Month: October 2017

By Jim Hagarty
2017

I am not much of a contest guy. I don’t buy lottery tickets or any other kind of tickets and I hate casinos. Games of chance leave me cold.

I especially can’t stand the silliness of calling into a radio show, hoping to be the special one who gets through and wins four tickets to the fall fair. And yet, I am aware that there are a lot of people who do just that. Maybe I am too lazy, but I just can’t get myself well organized enough to call the deejay and warble out my answer to the question of the hour.

So, that is my stand on radio contests and nothing will ever change my mind about that.

The other day, I met my neighbour out walking her dog, I was walking mine. We engaged in a little chit chat.

“Well, I just got back from picking up my cheque,” she said, out of the blue. “Oh no,” I immediately thought. “She’s been let go at work and went to get her final pay.” I felt sorry for her. I have been there and have felt the devastation of being tossed onto the trash heap.

“The cheque?” I asked, cautiously, not wanting to be too intrusive.

“Yes, my cheque from the radio contest I won through Radio 104,” she replied. “I was the 104th caller and got through, and then I had to give them a number to see if I got a bullseye. My niece shouted out a number, I gave that number to the radio station and I won.”

Well, I thought, that’s pretty cool. I was glad she was still employed and was sure she could use the couple hundred dollars she probably won.

“Do you mind me asking how much you won?” I said to her, nosily.

“Not at all,” she replied. “I won $10,100.”

Then she prattled on about the contest and how hard it was to be the 104th caller and how she was going to save the money for a special trip.

But I didn’t hear much of that. I was already planning my next day’s activities. Which involved a radio and my phone.

Radio contests are the best.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once met an orangutan,
Who told me that his name was Dan.
He was playful and all
So I threw him a ball.
“I’ll catch it,” he said, “if I can.”

By Jim Hagarty
2011

Acid corrodes the vessel in which it is stored, more than the vessel into which it is poured – my Dad on resentment. He laid this on me many years ago during a discussion I was having with him. I have no idea now what information I had given him that prompted him to share this gem with me but my guess is I was harboring a gigantic grudge against someone and he was trying to steer me in a better direction.

Today, thank God, I rarely hang on to anger at anyone else for very long. It’s not that I am trying hard not to resent anyone, it just seems to be happening naturally the older I get. Maybe it’s a time’s running out sort of thing, and there are better things to occupy my mind with. Or my brain is starting to shut down the number of things it can handle.

Whatever the reason, I am grateful to be mostly free of that monkey that got a free ride on my back for many, many years. Still, I do have lots of grumpy old man moments.

I have found most resentments come from unrealistic expectations of others and that it is possible to resent myself – that is called remorse.

That concludes today’s sermon. I shall now pass the basket for your freewill offering.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

I am not good at goodbyes and I’m terrible with change. I’m still trying to get over being forced to leave Grade 8. But the only thing that never changes is that everything always changes (that is my own expression, thought up in my own little brain but you are free to use it providing you send me $5 every time you do.)

In any case (the previous bunch of words being the equivalent of putting filler in hamburger), I said all that to say this: I had to say farewell to my family doctor of almost 15 years yesterday and that was hard. I got a little choked up as I left the building and walked to my car.

But this is why I liked him so much.

He knew all us old fogies all too well. His name is Dr. D. Thompson. Guess what the name of the new doctor is. Dr. D. Thompson. Yes, as we shook hands goodbye he said to me that he wanted to make sure he found someone with the same name to take over so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock. Not exactly the same. His name is Douglas and the new guy is David, but close enough.

I thanked him for all he had done for me and my wife and son and daughter and he smiled and said, “You get what you give.”

I’m going to hang onto that as soon as I figure out exactly what he meant.

By Jim Hagarty
2017

I suppose I should have guessed that my new baseball cap would bring the worst out in the people who saw me wear it. It is, after all, the ugliest baseball cap ever manufactured in whatever country had the gall to make it. But I like it and therein lies the problem.

It’s a nice shade of brown and when it sat on the shelf in the store, it already looked like a baseball team had taken it out behind the building and beat it to death several times with their bats. Then drove over it with the team bus. The peak was ripped and torn when I paid the clerk $21 and tax for it. I own at least 13 other baseball caps, not counting the ones that are hiding in closets and boxes all over the premises, and I didn’t pay $21 plus tax for the whole lot, having acquired most of them for free somehow and others for a buck or two. But this little brown beauty fit my head perfectly and emblazoned across the front is the logo, “Farm Boy.” Being a farm boy, I had to have it.

The first ones to express their deep mortification when they saw me wearing the hat were some former fellow journalism teachers who could hardly eat the meal we had gathered for because they couldn’t stop staring at my ugly cap. One guy even used the word ugly to describe it.

