Category: Uncategorized

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Now that the world has dealt successfully with the easier problems of racism, crime, addiction, poverty, war and pollution, it’s time for us to move onto the more serious troubles facing modern man and woman.

I am talking here of serious woes such as the shame of bad breath.
How many times have you found yourself wondering, after a particularly frightening encounter with someone whose breath, as the expression goes, would scare a buzzard off a shit wagon, why someone hasn’t done something about this? Forty years of mouthwash companies experimenting with chlorophyll and retsin and toothpaste companies trying green stripes and red gel and a lot of us still have days when even our pets won’t come near us.

Well, the good news is, someone has done something about it. In October, the Fresh Breath Clinic opened up in Toronto, one of two in North America now treating stubborn mouth odours.

“It’s like a load’s been lifted off me,” one happy clinic patient told a reporter this week. “It was just unbelievable.” My guess is a bigger load’s been lifted off his family and fellow workers.

Of course, we aren’t hearing from the unsuccessful clinic attendees, presumably because no reporter can get close enough for an interview, but who are we to disbelieve someone who has had such a transforming experience? He has been to the mountain and the answer is a special prescription mouth rinse that makes his kisser as sweet as a freshly picked daisy. The rinse apparently also works well for stripping down old tractor bodies for repainting and for opening up those nasty drain clogs. Do not use around open flames.

And now for the world’s other nastiest problem.

Out of London, England comes the news that a new course has been designed to help people stop being excessively nice. Called The Nice Factor, the weekend course is being run by an actor who wants people to stop worrying about what others think.

“We are not against being nice itself, but we try to help people who are always nice – even to people who do not deserve it – and whose lips always say yes when their minds say no,” says course founder Raymond Chandler. “The disease of niceness cripples more lives than alcoholism.”

Now, aside from the fact that it’s been a while since I heard about anyone being run over by someone driving under the influence of niceness, I have no problems agreeing with Chandler’s view. As a chronically “nice” guy of long standing, I have been left standing for long periods in line while others not burdened with such a character defect, cut in front of me at the coffee shop. My response is to reason with myself: “Why cause a scene? What does it matter? Maybe he’s a nut with a loaded handgun in his jacket. Maybe he just didn’t see me. Don’t be petty.” The bottom line is, however, that he has his coffee and is a half hour down the road before I’ve even finished deciding between honey cruller and fancy plain.

So, as you can see, this is a crisis worth attending to. And it has an unexpected side benefit that sort of shows how life works in cycles that almost have an intelligence to them. The people who graduate from treatment for being too nice, it would seem, would have no problem from then on going up to people with barnyard breath and informing them of the fact.

“You smell like a fish factory on a hot day in August,” the no-longer-nice person would hopefully have the decency to say which, if the world were perfect, would result in another enrollee at the Fresh Breath Clinic. (Or, the Open Gunshot Wound Clinic.)

So the answer it seems, is for more us to stop being so nice and send the not-so-sweet-smelling among us for treatment.

Next dilemma, please!

By Jim Hagarty
2014

When I was a boy, I sat transfixed on Sunday mornings in a front pew at the Catholic Church in the country my family and I attended, watching the spectacle unfolding on the grand altar where the priest and his helpers performed their ancient rituals.

Slowly and methodically, they carried golden chalices, poured holy water from glass canisters, rang tiny handbells and put incense into a small holder which the priest then waved toward the congregation as he walked slowly up and down the aisles.

This was spectacle, and for a farm boy growing up in a modest home and spending his days around cattle, tractors and mows of hay, it was all very mystical and magical.

But I think now that the thing that impressed me most about all this was the deliberateness that the priest and the altar boys brought to everything they did on that stage in the big old church. Every motion, every step, every turning of a Bible page or raising of a cup, was done with great reverence and peace. Nothing was done hastily or impulsively.

All was part of a rhythm, like breathing.

In those days, except for the sermon, almost every word spoken during the Mass was in Latin. That simply added to the mystique.

There was much I didn’t understand in the world around me as I grew up. Church was one of the greatest mysteries.

