Paying for the Past

By Jim Hagarty
1986

I used to think there were no such things as antiques. The world was made up of only two kinds of household items – old furniture, bottles, machinery and paintings and – new ones.

I could never understand what it was people found intriguing enough about an old washstand or dresser to make them want to invest hours of backbreaking labour and lots of money in the refinishing of them. Why not just go out and buy yourself something new and shiny and unmarked?

Antique lovers, I thought, had too much money and not enough things to spend it on. Or they were wasting their time wandering around in a past that wasn’t really as good as they remembered it.

A few years ago, I bought a chrome-and-arborite table with an imitation barnboard top and vinyl swivel chairs to match. The whole affair was the most beautiful furniture I’d ever seen. How the manufacturers managed to sell it at so low a price was beyond me. And why everyone else wasn’t buying up the identical ensemble had me stumped.

About the same time, I gave away, free of charge, a white-paint-coated washstand to a furniture refinisher who expressed an interest in it. It was given to me, I reasoned and I wasn’t going to use it. Go ahead. Take it.

A short time later, I barely recognized the same piece of furniture in the refinisher’s showroom but by then, it looked remarkably good and bore a price tag of $225. I was vaguely aware that I had let some sort of treasure slip through my fingers.

Today, my chrome table’s gone and in its place sits an old elm harvest table, complete with scratches on the top and uneven finish on the legs. Around the table sit five old pressed-back kitchen chairs that wobble a lot and need repairing. The seat on one of them is split in two and the spindles on another don’t match but I wouldn’t trade the whole lot for a factory-full of chrome.

There must come a time in most people’s lives when the nostalgia bug bites them and I think it has some correlation with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines and rounding the halfway mark to the three-score-and-ten line. You don’t see very many teenagers in antique shops and flea markets. They’re in the record stores and burger places.

I’ve always been sentimental but never was much attracted to old things until recently. Now I spend a lot of time browsing in flea markets and antique shops, in search of bargains. I look more often than I buy but if something really grabs me, and the price is not outrageous, I take it home.

It’s funny how tastes change. When I was a kid, our house on the farm had many old pieces of furniture ranging from washstands and dressers, beds and night tables to kitchen table and chairs. In their original state, they would all have been stained and varnished and had wooden or porcelain turns on their doors and drawers. By the time I was old enough to take notice of them, they had all been coated with several layers of white paint and their original turns had been replaced by glass knobs. I can’t remember ever thinking that any of that furniture was very appealing or valuable.

Now, in shops and markets, I look at the price tags on furniture that’s almost identical and just shake my head.

A few weeks ago, a local antique dealer showed me through the room where all of his refinishing is done. As soon as I entered the shop, I spied a black and red, General Electric, table clock-radio hooked to the wall. I asked the man if he’d turn it on and he did. The radio took half a minute or so to warm up before any sound came out of it. When it did, the music was accompanied by a humming sound – the identical buzz that emanated from the same radio that sat on my bedside table at home for years. Disc jockeys from WBZ in Boston and WLS in Chicago plus a New York station for which I can’t remember the call letters (was it WCFL or WKYC?) used to spin their records late into every night over that little radio while I lay there waiting for sleep. I have no idea where the radio went and had forgotten about it completely until I saw its twin in the antique dealer’s shop.

In a turbulent world where, it seems, little stays the same from one day to the next, it’s comforting to know that that 50-year-old radio in the dealer’s shop is still spittin’ and cracklin’ its music and news out over the air.

It wasn’t for sale. Stuff like that never is.

The Licker Inspectors

By Jim Hagarty
2015
My daughter says I keep repeating bad jokes in the hope that somebody somewhere will find them funny. To prove her right, I am repeating that our dog Toby can’t hold his licker. Clever, right? I thought so. Please laugh so I don’t have to repeat that several more times. To encourage you to choose the only possible response, I am offering a bonus assessment. I am going to build Toby a doghouse and call it the licker cabinet. It’s falling down laughing you are, right? I thought so. If that hasn’t done it yet, there’s always this: My wife and daughter are disgusted when Toby licks my face, head and the insides of my ears. They command him to stop when they catch him at this activity. They are therefore known, as well they should be, as our licker inspectors. Go ahead, throw back your head and let ‘er rip. You and I and Toby all know you want to.

