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Barn painting

By Jim Hagarty

I am a singer.

During the first 20 years of my life, I performed hundreds of free concerts. They were well attended. I worked my magic on a unique, slow-moving stage, sitting atop the leather seat of a John Deere AR tractor. The concert halls were the 335 acres of plowable fields on my family’s farms. My inattentive audiences were the birds, mice, snakes, foxes, squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, dogs, cats and cattle that occupied the fields where I practised my craft.

No humans ever heard my dulcet tones. And that is just the way I wanted it. I learned how to project my voice so I could hear myself over the noise from the tractor. I always knew I could not be heard by anyone in the vicinity of those fields. The tractor sounds were too loud. That was fine with me, as I tended to the shy side.

One afternoon, towards the end of my John Deere days, I was standing in our farmyard when I heard something going by on the concession road at the end of our lane. It was a farmer singing at the top of his lungs as he rode past our place on a tractor. I couldn’t hear the tractor. I realized the tractor noise must have been travelling through the air on a lower and slower sound wave than was the farmer’s voice. His voice reached my ears loud and clear; the tractor putt putt, not so much.

It was an awakening. I realized that at least some of my back forty concerts were probably heard by humans somewhere who happened to be in the vicinity. If I had known I actually did have non-critter audiences, I might have charged admission to my shows and be a rich man today.

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.