Month: December 2017

I can’t get into my community mailbox in the winter. It is always frozen. I have no idea why. My box is No. 12. JH

By Jim Hagarty
2017

I am not happy. I cannot afford to be. I am doomed to misery because I am unable to come up with $15.99 plus tax to buy the magazine I saw today on a rack at Wal-Mart. On the cover, in blazing big letters, was this announcement: The Secret to Being Happy. I always knew there was a secret and furthermore, I knew that everyone in my life was conspiring to keep me from finding out what the secret was. I don’t know why they would do that but they obviously did for some terrible reason. That really bugs the hell out of me. For a mere $15.99 plus tax, I could finally discover this secret. But I have in my wallet, only $5. Maybe if I gave a Wal-Mart clerk my $5, she would let me look inside the magazine for a few minutes and at least score a smidgen of happiness. In smaller print on the magazine cover is the declaration that new scientific findings are leading the way to happiness. I have no idea what those findings are and I guess I never will. They say money can’t buy happiness but apparently, $15.99 plus tax will do the trick. Oh well. Guess I’ll just stay miserable. Doesn’t seem as though I have much choice.

By Jim Hagarty
2012

A Christmas Story is my all time favourite Christmas movie.

The actor who plays the lead character Ralphie in A Christmas Story also appears in Will Ferrell’s Christmas classic Elf. He was one of Bob Newhart’s elves at the North Pole. You might be able to find a short video or photo on the Internet which points out which one he is. And he appears as an airport ticket clerk in another Christmas movie, Four Christmases.

Funny that Peter Billingsley would be in three Christmas classics. He’s also been in a number of other movies but mostly he works as a producer/director.

Two years ago my son Chris and I visited the house in Cleveland where the exteriors of A Christmas Story were shot. (Most of the rest of the movie, including the interiors, were filmed in Canada). The movie narrator never reveals in what city Ralphie Parker and his family lived but there is a hint given when he refers to their street as Cleveland Street. That is not the actual name of the real street.

The mailbox where Ralphie got his secret decoder from is still there although the door to it is gone. There is a shed in the backyard but I don’t think it is the one that all the bad guys were crawling on that Ralphie was shooting heroically with his pellet gun, although it is in the same location of the yard.

A house directly across the street has been converted to A Christmas Story museum and Ralphie’s little brother Randy was scheduled to be there the next day but we had to move on. As we were driving away, one of the houses on the street had a full-sized leg lamp in the window. Very cool.

The school scenes were shot at an old school in Welland, Ontario, which has now been turned into a family violence shelter. I don’t know where the house interior scenes were shot – maybe Toronto – but someone has bought the house in Cleveland and completely rebuilt the insides to match the movie set interiors of the house. There is a full-size leg lamp in the front window, as there was in the movie.

As you can tell, my son and I are big fans. We watch it together every Christmas eve while my wife and daughter usually watch something else. They like the movie but don’t share the same extreme passion.

By Jim Hagarty
1987

The type of stress I hate the most is the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re feeling good. I can handle the variety that hangs around all day and mixes in with all your other worries so that you hardly notice it. After a while, the fear of cancer, car accidents, bankruptcy, unemployment, crime, nuclear annihilation and the possibility that Oral Roberts may be right become almost like old friends and you can actually learn to nod off to sleep now and then with all this happening in your head. But stress that swoops down out of nowhere and attacks like a bird yanking fish out of the water really bugs me.

Take Saturday, for instance. It was a fairly nice day and all was well with the world. The neighbour kids were over at my place asking me, “Whatcha doin’?” “Why?” and “Can I do dat?” Grumbles my cat was running around putting her head into every opening where a cat’s head shouldn’t be. And all around me the neighbourhood was abuzz with cars being washed, bikes being ridden and lawns being cut.

