By Jim Hagarty
2015
I have officially embarked on The Flashlight Years, the period in a man’s life when artificial beams of light are his only hope for survival. Without them, he cannot expect to find the potato chips in the cupboard and without potato chips, of course, he will eventually perish. Without light he is apt to dab the wrong ointment on the wrong wound and put his underwear on backwards. Not even necessarily his own underwear.
I don’t know if girls and women have the same kind of relationship that boys and men have with flashlights but I suspect they don’t. The ones I know seem to have the ability to snatch a flea off a black cat in a dark room in the middle of the night but maybe some of them are light challenged too.
With males, there is a lifelong fascination with the idea that when you press a button, a light beams its way out of a little cylinder. If childbirth is a mystery to the female, a flashlight is perhaps the male’s equivalent, minus the baby shower.
I have loved flashlights since I was a boy and have been surrounded by them all my life but strangely, I have hardly ever bought any of them. They just show up. Like the heavenly gifts they are.
And this Christmas, not just one but two flashlights ended up under our tree with my name on them. The bigger one was thought out in a lab somewhere by the smartest person in the world. It uses LED (Light for Every Dude) and has several intense magnets strategically placed on it, allowing me to attach it to practically anything. I have carried this thing with me day and night since I opened my gift and seemingly can’t even find a spoon in the cutlery drawer without it now.
But the smaller package that was wrapped and stuffed in my Christmas stocking held the best surprise of all. A flashlight that attaches to the peak of my caps, allowing me to feel like a coal miner 24/7. It has three LED bulbs on it but here’s the best part. I can make them flash.
A man walking his neighbourhood at night with a cap flashlight blinking is a wealthy man indeed, although his ability to sneak up on people, assuming he might want to do this, is somewhat
impaired.
But let’s face it, he has the world by the tail (and if that tail has a flea on it, he’ll spot it right away.)
