Month: January 2017

By Jim Hagarty
2012

Apparently young people buying homes today often don’t want what their parents had. They don’t want big houses nor do they care for large lawns – they just want enough backyard for a patio and barbecue where they can entertain friends.

No useless rooms inside like a parlour or fancy dining room. Instead they would like a room for a big TV and space to play video games.

They don’t want a tub but do look for a large walk-in shower.

And they want to be within walking distance of shops and restaurants and schools so they are not dependent on cars.

A friend and I talked a bit about this sort of thing last week. He and his wife recently sold their beautiful country property and moved into a house in town. They’re loving the change. Their property was so big and filled with so many flower beds, he spent his days manicuring everything, as though he was the keeper of a large park.

In summer I drive in the country a lot and I often feel sorry for farm families who I see out caring for the large lawns surrounding their homes and outbuildings on beautiful Sunday afternoons. The one day of the week they normally could have off they spend bouncing around on a riding lawnmower keeping everything trim, even the roadside ditches at the front of their farms.

In the old days, farm lawns in this part of the world were not so grand. A very old picture of the farmhouse where my mother grew up shows just a small patch of grass surrounding the home, maybe only 20 feet or so. It seems as though farm lawns have grown bit by bit over the decades and now are rural parks as much as anything.

But who are they for?

Do those who care for them ever get to enjoy that space? And there are so few cars that drive some of those back roads, it’s a wonder a whole day doesn’t go by when no one but the farm family sees the park.

Maybe young homeowners are onto something. Like the expression goes, do I work to live or live to work? Do I own my home or does my home own me?

But no tub? Seriously? No shower I’ve ever been in no matter how roomy could ever ease the aches and pains and tension like a bathtub full of very hot water and bath oil to save the skin. And with the light off and a candle on the sink, the room can seem almost like your own special home away from home.

Showering in the dark just doesn’t have the same appeal, not that I have ever tried it.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

They say if you don’t want to spend money, don’t go into stores where they sell things. I am finding this to be true. I was in a hardware store last week and saw five or six items that I just had to have. Actually, a couple of them I had to think long and hard for a possible use for them, but I wanted them nonetheless.

I left the store, however, wallet intact. I have turned over a new leaf.

On Saturday morning, I was in a drug store picking up some toothpaste when my eyes came to rest on a bag of caramel popcorn. In the old days, a drug store sold drugs and a grocery store sold food and never the twain would meet. Now, the twain meet a lot. The drug stores are full of groceries and the food stores are full of drugs – and even clothes. The world is upside down.

I tried to go through my day peacefully but the image of that caramel popcorn kept invading my thoughts and I knew it was only a matter of time before I bought a bag. I held off till late last night however and finally broke down, cleaned off the car and went out into the snowy night in search of my prey. Back I returned, bag in hand.

I sat down on the couch to watch TV and surf the net. I got myself a tidy little bowl of potato chips. They went down very well. The popcorn bag I kept right beside me, waiting for the right time to open it. About an hour into Saturday Night Live, the big moment arrived and I tore the bag open.

My dog Toby immediately jumped down from the easy chair and ran over to where I sat. He looked at the popcorn and then at me, and repeated this motion several times. His eyes were pleading.

“No, no, no, little guy,” I said to him. “You can’t have any of this. Not even one little bit.” And, I’m sorry but I might have thrown in a “ha, ha” at the end.

Resigned, he jumped back into his chair and went to sleep. I ate a bit of the popcorn but the chips had filled me up so I left most of it for today, when I would eagerly finish it off. When I turned out the lights to go to bed, I looked at Toby and said, “Not coming to bed, little fella?” Normally, he would be there by then. I left him. Sometimes he stays in his chair and doesn’t come downstairs at all.

This morning I got up and the first thing I saw on the counter in the kitchen was my precious bag of popcorn, about three little puffy kernels left inside. I knew who the culprits were – my son and his friends. I will admit to a bit of irritation.

When my wife came upstairs, I told her the guys had eaten my popcorn. “No they didn’t,” she said. “Toby got it. You left the bag on the couch.”

