Category: Uncategorized

By Jim Hagarty

I worked at a small daily newspaper 30 years ago.

The composing room, where the paper was prepared for printing, where all the ads were assembled and stories and photos laid out on broadsheets before being photographed and sent to the press, was populated by older and younger workers.

The older workers spent much of their time regaling the young journalists such as I was at the time, about how things used to be done years ago. The years of “hot type”, where metal letters were physically placed in special trays to form every word that appeared. It is a cautionary tale for people who think talk of the old ways in fascinating. It wasn’t.

But we tried to respect our elders. They were nice hardworking people, deserving of our respect. I liked them.

The owners of the paper were middle aged and in a constant battle to keep up with the times. I admire them to this day for their willingness to embrace change.

One momentous day, computers were introduced to the composing room. Henceforth, though there would be a long period of adjustment, all the ads would be created by the computers and the people who operated them.

Needed were volunteers who would be willing to be trained in the new methods. A few people stepped forward eagerly. Five gray hairs could not have been assembled from the heads of those who applied.

For their part, the old guys laughed defiantly and declared they would not be caught dead on one of those computers. One semi old guy did embrace the new way, but wasn’t great at it. Another tried it and quit in frustration, going back to the banks of broadsheets and what he knew best.

One by one, the old guys were gone, in fairly short order. They gathered in the coffee shops and bemoaned the indignity and injustice.

Thirty years later, many of the volunteers who stepped up that day are still there. One young woman I know eventually left and is now a teaching assistant in a high school.

Helping kids learn computers.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a mean mosquito.
He was somewhat of a hit though.
He stung young and old,
Had no heart, he was cold.
He even bit into my kid’s toe.

By Jim Hagarty

I ate my lunch in the food court of a lovely little shopping mall in a nearby city recently.

It is one of the city’s oldest malls which is fitting, in a way, because it appears as though there is a dress code for the place: You have to have white hair to be allowed entry.

Meeting the code, I fit right in, which was a problem for me. I looked around at everyone who looks pretty much like me now and thought, “Oh no, these are my people.”

I took out my cellphone and looked at the crowd of 50 or 60 people and thought, “I bet if you held everybody upside down and shook them, only three cellphones would fall out of the pockets of everyone here.” And even I am behind; mine is not a smartphone. (I have since upgraded.)

I also doubted there were very many computer-users in the group, but I bet their homes are filled with radios, radios, radios and lots of tube TVs. Not very many CD or DVD players and not one BluRay (I don’t have one yet myself). And I bet a daily newspaper gets dropped on the doorstep of most of the people there.

There were several tables of men only, swapping tales amidst uproarious laughter. At a couple of tables, women sat by themselves drinking a coffee and reading a novel. A younger man arrived at the table next to me but even he had almost-white hair. I suspect he dyed it just to fit in. He spread out a feast before him and also picked up a novel. At only one table did I see what you might call young people – two mothers with their infants in strollers.

Finishing my pizza, I took a stroll past the stores and could see that they reflected the crowd. There was a big drug store at one end and an optometrist half way down the stretch. Another big store offered home health products such as special walkers and foot baths and massagers. And as though to put an exclamation point on my no-cellphones observation, there was a bank of payphones in the front entrance, the better to call a cabbie with.

I never thought about a mall having a personality before but this winter I wrote about skating at an indoor rink in a shopping mall in Cambridge and realizing that I was the oldest person on the ice. That realization gave me kind of a sinking feeling.

Today, I was one of the younger ones in the food court of the mall. Same sort of feeling, coming from a different direction.

Guess I’m going to give up malls as they appear to be contributing to the aging process.

This one had great pizza, though.

By Jim Hagarty

So many things are disposable these days.

Lighters, diapers, cups, plates, knives and forks, napkins, even clothes.

And backyard water wands.

As we do most winters, we worked hard to prepare our backyard this year for a skating rink. The big moment arrived, the snow was packed down and ready, our old brown wand was hooked to the hose and sploosh. It had sprung a terrible leak.

Off to the store for a new one. A really nice blue one. A quality wand befitting the amazing rink about to come to life.

$19.95 plus tax.

A small price to pay for endless skating to come, all within sight of the kitchen window.

Unfortunately, the wand was left out in the cold a little too long shortly after being pressed into service and it too sprang a terrible leak.

Back to the store.