Now, six decades later, it is the mysteries in life that intrigue me, often more than the observable realities of it.

At night, I am sometimes outside, looking up at the moon. The same moon the dinosaurs and the cavemen saw before me.

Much has changed. Much has not.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

We once had the sweetest old sow.
I smile when I think of her now.
She had many litters.
Used no babysitters.
But was helped by a friendly young cow.

There comes a time in a father’s life
When he suddenly doesn’t belong.
For so many years he is Daddy, then Dad,
Then one day, his children are gone.

No more bedtime routines or horsey back rides,
No more pushes on swings in the park.
No more TV cartoons and short story books.
No more holding their hands in the dark.

Yes, this is the fate of a daddy in love,
To let go of his children some day.
He knew from the start that the time would arrive.
But it always seemed so far away.

The only thing that a father can do
When his children are no longer there.
Is cry like his heart has been broken for good,
Till it seems almost too much to bear.

It’s the way of the world and everyone says
You’ll get used to it all someday soon.
And maybe they’re right, they seem so convinced.
But my heart strings are all out of tune.

• Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
1992

Taped to my computer keyboard here at the office is a small, inspiring cartoon of TV’s lovable, stumbly-bum dad, Homer Simpson, holding a nice, big, round, chocolate-covered doughnut and declaring that, “Doughnuts are a man’s best friend.”

Some writers might opt for a little more lofty saying to tape to their computers – something from Shakespeare, perhaps. Or a few lines from a Robbie Burns poem.

But these days, for me, Homer Simpson and his love of doughnuts suit my mood perfectly. He’s an ordinary guy with ordinary tastes. Maybe he can’t afford a villa on the Riviera for the winter but he can afford a doughnut. The simple pleasures, after all, are still the best.

And yet, while Homer Simpson’s idea of man’s best friend and mine are similar, I am a little more expansive in my assessment of what constitutes the closest pal a human can have. To me, doughnut SHOPS are a man’s best friend.

Next to my own home which, thankfully, is the one place on earth I usually want to be most of all, doughnut shops have for years been my favourite places to hang out. It is not that I am addicted so much to coffee and doughnuts – at home, I rarely have either. It’s just that doughnut shops take care of so many needs, other than hunger and thirst, and they do it without emptying my bank account.

A favourite topic of conversation these days for people who live, work and do business in my city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, is how on earth all the doughnut shops now located here will ever survive. At last count, there are nine operating and soon to be operating in the city, a veritable explosion in a place which, until just a few years ago, made do with only two. And it’s possible one or two more may locate here in the near future. As well, coffee shops are springing up in the small towns in the area and even right out in the country.

I listen to and take part in these discussions – after all, this is one of my favourite subjects – and I’ve noticed that many people use the wrong approach to solving the question of whether or not these businesses can survive the competition. Many of them ask, “How much coffee can a city of 35,000 people drink?”, before they conclude we can’t drink all the coffee that nine coffee shops can brew. While they could well be right and only time will tell, I think the recent explosion of doughnut shops in this area doesn’t have as much to do with our need for coffee as our need for companionship and comfort.

To me, today’s doughnut shops are yesterday’s pubs. Where hotels once dotted the city and country landscapes – the town of Mitchell, for example, had as many as nine hotels at one time and now has only one – their fortunes have been in decline for years as people have turned away from drinking and driving and even from drinking itself.

But people still need places where they can gather – like they do in pubs – to shoot the breeze, wait for their car to be repaired, console a friend, take a first date after a movie, sort out their troubles, escape from their wife/husband/kids, stop for a stretch part way through a trip, wait out a recession or a snowstorm and read the Sunday paper when it’s raining outside.

Unless the people of Stratford suddenly don’t need to do these things any more, I think most of our doughnut shops, many of them open 24 hours a day, will hang in there for a while. Besides, there’s more than a bit of Homer Simpson in most of us. We have to take our comfort where we can find it.

And as for the coffee shops being man’s best friend, I think sometimes they’re even better than a best friend. How many best friends would be glad to see you show up at 4 o’clock in the morning?