I’d had a shower and my first coffee of the day and I don’t mind saying I was feeling unusually content. Things were under control. Bills mostly paid. House fairly clean. New fast-food restaurant opened up the day before right behind my place. What more could a man ask for?

In retrospect, I know now that this is where I should have hit the pause button. But the trouble with feeling good is it makes you want to do things. Things you weren’t necessarily designed to do. Like planting flowers. Or ironing your shirts. Or changing a bulb in a car with hideaway headlights.

I’ve been buying and changing headlights in cars for the past 20 years. Takes 10 minutes, tops, and then only if you stop for a five-minute break. But I hadn’t yet replaced either one of the pop-up types in my latest vehicle. I never will again.

The last I saw of my serenity, it was sneaking off down the driveway along with my patience and common sense about the same time I knelt before the front of the car, screwdriver and new headlight in hand. The first step in machinery repair is turn every screw you see. Eventually, something has to come apart. It’s always worked in the past but this time it didn’t.

I finally fumbled in the glove box for the owner’s manual and on pages 24 to 26 there were a series of illustrations and 19 detailed steps to follow when changing a headlight. Get a load of this: “Separate the I-cavity black connector at the blue wire … remove the Torx screws from the upper corners of the black plastic outer bezel … pull the retaining spring away from the bottom corner of the headlight assembly … reinstall the bezel … torque to 8 N.m (6 ft. lbs.) ….”

But I really lost it at Step 12 when I read this statement concerning the first two screws I’d twisted away at before I got out the manual. It said: “DO NOT remove or adjust these screws.” Now, if this instruction was so important that they’d capitalized the do not, don’t you think they’d have put a little warning label right above the screws themselves? And don’t you think it would have been Step 1 and not Step 12? Well, DON’T YOU?

I’ve decided not to take you through a curse-by-curse description of what ensued from there. I really don’t want to relive it. But an hour after I started this little job, every one of my tools and half the neighbour’s were strewn across the driveway. Every blood cell in my body had been summoned to begin emergency repair of my bruised, skinless knuckles and my neighbours learned that I know words I haven’t even got around to using in this column yet.

Edited for print, this is, in part, what I had to say at one point: “I can’t believe it. They can’t be serious. How could anyone design something this stupid? I have never seen anything so dumb in my whole life. Grumbles, you little rodent, get out of that box! I will never, ever fix anything on this car again. Ever. What a ridiculous setup. Why couldn’t they think of something simpler? Why? That’s all I want to know. Grumbles, get out of that bag, you little pest. Go on. Get out of there. I said, GET OUT OF THERE! Boy this makes me mad. Why can’t things ever just run smoothly? How could such a small car be such a big pain in the neck?”

Anyway, you get the idea. In time, the headlight got installed, the tools were put away and Grumbles took refuge in the rafters in my garage. Good move on her part. A few hours later, I calmed down.

But, when I drove down the highway Saturday night, my right headlight gave me a real good view of the tops of the trees along the side of the road but the pavement right ahead of the car lay in darkness.

I think there should be meetings where we do-it-yourselfers could share our woes and find the strength to give up our compulsion to fix things. Then, before we fell into the tinkering trap, we could call a buddy and get talked down.

Until then, we’ll have to continue to suffer alone, misunderstood by the mass of society who find changing a light bulb as easy as – changing a light bulb.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There once was a rat named John
That liked to hang out on my lawn.
But John is no more
He got under the mower
And was scattered hither and yon.

By Jim Hagarty
2012

Once in a while, in this fake and phony world, something truly honest comes along and I like that. In my stocking Christmas morning was a one-serving box of Sugar Pops. That’s right, Sugar Pops. Honest as the day is long, unlike Fruit Loops which contains 99 per cent sugar and zero per cent fruit not to mention hardly any loops.

And all the other pre-prepared foods on the shelves pretty much disguise their sugar content. Like ketchup, for example. Who knew there is sugar in ketchup, for Pete’s sake? It would probably be a short list, in fact, if I wrote down all the foods that don’t have sugar. Or salt, for that matter. Or both. In fact, there is probably sugar in salt, and salt in sugar.

