By Jim Hagarty
1986
It’s Thursday night. I’m sitting in my living room at a little computer, listening to elevator music on the stereo and writing this column. One of my cats has parked it on the hot-air register. The other’s crouching two feet away from the first one, waiting his turn to catch some warm air. I’ve got 47 hot-air registers in the house and both cats want to sit on only one of them. At the same time.
I’ve been looking around at snowblowers, thinking I might buy one. I saw a neat one yesterday. It has a cruising speed of 400 kilometres an hour, a wing span of 50 feet and an on-board computer. It doesn’t blow the snow – it launches it back into the orbit it fell out of.
Great big, oversized, flouncy sweatshirts are the rage. Tuesday night I spent $33.12 and bought one. A bright white one. I put it on the next morning to wear to work and took a horrified glance in the mirror. I looked like I should be hustling down the hall of a hospital, a bedpan in my hand, heading for the patient in Room 402. So, I took the shirt back. Exchanged it for a yellow one. It makes me look like a giant Easter egg.
I made a cash withdrawal from my bank’s automatic teller on Saturday. On the computer printout that came out of the machine at the end of the transaction, the words “not available” were printed where the account balance should have been. What does that mean? Was somebody at that very moment sitting around counting my money? If my bank doesn’t know how much money stands between me and destitution, how’m I supposed to know?
To the young girl who keeps phoning me at supper time asking to speak to Marsha: No one lives here by that name. Sorry. If I run into Marsha, I’ll have her call you.
Power of suggestion: I wrote out a cheque to a hardware store called Forest Hardware and got talking to the owner of the store as I wrote. I handed him the cheque. He handed it back. I had signed it, James Hardware.
Gordon Lightfoot isn’t going to record any more albums. I may as well sell my stereo. My brother brought home his first album 23 years ago, gave it to me and said, “You need to listen to this guy.” I did need to listen to him. I’ve been hooked on his music ever since. He’s the best poet that ever wandered into a recording studio.
I was driving east on the main street of my city, coming up to a red light. I stopped. A woman I didn’t recognize started walking toward my car, smiling broadly and looking for all the world as if she was going to get in the car with me. I unlocked the passenger door – good things like this don’t happen every day. The woman opened the door and still smiling happily, chirped, “Hello.” She then turned a sickly white as she realized she had no idea who I was. Three seconds after she said “Hello,” she said, “Goodbye,” closed the door and walked briskly away. If she’s searching for a long-lost friend, she ought to put an ad in the paper. It would save her the trouble of looking in every car in town.
Speaking of mistaken identity, a letter came to the newsroom here for me recently, addressed to Linda Hagarty. I put it in a file with the one I got the week before, sent to Tom Hagarty. Best of all was the one I got from a woman I’ve never heard of demanding I pay her back the money I owe her. It wasn’t bad enough I broke her heart, she wrote, but I didn’t have to take her money too.
But it’s all okay because according to this other letter I just got, I’m about to win the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes.