I looked at Toby. He looked at me. I know he can’t really speak, at least not in human language, but it seemed to me he was saying, with his eyes, “Ha, ha!”

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I have to go for diet counselling again on Monday. This is my fourth lap around this track, dating back about 20 years. But, a lot has been accomplished in those 20 years. I now use corn oil margarine and skim milk. That’s about it.

A lot of breath and energy wasted on my behalf and yet, we all persist in this messed-up idea that someday I will change my dietary ways. My doctor, dietitian and I, are all actors in this little passion piece. Guess who plays the villain?

I think they think they’ve got me this time, however. I have to keep a detailed list of absolutely everything I eat and drink for the three days leading up to my appointment. And the precise times when I eat and drink that stuff. This assumes some level of honesty on my part and more than a few people over the years have made the mistake of making the assumption that I am honest, which I am not.

I’m a bargainer. Not in the marketplace of goods and services, where I am hopeless (I once sold a house for less than I bought it for. Who does that?) but in the superstore of truth and lies. This dates back almost 60 years to my childhood in the Catholic Church. When I came of age and had to start going to confession, I started to see how much trouble the truth could get me into. However, I was not quite prepared to start dealing in outright lies (that would come later). So, I well remember kneeling in a pew at the back of our church, preparing my list of sins for the priest. I used a little booklet which helped me to calculate the frequency with which I had committed such moral failures over the past month. I would scroll down through the 10 commandments and see which ones were tripping me up. Fortunately, I didn’t have any problem with most of them. In fact, I wasn’t sure what it might mean to covet thy neighbour’s wife. So I stuck to the mainstream errors such as keeping Sundays holy and the biggie – using the Lord’s name in vain.

As a teenager, I had quite a lot of trouble with this one. I don’t mean to excuse myself but my high school was one big factory of foul language in those days. It was either swear or be sworn at. Cuss or die!

Always one to fit in, I did my best to keep up. This was not usually a problem except at my monthly encounters with the confessional. It was very important, for some reason – well, the reason was we needed to be forgiven – to tell the priest not only the nature of each sin but exactly how many times we committed it. So, drawing on my math skills, I would calculate up how many times I had sworn in a typical day and then multiply that by the number of days in that particular month. I might, for example, arrive at the not unreasonable number of 20 swear words that escaped my lips per day that month. But in a typical month, that was at least 600 times. I knew that if I told the priest that, he’d scream, rip off his collar and go get a job selling used cars.

So, I had to compromise. Ten words a day. That would be 300. Still too many. Five times a day. One hundred and fifty. I could live with that. When asked by the priest how many times I had cursed since my last confession, I would produce the number 150 and there was no ministerial meltdown on the other side of that screen in the big box with the curtains. This was when I realized the potential efficacy of a little larceny, even while kneeling there supposedly confessing the truth.

Lying in a booth dedicated to not lying was having it both ways. And don’t get me started on that. How many lies had I told in the last month? Well one big one right there in the confessional, for starters, when I lied about my swearing.

Now, I would have to calculate my lies and come up with a reasonable number I could sell. And then go tell the priest a big fat lie about my number of lies.

This problem was exacerbated many times over as I got older and strayed from my monthly confessions. Now, it might be three months since my last confession. So, all my sins would be tripled in number. That was hard to sell and I would spend a long, long time on my knees in the pew running the numbers. And this was before the calculator was invented.

Later, doctors and I would get on a similar merry-go-round except the doctors didn’t seem to care how much swearing I did or whether or not I was coveting my neighbour’s wife, which by then I probably was. Now, it was how many cups of coffee was I drinking a day. I had no time to calculate that in advance because the question came out of the blue right in the examination room with the doctor standing right there. So I would just spit out a number and lowball it as far as I could without being totally unbelievable. Five, I would say, when the number was 10 or 15.

But, the chickens come home to roost. I know that they do from having grown up on a farm with not one, but two chicken coops. So on Monday, I will have to turn over a list showing every single thing I ate and drank, the quantities, and the times I ingested all this stuff.

