Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2018

Somebody somewhere recently wrote that only a fool pretends to be wise and the bigger the fool, the more wisdom he pretends to have. This hit home with me as I sometimes foolishly share ideas that seem to me to be, if not entirely wise, then at least somewhere in the neighbourhood of wise, if only in the dusty, unlit outskirts.

So, I feel that I have been judged by this man’s assessment as not only someone who is unwise but an actual fool. I sit here on my couch dejected. I’ve always suspected I was foolish and have spent a lifetime trying to disguise it, primarly by trying to sound wise.

But then a notion begins to occur to me, in the same way most fools have notions occur to them. By sharing his bit of wisdom about foolish fellas flinging out non-wisdom into the world, is this wise guy actually outing himself as a fool? He has dispensed his wisdom on the topic, and not only that, on a subject that is pretty wide-ranging. So maybe this guy, as it might turn out ironically, is the biggest fool of all, pretending to pronounce on the folly of fools. However, my guess is he believes he is the one exception to his own rule, that he is, in fact, a wise man dispensing nothing but wise guy wisdom. I wonder, and this is probably a foolish idea, whether or not what said brainiac has been brandishing is really only fool’s gold.

Yes, I think I’ve got this sucker. But for a while there, I have to be honest, he almost had me fooled.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Once a man, twice a child. That is one of my favourite sayings, describing, as it does so succinctly, the inevitable stages of many people’s lives. But I think the world is in need of another new nugget regarding the aging process and I suggest this ripoff of the adage in the first paragraph: Once long hair, twice a buzz cut.

There are little signposts along the journey that let you know this is a one-way trip you’re on and the day you are told, by the person who looks after your hair, that you don’t really need to come back any more, you feel yourself in semi-schock.

“When you’re using the trimmer on your beard,” says the hair stylist, “just keep on going over the rest of your head,” She fires up her clippers and takes a run at it, just to show me the way. Suddenly, I am transported back to Fred Guy’s barbershop in Monkton and the simplicity of what was known back then as a “brush cut.” A few waves of his magic wand and I was back in peak trim, each hair follicle having been reduced to about one sixteenth of an inch in length. My entire head, after my brush cut, would look like Fred Flinstone’s face an its three-day shadow he could never quite shake.

It’s a bit sad, of course, to be rounding this turn, but a bit liberating as well. I now have one black comb (a bit bent) and one blue brush (fairly new) for sale and expect to earn a fair sum for both. I no longer have to worry about my hair getting “mussed up” and my baseball caps have never fit better. My total outlay from here on in on hair dryers I expect to add up, with both taxes added on, to zero. A bonus, I suppose, is that some people have been telling me all week that I look much neater. It was never one of my life’s goals to look neat, but I guess if this is considered a positive quality, then I’ll take it.

Another sign that time is moving ever so aggressively on has to do with a man’s “trousers” (as they call them in civilized, English-speaking nations) and how well they resist the pull of gravity. I remember many years ago, having a good chuckle watching a pair of pants fall down around the ankles of an “old” man next door. First of all, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he suddenly had a lot of extra baggage hovering just above his sock lines and secondly, upon discovering this fact, he seemed not to care one whit about it.

The other night, while racing to move some backyard topsoil before the sun went completely clown, I bent to heave some rocks when I felt a “pop” followed by a loosening around the waist, sure signs that a button has fled the scene. But hurry is a terrible thing, with the sun in such a rush to disappear, and so I decided to carry on. While hustling across the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of soil, I suddenly felt much cooler around the leg, thigh and groinal areas and knew that I had been struck by my karma: What we mock, we shall become!

Standing there in the middle of my yard with buzz cut above and no pants below, I had my “aha!” moment: Middle age seemed suddenly in my rear-view mirror.

My only possible salvation is the prospect that I might get in on a little of that “not caring a whit” attitude my neighbour seemed to have. Day by day, I feel that coming on and I can only think that that must be nature’s major compensation for all these completely undeserved changes.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

I heard on the radio yesterday that gas in Venezuela is four cents a gallon. A gallon. Four cents. This works out, for all us on the metric system of measurement, to about one cent per litre. I drive a small car. It would cost me about fifty cents to fill it up in Venezuela, if I could figure out how to get it there and back. The last time the government in Venezuela tried to raise the price of gas was in 1989 and there were riots. Hundreds of people died. I can’t think of a point to all this but I thought you might want to know as you fill up your tank with four or five dollar a gallon gas.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a bully named Bob
Who hurt me all day till I’d sob.
I do not know why
That guy made me cry.
Did he think that that was his job?

By Jim Hagarty
1994

To those of you who think that newspapers are only full of bad news, I would direct your attention to the recent article which detailed the efforts by scientists to reduce the methane gas emanating from the millions of cows on the planet.

Yes, you felt despair over war, homelessness, poverty, crime and terrorism but you were only seeing half the picture. Stack up those things against the work being done to lessen the bad air coming out of various openings on cattle and I think you’ll agree the picture doesn’t look so dim.

In a research barn in Ottawa, ran the Canadian Press news report, a cow named Betsy is being feverishly experimented on with the aim of cutting down on her contributions to the greenhouse gases causing environmental damage to our planet. On her left side has been implanted a plastic porthole through which scientists are able to work on her main stomach, a body part that regularly churns out 600 litres of gas a day. By genetically altering the feed she eats, they’re hoping to make her digestive system work better.

The bad news is, it’s going to take at least five more years to get this system working, so the burps and flatulence from the world’s cattle herds will probably have warmed up this planet to an average skin-blistering 45-degrees Celsius by then and none of us will care how smelly the cow’s belly can be.