Fortunately, I am a patient man and I let the slings and arrows bounce off me. I tried to defend myself by saying that I actually chose this cap in the decrepit state it is in and paid $21 plus tax for it. But that feeble defence did little to subdue the haters as they immediately switched from despising the cap to wondering about my mental stability and reasoning powers after admitting to this horrendous purchase.

Other groups of people also started to complain including members of my own family. But they needn’t worry. The cap is not in my will. Instead I am leaving it to a young farmer out in Logan Township who I know will wear it with pride.

The dilemma I have, however, and this is the reason for my story, is my most cherished cap keeps disappearing. For days at a time and most recently, for an entire week. It is as though it just gets up and walks away on its own. If I was a suspicious, conspiracy-loving man, I might wonder whether or not people in my life who detest my hat are purposely hiding it on me. It’s a hard conclusion not to come to because when I finally find it, and rejoice as of course I would, the cap stays in my possession for only another few hours before it once again disappears.

Today marked Day Seven without it. I have been wearing instead various other caps from my collection of 13 but doing so has been like having my Corvette break down and having to ride my old bike. With two flat tires.

Today I was going through a full recycling box, carefully transferring each item to a bigger blue bin, to make sure nothing was accidentally discarded. When I got halfway down the pile of papers and boxboard, the familiar brown top of my beloved cap was exposed. Had some other member of the family just dumped the contents of the box into the bin without checking, I would have been searching for my cap for the rest of my life.

How did my cap get in the recycling box?

Tomorrow, I meet with a DNA and fingerprint expert to try to find the traitor.

And I am sleeping with one eye open.

By Jim Hagarty
2017

The letter came in the mail in an unassuming presentation. Almost as though the plain, white envelope contained little more than advertising. But it didn’t. Inside were riches unimaginable.

It was a notice from a law firm acting on behalf of the shareholders of a large company trading on the stock market which had run afoul of regulations. There had been a class-action suit filed and a settlement was finally arrived at.

That settlement is $69 million. I will write it out as it seems more impressive done that way. Sixty-nine million dollars.

The law firm was searching for people who owned shares of this company between 2004 and 2009. As it happens, my wife and I did own shares in that company during that period which is why we got the letter. In fact, we owned a lot of shares, 1,091 of them. That is a very large number to me. I do not own 1,091 of anything, not even screwnails though I do have three peanut butter jars full of them.

I am not a stock market expert, not even close, but I cannot imagine anyone else owning even a fraction of the shares in this company that we did. We owned, after all, 1,091 of them. I am also not a mathematician but I have a good feeling with our majority stake in this company back then, we can probably expect a cool thirty or forty million coming our way. We will know for sure in 60 days.

I was at the coffee shop when I opened the envelope and I called my wife from the Cadillac dealership which is located between the restaurant and our home. I told her the good news and wondered what colour of new Caddy she would prefer. She didn’t have an opinion on that but instead, advised me to come right home so we could talk about this new development in our lives. I might be mistaken but I think I remember her using the same tone of voice when she was trying to talk our kids into climbing down carefully from the highest branches of the maple tree in our yard.

So I told the dealer “the red one” and then rushed straight home to celebrate our sudden good fortune with my spouse. She is not usually a spoil sport but on this occasion, she put forward the idea that we might not see even $20 million of the settlement funds, let alone forty. I was disappointed by her pessimism but pretended to be reasonable. She took the position that there might have been a few investors who owned more than 1,091 shares in the company between 2004 and 2009, as doubtful a possibility as could be. In fact, she guessed that some people might have actually owned many times more than 1,091 shares, a position I found totally unimaginable. I still maintain that 1,091 is a big number, whether we’re talking screwnails, stars or stocks. And I realized the more she talked the poorer we were becoming so I dropped the subject.

Then I set to work filling out the required forms to ensure we qualified for our cut of the settlement, or our eff ewe money, as I like to call it when my wife is not around.

It took me a month to fill out those stupid forms. And during that period, I discovered something funny. I swore out loud more than 1,091 times during that month and the strange thing is, it hardly seemed like I was swearing at all. All I know is there were long stretches during that process when the dog and cats went missing.

Today was the last day to send in our application. I spent the whole day finishing it up, swearing and rushing it to the post office before the deadline.

I have never known my wife to be wrong on many occasions but boy is she in for a surprise two months from now.
Either that or I will be calling the class-action lawyers and yelling, “Eff Ewe!” into the phone.

I will report on the lawyers’ decision in eight weeks’ time but don’t expect me to wave at you from my red Caddy. I will have moved up a class or two by then.