I am currently engaged in these very intricate decipherations (I think I just made up that word) but now I have the benefit of a calculator. Now and then, however, I get a little frustrated, and I swear. Ten times today, so far. No, seven. Did I say seven? It was just four.

Good grief. (Is that swearing?)

Photo by Al Bossence (thebayfieldbunch.com)

By Jim Hagarty
2017

When I was 16, I was filled with many answers to the mysteries and problems of life. They were simplistic conceptions. How could they be otherwise. These people were good, those people were bad. These beliefs were right, those beliefs were wrong. There were not too many gray areas. Just like our television sets in those days, a lot of black and white.

Fifty years on, I have fewer answers. My TV broadcasts are in colour now and so is my outlook. I like to think that now, I have a bit more humility than then. What happened to bring that about was 50 years of living. A half century of mingling and working with others. Good times and hard times.

In fact, I have a lot more questions now than answers although I am not in hot pursuit every day for explanations. I am not in a race to shape life to suit me but am trying merely to shape myself to suit life. I have periods now of peace, a contrast with the 16-year-old me who was a bundle of excitement, fear and despondency.

Sorry to make this political, but I believe that a lot of conservative-minded folk never seem to progress past the “got all the answers” phase of their lives. There is an expression out there somewhere that if you are a conservative at 18, you will be a liberal at 80. Life will make that transformation. I shouldn’t make this judgment, but it seems to me people who travel become more open-minded as a result. I have travelled quite a bit in my life. I know people who have barely made it past the city limits of the place I live.

But, I have known people who were liberal at 20 and conservative at 60. They find success, accumulate the rewards of that, and then spend their days worrying that some undeserving souls will come and take it away from them.

There is another expression which says something to the effect that the wiser a man becomes, the quieter he is. He has fewer hardened opinions and less need to share what it is he thinks he knows.

It is frightening to me to watch a U.S. government that has been taken over by self-assured 16-year-olds, who are fully confident of their assessments of good and bad, right and wrong.

What I don’t see among them, I am afraid to say, is any heart. And yet, almost to a man, they are Christians. They think only in black and white. No room for compromise. Up is down. Cruelty is merely “telling it like it is.”

What it really is is tragic.

By Jim Hagarty
2012

I was going through the drive-through at A&W at noon hour today when the young woman who served me at the window asked me very cheerily and with a large smile how I was doing. “Fine, thank you,” I replied. She then handed me my junk grub and said, “Have a good day, sweetheart!”

Sweetheart?

A young person of the opposite sex who I have never met just called me sweetheart. I don’t mind saying this made me feel pretty darned good. But I was a little rattled, wondering why she called me by this term of endearment. Does she say that to everyone, I wondered, but then rejected that notion. She was very sincere and very clearly wanted me to know that she thought I was a sweetheart.

(For awhile I wondered if what she really called me was a sweathog but then I decided that no, it was really sweetheart.)

I finally came to the only conclusion that made any sense: She was blown away by my sheer awesomeness. There I sat in my little rusting-out Chevy, with my cloth winter coat on covered in sawdust from working on the renovation project in my garage. I was also sporting about 10 days unmanaged beard growth and on my head, a barely scabbed over red spot where a falling hammer clobbered me last night. I also had not gotten around to brushing my teeth yet and had used no mouthwash which probably left me just a little nicer smelling than a water buffalo emerging from a day in the swamp.

Oh yeah, and I have a drippy nose.

Still, it is obvious that enough of my magnetism shone through all this to cause a twenty-something, attractive woman in a drive-through to call me her sweetheart. (Well, she didn’t really say I was her sweetheart, but I think that’s what she meant.)

So, I spent the afternoon in a golden haze, preparing to live off this little bit of encouragement for many months to come until I heard on the radio later in the afternoon that today is National Compliments Day. You don’t suppose my girl was just following the spirit of the day, do you? Nah. If there weren’t a few decades’ difference in our ages, I would right now be fighting her off with a stick.

