often) applications of copious quantities of dog slobber. I wonder if anyone has examined this sort of phenomenon with an eye to predicting when the effect on the human face is so severe with the slobber build-up that one day it just slides right off the skull.

There must be some way in which this could be tested. At the same time, I am getting no help from the skin specialist my doctor sent me to. I was told by that doctor, after thorough testing, that I was suffering from a severe case of dog slobber deficiency, the worst case she had ever seen. She recommended I continue the twice daily applications and went so far as to advise me to encourage my dog to ramp up his schedule.

Another scientific test I would like to see done is an examination of how much slobber one 13-pound dog is able to exude in a day because I am pretty sure my dog’s glands are overproducing.

Lest you think a simple face-washing with soap and water might solve the problem, I am here to declare that slobber is very much like the goo that oozes out of evergreen trees from time to time.

That stuff is some serious sticky.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

Last week, I received a lovely eight-page, handwritten letter from my oldest sister Betty who lives in another city. She always sends letters and greeting cards where every inch of blank space is filled with her news.

Betty is not a fan of computers and doesn’t use email. I don’t believe she has ever sent one, though her husband prints out ones that are sent to her and brings them to her.

She doesn’t have a smartphone and not even a regular cellphone. She uses her landline.

But she loves her flatscreen TV and sits in the evenings, remote control firmly in hand.

After I receive one of my sister’s letters, I call her and we talk for two hours. But this time, I decided to respond in kind. So, I sat down and handwrote her an 11-page letter.

It was tough slogging. My handwriting, which used to be so good I won awards at fall fairs for it, has gone downhill. And it was a real effort to form all the letters and make them legible. My left hand kept wearing out on me and I would have to set down the pen and massage it back into shape.

The problem was I was trying to write like I type on my keyboards – very quickly. I couldn’t slow down and my hand was very tense.

But, the job finally done, I stuffed my treatise into an envelope, addressed and stamped it and took it to the mailbox down the street.

I felt pretty good about myself and tried to figure out when the last time was that I handwrote someone a letter. It might have been 50 years ago when I would write home for money to keep me going in university. They were very carefully written letters, something a defence attorney might present to a jury to try to keep his client from going to jail. The better I presented my argument, the more money I might score.

Then there was the summer I wrote a love letter every day to my girlfriend at the time who took the opportunity to get away from me by going to summer camp. Those letters, looking back, were probably sappy enough to cause rock music icon Roy Orbison, who specialized in writing sad songs, to admonish me and tell me to, “Cheer up, for ‘Crying’ out loud!”

In any case, yesterday my sister called me with some news and I asked her if she’d gotten my letter yet. She hadn’t and was all excited to have been sent one.

“I will read it over and over and treasure it,” she said.

And I know she will.

Next up: Sending her photos of our family. She sends us photos in the mail all the time and we never send any back. That will soon change.

In this fast-paced society we live in, Betty’s feet are still on the ground.

And I am grateful they are.

My feet, on the other hand (can your feet be on your other hand?) are somewhere between clouds seven and nine. Fresh off this victory, one of these days I am going to walk right past our shower stall and lay me down into a piping hot, soapy puddle waiting for me in our bathtub. It might take me two days to get out of the damn thing, but it will be worth it. Back in the day, I used to smoke cigarettes and read a book in the tub. It’s a right bugger trying to do either one of those things, or both, in the shower. However, I have given a lot more shower concerts than I ever have done in the bathtub.

And it seems like forever since I fell asleep in the shower.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

My cat Mario and I have a lot in common. We are more alike than you might think a man and a cat could ever be.

To begin with, we are both old now, more days behind us than ahead of us. He is almost 18 in cat years and I am a little more than 10 in dog years.

We both have a touch of arthritis. We are incredibly picky eaters and very lucky guys to have found people to love us in spite of our quirky ways and our tendency to occasional outbursts of crankiness.

We have both lost brothers and are sometimes lost ourselves in our loneliness. We’ve given up a lot of the things of our youth. Neither one of us spends much time playing any more. That doesn’t mean we are unhappy, just that we’ve lost interest in some of the things that used to captivate us.

