The Hunger Games

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Nobody home tonight, except for me and the dog and cats.

Come dinner time, I was getting hungry. So I went to the store, ended up in the frozen food section. And there it was before me in all its gleaming gloriousness: A Hungry Man Dinner. I fit the demographic: I was hungry, a man and it was dinner time.

A friend saw me at the checkout.

“You can’t even eat that,” he said. “It’s not like food at all.”

I took it home anyway. Hungry. Man. Dinner.

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled the feast from the oven and ate it from its plastic container.

OMG, it was the best meal I have had in 40 years. Where the heck has this been all my life? It’s all I want to eat, every day, for the rest of my days.

“Not like food at all.”

Pshaw!

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.