Give Me a Break

By Jim Hagarty
2016
I quit drinking coffee for almost 15 years. I went back to it two years ago when the Vatican turned down my application for sainthood. I didn’t have proof of enough miracles (and I wasn’t dead). They didn’t think my photos of me turning water into long and wide skating rinks in my backyard qualified me. What I didn’t realize when I quit coffee was I had also quit taking coffee breaks. That was a mistake. Workplaces should not only always allow coffee breaks, but should also encourage them. There is a direct link between them and sanity.

A Clutter Buster Gets Busted

By Jim Hagarty
2005

Clutter and I have been involved in hand-to-hand combat for the past few months and for a while, I thought I was winning. But trip after trip of carrying things out of the house to throw away, recycle or donate, didn’t seem to be making the mountain of material objects any less arduous to climb. I was truly puzzled by this phenomenon; surely if you take things away from a pile, the pile must begin to shrink. Alas, no shrinkage occurred. In fact, the exact opposite seemed to be true: the clutter was gaining on me at an alarming rate.

Then, a morning of meditation finally brought the truth to me. At the same time as I was obsessively lugging old stuff out the back door, the other three members of the household were busy hauling new stuff in the front. With the odds stacked against me like this, I fear I’ll be found dead some day beneath a heap of winter clothes, a bunch of boxes, foam and plastic bags from new purchases and a plethora of manufactured goods of dubious use. The needability of many of these items is borderline or below.

Still, I carry on, pun intended, my arms full of belongings that were once held in great esteem but which have now been tripped over (literally) far too many times.

Every night I search the Internet for quality clutter-busting tips and have discovered a whole world out there of people who have suffered as I have from the weight of too many possessions. And of the thousands of words of advice I’ve read, comes this basic, number one rule:

Do you use this thing? If not, why do you possess it?

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Thanks Internet guru.

The push was on to simplify.

Another useful suggestion was to not try too hard to get a fair buck for everything. Just get rid of it, the sooner the better.

It is amazing what wonders one little stake on your lawn bearing a hand-scrawled sign labelled “FREE” can achieve toward the goal of declutterization. There is almost nothing, it seems, that won’t become instantly irresistible at the amazing, once-only, bargain-basement price of zilch. Nuts, bolts, wire, curtains, windows, picture frames, you name it.

By mistake, I put in the give away box a pair of old eyeglasses that I intended to donate to my optometrist to take on her next mission to Guatemala. She won’t be taking them, however; amazingly to me, someone fished them out of the box and took them home. Here’s what puzzles me. The glasses were bifocals. To be of any use to you, your vision needs would have to match not only the regular prescription but the bi-focal one too.

I don’t care. They’re gone. Just 2,346 items left to go. But with my family hauling material things in the front door at such a rapid rate, I fear I will forever be the frustrated man who is shovelling his driveway during a snowstorm and wondering why he isn’t getting ahead.

The Silent Stalker

By Jim Hagarty
2013

You leer in their general direction with a come hither look, but they avoid eye contact. They know what you want. They know exactly what you want. So they pretend not to see you. They’ve been down this road before and have regretted the times they gave in.

Another one walks by. Looks straight ahead. You move closer, thinking you can’t be avoided but you’re wrong. You begin to question yourself.

“What is wrong with me?” you wonder. “Do I pose just too big a challenge? Has my reputation spread?”

Occasionally one goes by who glances your way, but this time, you look down, pretending not to see them. Those ones charge money for services rendered and it hasn’t come to that yet. In desperation only would you turn to one of them. But, you are almost at that point. You’ll soon have to do something.

Before all the neighbours put their snowblowers away for the day and you are forced to shovel out your driveway!

Having Finally Seen the Light

By Jim Hagarty
2001

I have long known that I am somewhat different from your average human being and nothing illustrates that terminal uniqueness more than my opposition to motion-sensor lights. You know, those little seeing-eye devices that peer down from the upper corners of large rooms and sensing no motion, turn off the lights to save electricity. Who else but the cranky old storyteller hereby addressing you would be bothered to spend enough time thinking about this modern-day invention to become upset about it? But I am. Darned mad, in fact.