Mario still goes outside and enjoys doing so but he never leaves the property now and I rarely do as well. Our worlds are shrinking and I like to think that is by choice. We both love our backyard these days and when Mario sees me lounging in a lawnchair under one of our maple trees, he reaches for me to pick him up and sit him in my lap so I do.

Sometimes he sunbathes on the patio and falls asleep. I lie back in my chair and saw off in the shade.

But we do differ in some ways. He has a couple of more legs than I have and a long tail. All I can offer concerning his latter feature is a tailbone. Had I been ripping around the planet a few million years ago, who knows? I might have had a tail longer than his.

Mario isn’t much interested in human food and he doesn’t have to worry that I will eat his. He will still chase a rodent if one makes the mistake of crossing his path but his skills in that field have gone downhill. I haven’t hunted a wily groundhog since my days on the farm though I did chase one out of our yard a few years ago.

Mario sits on more laps than I ever do. He sleeps all day and wanders around at night. I napped during the day more in my twenties than I do in my seventies but like my younger self, I am still a nighthawk. As I write this, it is 4:45 a.m.

Added to these differences are our medications. He gets rabies shots once a year, I get a flu shot. We give him a little paste which helps reduce his furballs. I have no issue with furballs. I also don’t have to take any substance to ward off fleas. Flies and bees follow me around like rockstar groupies when I am outside but the fleas leave me alone.

But there is one major medication area where we are totally alike. (You knew something just had to be coming after reading all this, didn’t you.)

Mario and I both take the same laxative. It is made for humans but the vet recommended it for the cat as well. I pick it up at the pharmacy. We hide his in his soft food so he won’t detect it and refuse to consume it.

But I am braver than my cat. I pour mine in a saucer and lap it up.

Cat and man do have our issues but, all in all, we’re just a couple of totally regular guys.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

I think the Universe is sending me a message and it doesn’t seem to be a pleasant one.

Two days ago, I wrote about my frustration in living a lifetime of not being able to turn straw into gold as many people seem able to do. And to rub that fact in, a woman ahead of me in a shop lineup earlier that day bought five cents worth of garlic powder and in return, was rewarded with a slip offering her $10 off her next purchase at that store. Instantly, somehow, she turned a single nickel into 200 nickels.

If I had 200 nickels and I was wandering around the stores, I would soon be reduced to one nickel. I can’t explain it.

But what I have learned for sure is that I have to quit following the woman around whom I referred to above. Again, today, I somehow wound up standing behind her as she was paying for parking at our city’s medical centre. She owed $4 and so she inserted a five dollar bill into the machine. Immediately it spit out her change into a receptacle. She reached in to pull out what she expected would be one dollar in change and instead fished out $5 in coins. She let out the same whoop of joy hockey players yell when they score a winning goal.

This was baffling and discouraging to me and it didn’t help that she turned to share with me how pleased she was with her good fortune. Following her golden nickel strike of the day before, this was just too much to watch her celebrating shoving five dollars into a machine and getting five dollars in change in return.

Along with the many things I wish for every day, I suddenly wished I lived in a bigger town so my chances of encountering this woman, seemingly on a daily basis now, would be greatly reduced.

I guess I should be pleased that she must wear a lucky horseshoe medallion on a golden chain around her neck, but her good money management on two days in a row while ahead of me in line is just a reminder of my total lack of the same.

The last time I dealt with this same machine, I used my credit card instead of cash. I tried my best to follow all the instructions but the transaction didn’t seem to go through. So, I slipped my card in again and had better luck the second time.

Checking my credit card statement when it came in, however, I discovered that my first insertion of the card HAD WORKED. As did the second. Bottom line: I paid $8 that day for a $4 parking fee. And on this day, the woman I seem destined to stand behind in line every day now paid $0.00 for a $4 fee.

Someday, I suppose, my ship will come in and I will climb aboard. A mile out from shore, I will watch in horror as the lake begins streaming in through a big hole.