$19.95 plus tax for the same wand. Same blue colour. Small price to pay, yadda, yadda.

Winter came and went. It blessed us with two skating rinks (the first one melted away in January.) The skating was not endless. It ended. But we had a few hours …

Two weeks ago, I saw the first of the wonder wands we had bought for $19.95, sitting forlorn in the garage. I picked it up, said a sad farewell, and put it in the garbage. The garbage truck came and took it away.

Last week, I went looking for its replacement, the good wand.

But as I write, the Hagarty home is wandless. Apparently, in the confusion brought about by the hours spent freezing my ass off building the rink this winter, I had already thrown out the first bad wand.

And having forgotten about that, I threw out the good one too.

My blog is called Lifetime Sentences, “Tales from a Wandering Mind.”

It is no coincidence the word “wand” is contained within the word “wandering.”

Next winter, I will wander off to the store again.

This time, I will buy the purple wand.

The blue ones suck. They really do.

Tonight, my wife dug out the very first wand, the brown one. I felt bad watching her trying to water the flowers. Water flew out of that thing from every part imaginable except the nozzle. If the flowers got wet, it was just a drive-by.

Guess what I wand for Christmas?

By Jim Hagarty

When we walk out into the sunshine each day, we can be positive and greet our neighbours with a smile.

Or, we can do this.

I bought the house you see at the top of this post 30 years ago. It was a bit of a shambles when I bought it which helped in the price department. But three decades of love, sweat and bank loans and the place seems to be out of reach, for the moment, of the building inspectors in my town who go around and actually condemn houses, deeming them unfit for habitation. Ours is still fit for habitation although some days, we might just slip under the wire.

But back in 1986, a few weeks after I bought my new palace, a neighbour who had lived on the street since back when milk was still delivered by a horse and wagon, sidled over to give me the home inspection I had failed to formally acquire before I made my purchase.

“I watched this house being built,” he said to me. “They built it in a hell of a hurry.”

“Oh,” I replied, waiting for the hammer to fall.

It wasn’t long in falling.

“It’s a terrible house,” said neighbour.

This is what I replied (in my dreams that night):

“Well, at least it isn’t a terrible neighbour.”

But I didn’t really say that, of course.

I just went and got out my paint brush.

Maybe it’s a pig, I don’t know. But it has nice lipstick.

And terrible or not, I love it.

---

(Full disclosure: I miss the days when you could just tell half the story and leave some out. Too much honesty going on these days. My neighbour turned out to be pretty nice guy and we had great chats over the years before he died. He did, however, become one of the “sidewalk superintendents” who came around during my extreme renovations and gave me the helpful news that I was doing everything wrong. That didn’t bother me much because they only “thought” I was doing everything wrong. I had the advantage of knowing for sure I was actually doing everything wrong. Because my neighbour was able to describe in some detail how he felt the housebuilders had rushed the construction, I was able to make a better job of the makeover. The foundation was the weakest part, he said. He was right. It cost me thousands to repair. In the end, I have a better house because of his bluntness.)

By Jim Hagarty

I asked my friend, “What should I do?”
I asked because he always knew.
He looked at me and only smiled
And didn’t answer for a while.
But then he gave me this advice
The same he’d given once or twice:
“You often ask me this, my friend
“So I will say these words again:
“Choices many, choices few
“Do the thing you need to do.
“Not the great and not the small
“What’s in front of you, that’s all.”

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I have no limerick today.
My bankrupt brain said, “No way!”
I asked, “Just one more?”
But Brain closed the door.
For once I have nothing to say.

By Jim Hagarty

What I find the most intriguing about modern high technology is not the amazing innovations our best brains are able to devise, but the uses to which these marvels of scientific research are eventually put.

Take the motion sensor, for example. This is really a breathtaking creature, which, as far as I know, exists only of a little eye, capable of detecting when things are moving and when they have stopped and then passing that information along to whatever other utility might need it, such as sliding door or a light.

My cap is off today to the people who invented motion sensitivity. What a marvellous contribution this breakthrough has made to the quality of all our lives. We don’t have to open doors to public places any more, or turn lights off and on.

In effect, what scientists have done with the motion sensor is begun the arduous task of creating artificial life, starting with the eye.

Now it is up to the rest of us to decide how we’ll make use of this little genius in our day-to-day lives. And in this area, clearly, we’re just getting started.

