By Jim Hagarty
2011
You try to hang onto a little bit of your former coolness as the years fly by, as hard a task as that is, and when a Grade 9 student asks if she can take your hat to school to show the other students, you feel kinda proud of yourself. You aren’t exactly like all the other dads and that makes you smile inside.
“Why do you want to take my hat?” you ask, just to hear her say she wants to impress her friends with her Dad’s cool choice of chapeau. But, alas, that isn’t it at all.
“It’s for history class,” she says. “We’re doing a segment on how people dressed in the forties and fifties and your hat is exactly the kind that paper boys from back then wore.”
Your mid-life crisis is long behind you so this only hurts a little. But when history students are examining your wardrobe like archaeologists sifting through Tut’s tomb, it might be time for an extreme makeover.
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Author: Jim Hagarty
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.
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