Category: Uncategorized

By Jim Hagarty
2018

I envy people who are not funny or, at the very least, are pretty sure they aren’t. Life is easier for them. For those who are funny, or think they are, the entire world outside is one big stage from which to deliver their lines and every outing is cause for a performance.

So those who are funny, or who have been told they are (a fellow university student 45 years ago said the only career that would make any sense for you would be as a stand-up comedian) must take their show on the road every single time they leave home.

The audience members are plenty and varied but the best ones to entertain are the captive people who have no escape. I refer, of course, to cash register jockeys in stores. They can’t tell you to shut up and so, as they finger through the till trying to find some nickels and dimes, they have to listen to you.

Seeing the store is not busy, you try this old clanger out on a nice young man who did nothing to deserve it. And to simplify things, you leave out names and make up characters.

“My grandfather died,” you announce, and the young man’s face falls. “And at the funeral, my grandmother was asked if grandpa had any last words. Grandma says yes, his final words were, ‘Mary, put down that gun.'”

Now the poor young man is filled with emotions, sorry your grandpa died and horrified that your grandma killed him. Another customer approaches the till and you have no time to deconstruct the story, so you flee.

At another store, a short time later, another checkout line on a very snowy day, you say to the young woman behind the counter, “So, are you coming over to shovel out my driveway?” This, in your mind, is just a friendly comment on the extreme weather outside. Immediately, on the clerk’s face, you read her mind wondering why a 66-year-old man is asking a 25-year-old woman to come over to his place.

This time you try to extricate yourself and what better way to do that than to refer to your wife. “If I go out with a snowshovel, I could shovel all day without even one neighbour looking in my direction. So I send out my wife with a shovel and five minutes later, three neighbours with snowblowers are on the scene.”

You think you’ve successfully cleaned up in Aisle 5, but the look on the clerk’s face say she is now dealing with a man who forces his wife to go out and shovel the driveway. She looks like she is about to push that button under the counter that every clerk must surely push when she wants to summon security.

So this is the plight of the funny man, or at least one who believes he is funny. It is his mission, he thinks, to cheer up the world but his feeble efforts cause only fear, alarm and expressed regrets on the sudden death of an ancestor.

He thinks about all this as he shovels his driveway alone, his wife knitting with the dog on her lap in their nice warm house. And he vows to never leave home again.

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(Hey, this is my first original, new story of 2018. Woo hoo!)

By Jim Hagarty
1994

There is a place where three modern obsessions come together in daily contact and the results are not always pleasant. At the local coffee shop, here and there among the “normal” people, are coffee-addicted news junkies who are also too cheap to buy a paper. To avoid laying down that big 50 cents for reading material, they will subject themselves to all sorts of frustration, disappointment and yes, even humiliation, all in public view. But before you condemn these types, try pitying them. How would you like to be hooked on something you absolutely refuse to pay for?

Like most character types in this world, coffee shop newshounds can be classed into a few specific categories. If you recognize yourself in any of these examples, you might want to think about seeking help.

The Paper Hog
Let’s start with the most objectionable character first. This person must have before him on his little table in the corner, EVERY SINGLE SECTION OF EVERY PAPER IN THE PLACE, as if he can read them all at once. A defining characteristic is his ability to completely ignore the glaring eyes of the other would-be readers in the shop who spend their visit to the place imagining suitable punishments for the lout, most of them involving either electric shock or some sort of water torture.

The Thief
Somewhere in every town or city, lurks a true menace who, when finished with the paper, leaves the coffee shop with a section (or two), from sports, to business to “insight.” This is a truly criminal act as newspaper junkies then must spend 10 minutes going frantically through every single paper in the rack, looking for that section, which of course, no longer exists, like the shattered kid looking for the absent toy assault rifle under the Christmas tree.