No doubt the motion-sensitivity inventors had some grand ideas in mind when they were working late into the night in their labs and eventually experiencing the joy of seeing their experiments begin to bear fruit. Maybe they thought the ability to artificially sense motion might help to fight crime or to prevent accidents and natural disasters or to save the environment.

I wonder what they would have thought if they’d only known that the ones who would make the best use of the product of their fertile minds would be the designers of the modern public washroom.

I discovered this truth a few years ago when I entered, all agog, the space-age-like men’s washroom at the remarkable new “food” store in my hometown. Of course, the taps in the sinks shoot out a little sprig of water when they sense your hands rubbing each other below them. And the dryer on the wall blows out some heat when it detects your approach. I’m used to these motion-sensor-triggered things.

But approaching that big white fixture on the wall that most men can’t wait to get close to after their morning coffee, I was surprised to discover that motion sensitivity had come now to even such a classic convenience as this. Completing the task at hand, I saw what I thought was a little round, wine-coloured button on the front of the porcelain potty. I pushed it, thinking it might activate the traditional cleansing cycle but it did nothing. Then I saw a sign above it informing me that this system started itself automatically. So, I rearranged myself and walked away. Within seconds of my doing that, I heard a rush of water as it vigourously removed all traces of my recent presence and I instantly knew, how the wall fixture knew, that I was done.

That little red button was not a button at all, but an eye. An eye that spends its entire day fixed on one thing and trained to trigger a torrent of water whenever that thing moves out of its range.

I have to admit, it’s a little unnerving to think that I can expect an eye – mechanical though it may be – will now be watching all my activities and other movements when I get up the courage to visit the modern public washroom. A bashful farm boy doesn’t easily get used to the idea of subjecting himself to such scrutiny.

And yet, who am I to quibble with science? I just wonder how it is that among the most ardent users of the motion sensor are people who worry about the flushing habits of the male half of the world’s population.

And I wonder if, for all its apparent proficiency, this device is really doing its job as well as it appears to be.

After my experience in the washroom, I returned somewhat stunned to my café table to tell a friend about it. He immediately retraced my steps to experience the marvel of modern science for himself, only to return, dejectedly, to tell me it hadn’t worked for him. Perhaps, I offered helpfully, the motion sensor is still more primitive than it looks and is not able to detect the movements of objects of insignificant size. Or something to that effect.

You know, in light of those remarks, it occurs to me that one useful application of the motion sensor might be to harness it somehow to detect when a person is about to say something he shouldn’t and to prevent his mouth from opening to say it.

And while I may not be any kind of technological breakthrough, I’m pretty good at detecting a bit of motion too. I sensed right away, for example, when my friend suddenly left our table and bolted for the door. Which sensed his approach, of course, and opened automatically.

I honestly wonder what the next few uses for motion sensitivity will be. Will my new TV be able to notice, late at night, when my eyes have snapped shut and my head has fallen to my chest and automatically shut itself off? Will car windows of the future automatically wind themselves up when they sense the motion of falling rain? Will my garbage cans automatically roll themselves to the street when they sense the approach of the waste-removal truck?

It is not just humans who are adapting to motion sensoring. I knew of a couple who would let their cat out at night. When it wanted back in, it would leap four feet in the air to trigger the motion-sensor light, alerting its owners to its wish to be let back in.

When even cats see the benefits in a thing, we are probably on the right track.

By Jim Hagarty
Here is another cut from the CD Bad Daughter by the McCullough Girls, Deborah and Callie. The album was recorded in Nashville and is a real treasure. All 12 songs were written by the mother-daughter due. It is not yet available in the Corner Store. I love the sentiment, the musicianship and the harmonies.

Sing Me a Lullaby by the McCullough Girls.

By Jim Hagarty

How long can a full tank of barbecue propane last?

This is a question I have wanted the answer to for years.

Finally, I found a way to solve the puzzle.

I brought home a full tank last weekend and we had our first barbecue of the season. It was great. I went outside after supper and fired up all three burners full blast to burn off the grease from the grills.

Next morning I walked over in the vicinity of the barbecue and remarked to myself that it seemed unusually warm in that corner of our yard. We have a nice big lot but generally the climate remains fairly constant from one side to the other.

Strange.

It was then I noticed that the barbecue was still busy barbecuing grease.

I am pleased to report that a full tank of propane will last at least 14 hours.

Somebody should pay me for my research.

So I can get the tank refilled.