Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2014

There is a man I know who annoys me. My issue, not his, and I can’t say exactly why he bugs me except that in my few encounters with him I found him to be somewhat pushy. I saw him from a distance on Tuesday and my blood simmered. He’s a prominent figure in our community and he enjoys his status, even promotes it. Maybe that’s what bugs me.

Stupid to have this reaction still after all these years but it’s practically part of my nature now.

Wednesday, I was in a waiting room and before me, on a coffee table, lie a few dozen magazines. In fact, there were 52 of them. The reason I know that number specifically is I counted them after this happened: I looked them all over and saw one peeking out from beneath another so I grabbed it. Guess whose mug shot was large and smiling out at me from the glossy cover?

I could have picked any one of 51 other magazines, but that is the card I drew from the deck. The joker, of course.

Settle down blood, settle down.

By Jim Hagarty
2004

What’s in a name? A career, if you’re one of the lucky ones

This column is dedicated to Jack Hammer, the power-tool salesmen about whom I have written before, the man with the perfect name for his job. Someone whose destiny was pounded out the day his parents named him.

And to all the others in the world who have it so easy, l say, well done. For you needn’t fret over career choices. Just follow your moniker; it will show you the way.

I cite, as my first piece of evidence, Your Honour, the person of Bonnie Beaver, president of the American Veterinary Association. I can’t imagine her in any other capacity. Ditto Jen Cutting. Surely she was accepted into hairdressing school based solely on her surname, and now is a successful coiffeur.

Chris Moneymaker, the accountant, won the 2003 World Series of Poker, and what else would you have expected him to do?

If I was president of 3M Canada, and chances are good that I may someday be hired for that position, I would rush out and hire Penny Wise to be my business manager, which the company has done. I’m not a huge believer in luck, but how could a person with that name mismanage any denomination or amount of money?

Of course, there are the simple ones, such as former Blue Jays slugger Cecil Fielder. Or the laughably easy, John Tory, the new leader of the Tory party in Ontario. He showed a lot of Grit in running for the leadership, but the result was a Never Doubted Probability (NDP).

Those of us old enough to remember the little incendiary device known as the “match stick” which, with a bit of scratching and thrusting against a rough surface would burst into flame – for the disposable lighter generation a concept surely too difficult to imagine – will remember a certain name associated with those matches and that is why it does not surprise us surprise us that Mike Eddy would be named president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.

And who couldn’t know that the Ontario caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada would choose Gary Goodyear to comment on recent meetings the party held with auto industry representatives to hammer out a party policy in that area?

And just as Alison Fryer didn’t really have much choice but to open The Cookbook Store, Kevin Sites had to become an NBC videographer to travel the world and show the people back home all the you know what he was seeing.

I think Zak Firestone is the right person to be sending out press releases for the Fire Safety Days a battery company holds each year. And when I send my son out with the Boy Scouts to learn all about living in the wild, I want nobody else but Terry Wilder looking after him.

And in what has to be the crop circles of surnames, this item appeared in newspapers this summer, surely emitting some sort of signal that aliens really have arrived. In August, Rev. James Profit, a Jesuit priest in Guelph, opposed plans by Wal-Mart to build a store near a Jesuit retreat centre. OMB panelists Bob Boxma, a Toronto lawyer, and John Aker, a former Oshawa and Durham Region councillor, listened to arguments from lawyers representing Wal-Mart and the city on one side, and the Jesuit Centre and a citizens’ group on the other all about the arrival of a big-box store next to the Jesuit Centre and how this would bring about the paving over of acres and acres of prime farmland. In a battle of wits between Boxma and Aker, l wouldn’t know on whom to bet.

Maybe I should ask that gambler Chris Moneymaker. He’d know.

I know a young woman who never smiles.
She works in a shop where I go.
She looks as unhappy as anyone could
And I have no idea why that’s so.

Maybe she hates working there in the shop
And dealing with people like me.
But she’s walked by my place when she wasn’t at work
And she still looks as sad as can be.

Sometimes she is rude when we have an exchange
And I’m tempted to call her on that.
But I don’t want to add to the troubles she has
So I keep it all under my hat.

Maybe things are a mess in her life
Or maybe her mother is ill.
I simply don’t know why she always is down
And I don’t suppose I ever will.

But I hope I am wrong and that’s just her way
Because life is too short we all know,
To spend our time fretting and frowning all day.
At some point we have to let go.

A woman who works alongside this sad one
Is always pleasant and bright.
And who knows, she might have problems that would
Make the sad one’s issues seem light.

A person whose manner says, “Leave me alone”
Will be left alone, that is for sure.
And whether her problems are real or imagined
Life won’t likely hold much joy for her.

• Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2014

A close family member is pretty handy at woodworking. So 20 years ago she spent some time in her father’s workshop and crafted some beautiful items which adorn our home.

One shelf was particularly nice and after being painted blue, was promptly put up in a bathroom where it has served masterfully ever since.

Its little cousin, however, did not fare so well. Painted the same shade of blue, this shelf was a bit smaller but just as ornate. And for some reason, though our house has walls aplenty, it just never found one where it belonged. So, it has spent its life as a drifter, going from shed to garage to basement to shed, never settling for long in any one spot, and always stuck in a corner, never fixed to a wall.

I love this shelf and over the past two decades, it is no exaggeration to say I have picked it up and moved it at least a hundred times. Sometimes I moved it into a room with full intention to put it up, but there was always an excuse not to do it. It seemed like a two-person job and the other person could never be rounded up, or I didn’t have the right screws or I gave in to my deathly fear of trying to find the studs behind the drywall.

But today, that all changed.

I was out in the garage, looking lovingly at the shelf, and actually told it out loud that today would be the day. It was sitting on top of an aquarium which I needed to move and so I did. And as I moved the big tank, I heard a bang and looked down. There lie the shelf in pieces on the concrete floor.

My exact words, at this development, were these: “Oh, good heavens. What on earth have I done?” Or less polite words to that effect.

Mostly ignored all these years, the shelf had spent a lot of its time above the rafters in the shed, where the heat in summer cooked it till it had become like foam. The glue had long ago given up. The biggest thing holding it together was the paint. Tonight I will fix it. And give it the finest location in the house and put our favourite pictures on it. Every shelf deserves another chance to finally serve the purpose for which it was created, no matter how broken and battered.

(Update 2017: The shelf got repaired and was attached to a wall in a downstairs bathroom. It is covered in toiletries and, I assume, is happy at last.)

By Jim Hagarty
1986

There aren’t that many things left, nowadays, that haven’t been improved. In fact, that’s the great obsession of our age – to improve everything. We want better bodies, better cars, better food and better TV programs. We’d like better government, better mail service and better information.

So, we get basically what we want and the one thing we can be sure of today is that whatever we buy, from tires to transistor radios, will be out of date some day, more likely sooner than later. Buy a stereo, TV or video cassette recorder and the miracle of modern technology will become practically obsolete in the time it takes to get it from the store to your home. This continuous search for something better is good because it creates a lot of employment.

But better is not always best and some things just can’t be improved on. Like rubber boots, straw hats, rocking chairs, long underwear and corn brooms.

The old bristly yellow and green corn broom has swept up more North American kitchens, cellars, granaries and ice rinks than any other type of cleaning tool including the vacuum cleaner. It has herded millions of nosy cats, dogs and children out of the house and brought down cob webs from the hardest-to-reach places in the parlour. For generations, it has kept the sidewalks in front of city stores clean and in its spare time, been horse, harness and saddle to many a young cowboy and cowgirl who rode out into the yard to shoot up the town.

The corn broom is close to the ideal cleaner. It can be used to sweep up everything from water in a flooded basement to windshield glass at a car-accident scene. Its bristles wear down more or less evenly, giving the broom a long life and as its condition deteriorates, it gets relegated from the house to the grimier jobs outside and in barns and basements.

Adaptations of the old corn broom have been a hit in the world of sports, keeping snow and dirt away from curling rocks as they head for their destination in the circle at the other end of the ice and being the main means of propelling the ball in broomball. And, for kids not able to afford a real goalie stick, the corn broom has turned aside many of Wayne Gretzky’s most blistering shots on both basement and parking lot rinks. Many a close game has been halted at critical moments because Mom needed the goalie stick to clean up the kitchen after supper. (The kind of people who most often use corn brooms, by the way, have “supper” at suppertime, not “dinner.” They eat dinner at dinnertime, not lunch. Lunch is what they eat in the field by their tractors some time about half way between dinner and supper.)

A corn broom can be used effectively to “shoo” little animals and little people in a direction opposite to the one they’re intent on travelling. It can be ridden by witches on their Halloween rounds and when its bristles have all worn down, they can be cut off and the broom can start a whole new life of usefulness as a broom handle.

As far as I know, no saying has ever been coined about the vacuum cleaner but for how many generations have people been using the phrase “a new broom sweeps clean?”

The corn broom, though crude in some respects when compared with the modern synthetic-plastic magnetic broom whose fibres attract dust to them like June bugs to porch lights, has managed to survive our computer age and by virtue of that achievement, deserves respect. And, when you consider you can still buy one of these brooms new for as little as $3, they have to be one of the few real bargains left in this world.

I hope nobody ever improves them.