The Clipper
Living in every city is a woman who wears one of those magnifying glasses on a cord around her neck and comes to the shop well-equipped with a pair of tiny scissors. Before the horrified stares of onlooking newshounds waiting for her paper, she begins to carefully clip out all the articles which interest her and file them away in a little leatherette folder with which she eventually exits the shop.

The Co-reader
This type has no interest in any part of the paper except the part you’re reading and so will sit on the stool beside you, hover like a dentist and read over your shoulder.

The Co-reader – Complete With Sound
Same as above only this guy shares comments on the stories you and he are co-reading. “So, whadya say? Michael Jackson divorced in six months?” (Your only appropriate response is to look at him and say, “Get away from me!”)

The Sharer
Perhaps the most honest, this guy marches over to your table, grabs the sections you’re not reading, asks, “You readin’ these?” and leaves with them. But of course, those were the sections you were just about to get to, wanting especially the page with the article on the connection between backaches and nectarines.

The Broadcaster
This guy sees it as his job to keep the rest of the coffee-shop gang informed about the goings on of the world and of his opinions about them. So in a loud voice, he announces as he reads: “Each photo radar unit is capable of catching two speeders every second. Well, it’ll be a hot day in February when they catch me with their little picture vans, the creeps.”

The Custodian
On second thought, this guy might be even more hated than the Paper Hog, because he gathers up all the papers in front of him, and then is joined by a friend so the two spend the next half hour swapping lies while the paper sits unread before them and a half a dozen news junkies go into withdrawal.

The Stranger
Now and then, a stranger appears, bearing his very own paper which he actually bought in a box outside. This is a big mistake on his part as he is then called on repeatedly to try to convince his fellow coffee-shop dwellers that this paper is, in fact, really his and doesn’t belong to the restaurant. Failing to do that, he quits buying papers and shows up from then on without one and thus, another coffee-shop newshound is born.

The end.

By Jim Hagarty
2011
Here’s something potentially amazing. I heard an expert on a science radio program yesterday saying that theoretically, every sound that has ever been made since the dawn of time is still out there somewhere, though obviously very faint. If we had the technical tools to do this, it would also be theoretically possible for us to capture those sounds so we could listen to William Shakespeare having a conversation with Anne Hathaway or Jesus talking to his disciples or any other sounds made in the past that we wanted to hear. I would like to hear Henry VIII fart after one of his big meals.

By Jim Hagarty
1988

As a concept, I think kids are great. They have cute smiles, say cute things and look cute when they’re all dressed up like mini-adults in their Sunday morning dresses and little sports coats. As a way of carrying on the human race, they’re ideal. A great idea. I can’t think of a better way to start out in life than as a kid.

Show the average child the least bit of attention and you’ll be wipin’ sloppy kisses off your cheek for a hour. And when they decide they like you, they go all out to show it. They don’t give a hoot about your appearance or the frailties in your character and will love you whether you rob banks for a living or belong to the peace corps.

But kids also don’t wait for a judge and jury to find you guilty or innocent before deciding they don’t like you. And if they don’t like you, backing up to their front door with a truckload full of toys once a week won’t win them over. Where they used to be just a kid who doesn’t like you, now they’ll be a kid with a lot of toys who doesn’t like you.

Like most things in this world, kids sound better in theory than they very often are in practice. The tame ones are generally preferable to the untamed ones though even the quiet ones will get into mischief if they’re alone for a while. But all kids, wild or domesticated, are by nature opposed to order and feel better in the midst of chaos. This is why they spend their days creating it.

Perhaps the most admirable trait of children, a feature that somehow gets trained out of them later on, is their absolute directness of purpose. Whatever they want to do, they do, regardless of where they are at the moment when it strikes them to do it. Or say it. Or throw it. Or jump on it.