Reminds me of the tale of the 90-year-old man who was heading off on his honeymoon with his 20-year-old bride. A friend was worried about the effects an exciting wedding night might have on the old fella and he said to him, “Aren’t you worried, you know, about sudden death?” “No,” said the old guy. “If she dies, she dies.”

I wonder if my A&W server knows how good she made me feel with one little word. I think she does. I think she is just a happy soul.

I am not a charmer and not quick with buttery comments; I often think later about what I should have said in a certain situation. But one day a few years ago when I was helping deliver my kids’ newspapers I started walking up a driveway behind two young women who were heading to the home’s backyard for a party. I saw them look back nervously at me, wondering why I was behind them.

“Just following the beautiful women,” I said, before depositing the paper in the mailbox and returning to the street. Both women immediately smiled big, broad smiles and maybe even blushed a little.

Finally, I thought, the right words were there just when I needed them and I managed to spit them out.

Maybe I am wrong but I have a feeling those two felt a lot better about themselves for awhile after that. I don’t know what made me say it. As far as I know it wasn’t National Compliments Days.

What I do know is that I felt pretty good about myself too.

Maybe I should get a job at A&W.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

Twice a day, every day, my little dog Toby takes me for a walk around the block. Weighing in at an awesome 12 pounds, the little guy nonetheless can muster up quite a bit of pulling power when he wants to – and he always wants to.

He’s a busy young fella on these strolls, with a lot to accomplish in a short time. There are people’s front porches to inspect and trees to water and the best days are Tuesdays when there are garbage cans and recycling boxes out by the curb. On those days, a dog’s nose can almost fall off his face with excitement because in those bags and cans are leftovers. Plenty of leftovers.

Of all of life’s little absurdities, sometimes this twice daily ritual strikes me as about as strange as they come. I walk along the sidewalk being dragged along on a leash by what amounts to a fluffy cushion with eyes, ears, nose and mouth. And legs. And more attitude than one of those all-in fighters, you know, the ones who jump into the ring and try to kill their opponent as fast as they can, spilling as much blood as they are able to along the way. Their own, the others guy’s. Who cares?

Before we leave the house, I have to dress this little creature in a sweater. He knows the drill now and pokes his head and legs through at the appropriate times. He has two really nice hand-woven sweaters, better than anything I have.

Toby poops and pees on command now, so we’ve come a long way. He knows if he doesn’t produce a couple of little brown logs, there will be no reward when we get home.

My dog is a barker. If he was human, he’d be a yeller. I should have named him Old Yeller, in fact. If the roles were reversed, and it was me being guided along on all fours at the end of the leash, I might accost the neighbours and strangers in much the same manner he does.

“Hey Dave,” I’d yell. “Got any treats at your place?”

Or, “Frank, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about this urine in the snow over here, would you? Smells to me like it could be yours.”

Or, I’d run up against a stranger and ask, “OK, who the hell are you to be walking down my street? Get outta here! NOW!!!”

If I saw that dastardly postal carrier coming my way I’d go berserk, of course, and yell, “You drop any more of that silly paper off at my house and I’ll bite your leg.” And then I would.

Of course, some people I wanted to get to know, I’d be a little friendlier to, as I’d asked them politely if they minded if I sniffed them up and down for a bit for no particular reason. And most of them would agree to the request. With some, I wouldn’t even ask. Just get right up close and personal.

“Would it kill you to shower now and then?” I might ask a neighbour after one of my inspections.

Yes, Toby is quite the adventurer and everyone on our street knows him now after the six years he’s lived here. Some like him, some tolerate him and some cross the street to avoid him – much like they do with his master I’m afraid.

But once in a while a newcomer will happen along, so strange he blows the little dog’s mind. Poodles are crackerjack smart but they do not have the sharpest eyesight of all the dogs in the world and so, the other night, the neighbours were treated to two minutes of wild, wild barking as a child’s snowman was given a good and proper scolding.

I would have done the same if I was cruising that low to the ground.

Can’t have snow creatures cluttering up the landscape.