To make things better, I will hear the engine of a large yacht streaking by with a now familiar face at the controls. And that lucky woman will smile and wave as she disappears from view.

Excuse me, but I need to go lie down for a while.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

I dropped my daughter Sarah off at her friend Melicia’s house. I went back a few hours later to pick her up but in the suburbs, sometimes, houses all look the same to me. I somehow found the right one and went to the door.

“Are Sarah and Melicia here?” I asked the man who greeted me warmly at the door. He nodded and went off into the kitchen, coming back with a little girl, maybe four, whose name was Sierra. Sierra and I had a nice chat and soon a woman in her 20s named Melissa came along behind her and we all started gabbing like old friends.

Finally, there was an awkward silence so I piped up, “Are Sarah and Melicia in the basement?”

Lots of puzzled looks greeted that question. A long silence and then, as it did for the family who stayed up all night to see the sun rise, it finally dawned on us. I had the wrong house.

“I think you want two doors down,” said the man who must have wondered later why he brought a little girl to the door to meet a total stranger. I wonder if he had mistaken me for someone he was expecting. Lots of apologies, then I went outside, crawled under the sod, and slithered my way down the street.

Even so, I’m pretty sure my red face shone up through the grass like a beacon.

What are the chances that the wrong house I would go to would have two females with names so close to the girls I was looking for? Freaky!

©2011 Jim Hagarty

Here I am, night after night, staying up late counting my nickels and wondering how I will pay for the next day’s chocolate milkshake. And cookie, if funds allow.

After 73 years, I have never quite caught on to how everyone I know seems to be able to open the money spigot whenever the spirit moves them and stand back to watch the cash flow out like water over the rocks at Niagara.

Now and then, I do get a glimpse of a secret or two but even then, I can’t understand it.

This evening, for example, I was in a shop to take advantage of seniors’ discount day (for all the good that day has ever done me) when I watched a woman before me in line negotiating with the teller over the purchase of a very small quantity of garlic powder.

“That will be five cents,” said the cashier, sheepishly, as he rang up the meagre sale.

After a brief search through her purse, the woman retrieved a nickel and slid it across the counter. Of course she did, as women almost always seem to pay with cash. Maybe that’s part of the secret, I wondered.

To my astonishment, the teller handed the woman two pieces of paper – the first a receipt for her five-cent purchase and the other a sheet on which was printed a $10 discount she would receive on a future purchase of at least $30.

Where on God’s green earth could you get a $10 return on having invested a mere five ridiculous cents, I thought.

So, this is how it is done.

Based on my experience over these many years, I would be lucky to qualify for five cents off my next $10 purchase. As the woman happily left the shop, I watched to see her climb into what just had to be a limousine but was surprised to see her driving a far-from-new sedan which was no stranger to rust. Maybe that’s another clue as to how the wealthy do it. Invest one nickel to instantly earn 20o nickels and then drive away in a rustbucket.

I think I am in need of a brain massage. And a super large milkshake.

I will begin my new adventure into frugality by skipping the cookie.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

I’ve played guitar for 45 years but I have never owned a guitar amplifier. That changed a few days ago so today I went out into the garage and plugged it in. I experimented with it, turning all the buttons every which way and checking out the neat sounds it can make.

After a while, I became curious about how loud it would go. So, I cranked it up. All the way. I strummed my guitar strings a few times, didn’t care for the distortion, and shut everything off to take the dog for a walk.

I got three houses away from home and my neighbour came out of his house. “My power just went off,” he said. Another neighbour came out his front door, directly across the street. “Have you got any power over there?” the first neighbour asked him. “Nope,” was the reply.

Then a woman emerged from the house next door. She too had no power. “Have you got any power?” the first neighbour asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I was just playing my guitar in the garage there and my amp was plugged in.”

Oh, oh.

The report arrived later that almost the whole city had been down for a while.

Oh well. I am hell bent on becoming a rock star and my neighbours are powerless to stop me.

©2014 Jim Hagarty