My disenchantment with this modern wonder stems not from the fact that it doesn’t work, but that it works too well. It can crack the lights off in a instant and whack ’em back on even quicker. Where it runs into a little trouble, however, is in the way it defines motion. Maybe it’s a matter of how its individual users program it for the specific room it’s in, but some of these gizmos seem as if they would hardly respond if a tornado ripped the ceiling off while others would spring into action if a fly hiding under a desk scratched its nose.

So, this is the basis of my disapproval. The thing is simply unreliable and as a man gets older, unreliability and unpredictability are twin evils to be deplored.

Perhaps my disenchantment has its origins in the time I was teaching a summer college course at 8:30 a.m. one fine Monday morning. Though the ranks in the rows before me were somewhat depleted, given the time of day, the season and the subject, there were, even at that, almost twenty hardy souls gathered there to hear the words of wisdom that dribbled from my mouth in those days like spring waters over the rocks in a stream.

So, when my truly dedicated crew had taken their seats, I started dribbling. And as the gentle rhythms of the babbling brook can have a certain soothing effect on those who listen to its cadence for a while, so too can a college instructor’s gentle voice calm the human spirit, especially the spirits of humans who have spent the weekend just past in wild celebration the likes of which have not been seen since the end of our most recent world war.

In what seemed like an alarmingly brief period, all normal student activity – note passing, arm stretching, paper rustling, cartoon doodling – had ground to a halt. And there, before this sea of tranquility, stood a weary teacher who was finding it difficult on this day to become animated by a section of course material on which he had lectured dozens of times before. Like a recording star grown tired of singing his same old hits, the teacher was suddenly weary of hearing himself yak on.

So, how best to describe the degree of inactivity in this classroom setting on this day? Perhaps the motion sensor said it best. In a room where twenty-one human beings were engaged in the stimulating process of acquiring and delivering a college education, the lights went out. So little movement was being generated by the gathering, not even by a lecturer in mid-flight, to interest a little black box up in a corner of the room. So, it pulled the plug, the modern-day equivalent, in this case, perhaps, of giving the hook to the Vaudevillian actor dying on stage.

To re-activate the scene, I had no choice but to get something going, so I waved my arms frantically in the air till illumination returned. As distressing as the embarrassment of suffering through a negative review by a motion sensor was the fact that at least half the students hadn’t seemed to notice that their classroom had suddenly plunged into darkness. And many of them appeared, as a result, to have only slipped into a deeper level of sleep during the light-less interlude. A change in their rapid-eye movement dream-cycle resulted, perhaps, from the onset of darkness.

For the remainder of that session and the semester, I dashed about during lectures in that classroom like a hands-on preacher in a gospel tent, my students seemingly startled at the surge of energy with which I was from then on approaching my lessons. They didn’t seem to grasp the fact that a little high-tech hardware had delivered a lesson of its own that dark day in July. And that whatever might have been my previous level of disinterest in my teaching duties, thanks to science I had finally seen the light.

Quality Control

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Note to all serious junk collectors: Here is a sign you have the sickness bad.

You are parked at the far end of the second-hand store parking lot enjoying a coffee in your car. Your eye catches, in the distance, the store’s big green garbage bin. The lid is open. The bin is full. And sticking out atop that pile of refuse are four perfectly good plastic lawnchairs.

“What the hell?” you exclaim to no one.

Briefly, you consider driving over to the bin and loading those tan lovelies in your car. These are chairs someone didn’t want so they gave them to the second-hand store. And the second-hand store didn’t want them! But you want them.

Somewhere there is a hotline, or ought to be one. Sadly, you leave, remorsing over what might have been. Your quality of life will have to remain in the moderate position for another day. But take heart. There is always the local dump. You are still fond of the perfectly good bookshelf you retrieved from a bin there one day, right from under the massive sign: Absolutely No Scavenging Allowed. You assumed, maybe incorrectly, that what was meant was it was illegal to steal that sign. You even thought at the time, “I could use a sign like that.”