But endearing as their strength of will may be, there are also times when a person might be forgiven for mistaking this as a liability and not an asset. Take the day I was walking down the street when I saw a young mother and her preschool boy walking toward me, hand in hand. So cute was he, that I smiled at the two of them as they approached and bent down to ask his name when we met. I planned to pat him on the head and tell him what a good little boy he was. Uninterested in such social pleasantries, the boy instead walked up to me and kicked me as hard as he could in one of my shins. Perhaps this commando maneuver was taught in his streetproofing class or perhaps he was the son of a professional wrestler. Whatever the case, I was not aware until then that such a thing as the steel-toed bootie had even been invented and I still can’t understand why it’s legal.

A person can love ice cream without liking every flavour, and so too is it possible to love children without immediately taking a shine to every kid he sees. Take the one I met one day recently. I saw him looking at me, realized he was going to speak and expected him to tell me he got a new water pistol or that his grandmother gave him a dollar for his birthday. Instead, he had this to say to me:

“How’s it going, Tubby?” he asked.

I was shocked. I know when I slouch and if the light is wrong, I can be mistaken for a person who should lose about two, maybe three, pounds. But Tubby? I asked him what it was he’d called me.

“I called you Tubby,” he said, defiantly.

“Well, don’t call me that again!” I ordered him.

“Why?” he asked me.

“Because that’s not my name,” I said.

A few quiet moments passed. Finally, he asked me: “So, did you plant those trees, Tubby?”

Fortunately, at my age, unlike him, I am able to think out a mature response to belligerent exchanges such as this. Were I a child, too, I would have engaged in a name-calling spree or threatened to tell his dad.

Instead, I said nothing. I do plan, however, to put a rubber snake in his wading pool.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

They say the only walls that ever imprison us are the ones we build ourselves. And that there are many doors we encounter along the way and we need only open them and walk on through. Sometimes that is easier said than done and in that, is the challenge of life. It is an even bigger challenge for some people than for others.

Take a Florida couple, for example. Last week, for some reason, they were wandering the halls of a college where they didn’t belong. Apparently, someone chased them into a closet and closed the door. There they stayed for two whole days until, desperate, they phoned 911 and asked the police to come save them.

The police showed up, found the closet and opened the door. With ease. There was no lock on it. And yet, the couple thought they had been locked in.

In this case, however, it doesn’t appear that any fancy philosophy fits the situation. Both of them proved they do not belong in a college. Not because they are too old or too poor, but because they are dumb enough to get locked in a closet behind a door that won’t lock. And to stay there for two days. No food. No bathroom breaks. And, I am going to guess, no intelligent conversation.

Who said, when one door closes, another one opens? I don’t know who said it but it wasn’t one of these two superstars.

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There is an alternative moral to this story. Many of us don’t try opening doors because we think they are locked. Like the high school girls who would have gone out with us but we never asked them because we had put them on a pedestal.

A magician was working on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The audience would be different each week, so the magician allowed himself to do the same tricks over and over again. There was only one problem: The captain’s parrot saw the shows every week and began to understand what the magician does in every trick. Once he understood that, he started shouting in the middle of the show: “Look, it’s not the same hat.” “Look, he is hiding the flowers under the table!” “Hey, why are all the cards the Ace of Spades?” The magician was furious but couldn’t do anything; it was the captain’s parrot after all. One day the ship had an accident and sank. The magician found himself on a piece of wood, in the middle of the ocean, with the parrot, of course. They stared at each other with hate, but did not utter a word. This went on for a day, and another, and another. After a week the parrot finally said: “OK. I give up. What’d you do with the boat?” thebayfieldbunch.com

By Jim Hagarty
2012
My wallet went missing for three days. Distress befell me. Today, I went to a kitchen cupboard and took out the basket that holds my pills. There, amidst the bottles, was the wallet. This raises a disturbing question in two different ways, both having to do with my memory. One: Why would I put my wallet in the pill bottle basket and think that was the correct place to put it? Two: I take these pills daily so apparently I have not taken my pills in three days or I would have found my wallet before this. Oh man, this is not good. I am hopeful that the light is not beginning to burn out at the top of the stairs as I don’t know where to buy a replacement bulb.