But good old Sugar Pops! I’m not sure how many pops are in this cereal but I do know there is lots of sugar. And I am kind of grateful that the makers of Sugar Pops are not ashamed of their product. They put it right out there. No one would be fooled if the cereal was called “Poppin’ Good Round Little Balls”, especially after they were tasted. So why not just be honest?

On the front of a box of Cap’n Crunch, for example, are the words “It’s Cruncharific!” I think we all know what they mean by that.

I haven’t bought any bags of white sugar lately but I’m not even sure they put the word sugar on those.

Long Live Sugar Pops!

(This message brought to you by the Canadian Dental Health Association)

By Jim Hagarty
2013

They say money talks but all it ever says to me is “Goodbye!”

Today, in line at the drive-through, I made it to the window, handed the young woman a twenty and she gave me back a ten and a five and then some coins on top of the bills. I retrieved the coins but the bills blew away. If you’ve ever wondered how wealthy people treat their money, now you know. For us, it’s just like dust in the wind.

An honest man in the car behind me jumped out, scooped up my money and returned it to me. But he didn’t have to. There is so much more where that came from!

By Jim Hagarty
1994

The interesting thing about problems is how there is never any shortage of new ones waiting around the corner for you. Creaky knees, unpaid bills, leaky taps and roof repairs are the ones you expect. They’re comfortable. Treatable. You know whom to call.

But it’s a cruel world when your own car turns on you in the middle of the coldest winter on record in a truly shocking way. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with the vehicle but in the last two weeks, it’s taken to zapping me with electrical charges that have made me truly afraid to be around it.

The dry outside air, I guess, combined with my sliding along the upholstered driver’s seat as I exit the car, have been combining to set up a reserve of static electricity that, when released, would blow the hat off me, if I wore a hat. This is distressing for me because, for a very good, historical reason, I hate with a passion being on the receiving end of a mini-lightning strike. My theory, and I think it’s a good one, is that when I was a kid living on a farm which made use of electric fences to keep the cattle from wandering over to the neighbours, I had so many volts run through me, entering by the head, neck, legs, back, hands, feet and who knows what else, that I developed a deep aversion to hydro. It isn’t that I mind it running my TV or fridge. I just can’t see any useful purpose in having it coursing through my veins and lighting up the corneas in my eyeballs.

So, I am extra cautious around sources of electric power, preferring other ways to get my thrills, ways that have nothing to do with the conveyance of negative and positive energy particles through any part of my anatomy. This is why these past two weeks have been somewhat of a nightmare. I’ve been in and out of my car a lot lately, almost every time with the same result. As soon as my hand touches the steel on the car door as I go to shut it, that only familiar feeling strikes again.

“Yow!!!” is all I can say at such times. And yow is a word I do not toss around lightly.

I’ve even taken to experimenting with ways of avoiding the inevitable but I’ve discovered that once charged, you’re like a lit firecracker that won’t be satisfied until it’s exploded. Yesterday, as I exited the car, I touched only plastic parts and smiled as I walked away from the vehicle, thinking I had won a round. However, as I reached to put some change in a parking meter…

“Yow!!!”

This situation is even affecting my social life as my supercharged forefinger has recently taken to zapping the fingers of other people I’ve been coming into contact with resulting, I think, in some of them wondering if this was some sort of sign that they should ask me out on a date. And my cats run for cover when I come into the house at night, knowing from experience they’re liable to get their ears singed when I reach down to pet them.

In any case, I guess I can live with this annoyance as long as garage doors I walk by don’t start opening on their own or I don’t start receiving pictures in my head from the Hubble Space Telescope.

And who knows? Maybe these electroshock therapy treatments, several times a day, will give me just the attitude adjustment I’ve been looking for and people have been saying I desperately need.