Of course, as usual, the scientists haven’t bothered to place a quick call to a certain daily newspaper’s rural editor in Stratford, Ontario, who spent his formative years working in large wooden enclosures where dozens of gas-producing cattle were kept and who often wondered about ways of making them less windy (the cows, that is, not the barns.) Many years before scientists started tossing around the idea that diet had something to do with it, the editor in question had already figured that out.

“It’s all that bran,” he realized one day after dumping yet another load of grain in their feeder. With no way to measure exactly, the young farmer nevertheless estimated each cattle beast was chomping down the equivalent of about 60 bran muffins a day not to mention the 25 large cans of corn niblets and, if a forkful of hay can be compared to a salad, about 10 or 12 caesars before sunrise. You eat all that, day and see how many parties you get invited to.

This problem is compounded by the fact that, after the cow has chomped down all this stuff, she then finds a nice quiet place under a tree to sit for the next six hours, regurgitating it all back up from her stomach into her mouth and chewing it all over again.

The editor, who is routinely ignored by the science community, says save the $100 million in tax (or whatever the research is costing), cut back on the muffins to one a day and institute the following menu for all cows everywhere:

Breakfast: cheese pancakes.

Lunch: cheese soufflé.

Supper: macaroni and cheese.

Bedtime snack: biscuits and cheese.

And when the cow flatus dilemma is finally solved, as it surely will be, let us then turn our attention to even bigger problems, like getting birds to stop dropping their droppings and fish to hold their water in the water.

The rural editor, if asked, has ideas for remedying those environmental hazards, too.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I moved into my house 29 years ago next month. One of my first forays after moving in was to a small variety store on the next street, a short walk away. I met the nice couple who ran the place and since then, we have had many a chat over the counter. Weather, politics, philosophy, music, life – it all got thoroughly discussed and I said many a brilliant thing. I think they learned a lot.

I was single then and eventually I married and kids arrived. When the kids were young, they’d send me home with a free popsicle for them, from time to time. Sometimes I didn’t have enough money for my purchases. They’d wave me off, pay us later, they said. I always tried to remember to do that. Sometimes a dime, sometimes 50 cents.

But something has always been amiss. After almost three decades, I have never known their names. I always hoped that some other customer that was there when I was would address them by their names but it never happened. After 20 years or so, it just became too embarrassing to come right out and ask them.

Last week, I noticed a help wanted sign on the door. So I asked them what was up. Well, this is what was up: “Jay’s retiring,” said Jay’s wife. “So is Jenny,” he chipped in. Now, I could have asked them their names, on the first day I met them. Instead, I found out the information as they are preparing for the last day I see them. My one consolation is the fact that I am pretty sure they don’t know my name.

Yesterday, I went into the store, and someone new was behind the counter. A friendly young woman, mid-30s. I asked her if she was the new employee, and she said yes. Then I asked her something else. “What is your name?” I said. “Nicole,” she answered me. “I’m Jim,” I said. Not making that mistake again. The next 29 years should be a breeze.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I can think of a few differences between the editor of the New York Times and the editor of the Stratford City Gazette. For starters, he could probably fit my car in his trunk and my house on his back porch. (Why he’d want to do either is anybody’s guess, but you get the point.)

Secondly, I’m guessing his office stretches for miles and that a mighty oak tree gave up its life so that he could have a desk. I could be very wrong on this, but I am also taking a shot in the dark and suggesting that he doesn’t share his office with two reporters. But I think that possibly the biggest difference between the Times editor and I, can be wrapped up nicely by the following little story of something that happened to me, which I don’t think happens very often to him.

I was leaning back in my chair at the hair salon, anticipating having my hair washed in the sink in preparation for having it cut, when a woman moved into the chair next to me, pulled out her sharpshooters and let me have it point blank at close range. Very close range.

“Whatever possessed you to write that article?” my neighbour to my right asked me, about an opinion piece we recently ran. And as we were lowered down into our respective water basins, the fight was on. As an editor, it isn’t easy to defend yourself at the best of times, but it’s especially hard when you’re horizontal, water splashing over your head and running into your ears. But I fought back bravely. The offending piece was something I’d written a while back, calling into question the veracity of a news report in other papers. I had had the audacity to ask, in my article, whether or not the incident in question really ever took place. And shockingly, by inference, I guess, I had called into question the judgment of a leading Stratford citizen, something, apparently, that is not supposed to be done in this town.

Did I know how much investigation of this incident in question was done by the above-mentioned leading citizen, I was scolded, somewhere between the shampoo and the rinse.

“How much was done?” I asked. Well, it so happened, the leading citizen talked to someone who had witnessed the event, the only witness, in fact.

“That’s it?” I asked, impudently. “I talked to him too. What if he wasn’t telling the truth?”

Eventually, both hairdressers who were attending to this squabbling mob, sat both chairs upright again and launched arguer and arguee back onto our feet, From there, we continued our healthy discussion over the 15 feet from the sinks to the bank of hairdressers’ chairs and unfortunately, we were seated side by side again. The poor hairdressers waited patiently as each of us clambered for the higher ground, and eventually we were seated, mouths still firing away like pop guns at a carnival.

Finally, my opponent’s stylist came up with a brilliant plan. “Let’s get our hair dryers going,” she said to my hairdresser. “Maybe if they can’t hear each other, they’ll shut up.”

The break in the action was a welcome relief but it also signalled a too-soon-conclusion to my haircut, through which I usually am able to catch a few winks. Whether disturbed at having my opinion challenged or just mad at missing my sleep, I met my adversary at the counter where we paid a nervous-looking receptionist and writer and reader proceeded into the cold outside the shop and argued for another half an hour.

Can somebody point me in the direction of New York?