By Jim Hagarty
2005
After five and a half decades of kickin’ around this old planet, I’ve learned a few things, though some people I know would vigorously dispute that claim. Many moons ago in my brief high school teaching career, I picked up a great line I heard somebody use about his students: “I’ve taught them everything I know and they still don’t know anything.” That suited me, which is why I went into journalism, a field where you don’t have to know anything about anything, except how to write knowledgeably about all the things you don’t know anything about. If you know absolutely nothing, they give you your own column.
But among the few things that l do know is this: Life has a great sense of humour and irony and a way of turning the tables on you when you get a little too judgmental.
Witness.
As you may know by now, I am no big fan of the current fad which has everybody walking and biking around with headphones on, listening to their favourite “tunes” streaming out of little music players either carried in their hand or tucked away somewhere on their person. I think it looks ridiculous and is ridiculous, not to mention dangerous. The other day I saw a headphone-wearing girl on a bike go blasting through a main intersection. She looked cool and modern and all, but my guess is she would not have been able to hear a car horn or someone yelling if a dangerous traffic situation developed. Around the same time, I saw a young man driving a car with headphones on. Hello! Isn’t that what car stereos are for? And is that safe?
Are we so starved for constant entertainment that we’ll put lives at risk to satisfy the craving?
Consequently, I’m at my curmudgeonly best these days when I drive back and forth to work and pass the many young and middle-age folk who gotta have their music 24/7.
The above is gripe Number 1.
Number 2 peeve is this.
A woman walked by me the other day and practically blew me off my feet with the gallon of perfume she must have dumped over her head before leaving her house that morning. My stomach almost flipped, my nostrils tried to squeeze themselves shut and I couldn’t get the taste of the scent out of my mouth for an hour. Why, oh why, do people do that, I wondered. Don’t they have any friends brave enough to clue them in?
This is far from the first time that’s happened.
Now here’s where an unexpected confluence of events conspired to knock me off my own pedestal.
Having been asked to play guitar to accompany the two singers at a recent wedding ceremony, I felt sort of pressed to learn the songs, all three of which I’d never heard. In fact, I didn’t sit down and listen to them till one week before the event and an hour or two before the three of us were to get together to practise. Feeling a bit panicky, I began carrying around a portable CD player and listening to the songs over and over. Wisely. I thought, I took the whole device (not having a CD player in my jalopy) out to the car to continue listening on my 10-mile trip to the singers’ place.
Wow! With those headphones pressed tight against my head, I was blown away by the quality of the sound. I wore the device all the way home in the car too.
On the day of the wedding, I did an extreme makeover – shower, shave and nose hair pluck – and dressed up in Old Faithful, the suit that’s seen me through many an occasion and gone in and out of style several times. A long look in the mirror produced a favourable assessment by myself, and I was ready to go. Well, almost ready.
I ducked back in the bathroom, fished around in a cabinet and came up with a tiny vial of men’s cologne that arrived under the tree many Christmases ago. Popping the cap, I dobbed a few fluid fingers of the stuff behind my ears (is that the way you do it?) and I was off.
Even with the windows down in my car, the self-administered noxious gas that threatened to rob me of my life’s breath was so overpowering, I was probably risking invasion by George Bush for harbouring a chemical weapon. Panicking, as I did not want to do for the wedding crowd what the woman in the mall had done to me, I wet a finger repeatedly with my tongue and tried to scrub off the offending odour.
Some people stayed away from me at the wedding, but I think it was my guitar playing that scared them off, not the fumes.
So, the lesson for this week, before I pass the basket and don’t be afraid to be generous, is that, as the old saying goes, we mock what we shall become. Right? And that such experiences were sent my way as lessons in humility and tolerance.
You wish.
Yesterday, I saw a woman jogging with great big headphones on.
Commmmmaaaaawwwwwnnnnn!!!!!
