Month: December 2017

By Jim Hagarty
2011

When our kids were very young I was often distressed at the way our home looked as though someone had thrown a grenade in the front door and ran away.

I complained about this to my older sister Betty and said I was on a tear to get rid of clutter. Having raised three kids of her own, she advised me not to get rid of absolutely everything as kids will make playthings out of the most ordinary “junk”. I took her advice and was glad I did.

And now, though I would still like a perfect house, there are many compromises that come about because of considerations like that. I need to fix the screen door on the back of our house but because it is kind of weak and past its prime, the cats are able to open and close it to let themselves in and out. If I repaired it or put on a new one, that would be the end of that. And we get a kick out of hearing the back door slam when Mario has made another hasty exit.

Same thing in the garage. We have old-type windows which we can prop open with a stick and the cats can vault through to let themselves in. If we put in proper double-hung, double-pane windows with good screens there will be no more cats flying through windows.

So, I have a feeling as long as they’re around, our palace will always have a few useful flaws.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

If I was a mouse – not the wimpy and timid type of mouse – but the real, grey little rodent with the beady eyes and long tail, I would move to my place.

In a heartbeat.

The Hagarty estate screams mouse resort in so many ways, I would not be able to resist the lure. With a six-foot-high wooden fence around the backyard, it is as close to a gated community as a mouse could ever get.

Mouse dwellings located on the property are many and varied, the best of which are the two twin-tower condos at the back of the lot which, in an earlier life, were called plastic composters, one of them black, the other brown. Inside each one is a veritable mouse paradise with heaps of warm, black compost, that haven’t been spread on the flowerbeds in the past two years because the owner doesn’t want to disturb the tenants, which, if he hasn’t actually grown fond of them, is kind of intrigued by their industriousness and inventiveness.

Inside each apartment complex, the heaps of black matter have been formed over many months into deep little caves and highways and whenever the lid is raised for new vegetable scraps and other organic matter to be added, there is a great scurrying about of the occupants from hole to hole, cave to cave, and, having grown accustomed to the routine, the braver among them now sit and stare up at the big guy in the greasy green cap and glasses, about to dump a pail full of potato, orange and banana peelings onto their heads. Apparently, they love this, and if I were a mouse, l’d probably love it too. Imagine someone lifting the roof off your house twice a week and dumping all your favourite foods, all ready to eat, into your kitchen and you have a picture of what a great event this must be for them.

Yes, life is good in the condos, and the compost dwellers are a happy and sociable lot. They even have constructed a sort of compost highway connecting both boxes and if things get a little too intense in one, they all scram over to the other till the hubbub dies down.

Not many downsides here, unless you count the occasional alley cat who camps out before the condos for hours, waiting for a meal of his own. And there was that incident where the owner stuck a potato fork into the brew to stir it up, as is supposed to be done, and retrieved the fork to find a mouse impaled on one of the tines.

Fortunately for the mice, the fork has since broke and hasn’t been replaced. The tragedy is still whispered about by the elders at night after the mouselets are all tucked in. In time, they will take fork-safety training.

When life gets dull, there are trips to be made to the shed up by the house, where birdseed and other sweet confections can often be snacked on, a sort of mouse fast-food restaurant, if you will.

But the ultimate in mouse habitation is located in the big blue box the owners call their house, more specifically, the space between the basement cieling tiles and the floor joists. Warm heating pipes to snuggle up to. Acres of interesting places to explore. Privacy a Trappist monk would envy. It has it all. It is where condo dwellers go for their vacations.

But like all travel, in the big house there are some dangers. Two big cats wander the premises and so far have claimed six innocent lives. And when the cats aren’t after them, the humans are, with their little, peanut-butter-baited traps.

However, it is said those who are afraid to die are afraid to live and so the truly venturous among the mice population don’t mind rolling the dice for a little R&R.

Personally, if I was one of the mice, I’d pass on the house and stick to the condos. Sunday, both were filled to the brim with nice, dry maple leaves. How nice to even be provided blankets for the winter along with the free room and board.

Sad day (and so close to Christmas, too). Today I said goodbye to my precious Asics running shoes after 10 years of quality service. The Footwear Hall of Fame wanted them but I know I would go there, see them, and live the heartbreak all over again. Farewell my faithful buddies.

By Jim Hagarty
1986

These days, to get some distance away from the pressures of keepin’ it together in 1986, I retreat to my lawnmower and the half acre or so of grass that grows in the ground around my house. Some weeks, the grass doesn’t grow fast enough to keep up with my need to cut it, so it gets another premature trim, whether it wants it or not.

My lawn’s not a 40-acre field and my mower’s not an old John Deere tractor but the repetitious job of walking round and round an ever-shrinking perimeter, gradually changing and improving the appearance of the landscape is a soothing, satisfying exercise that takes me back to those long and generally happy days I spent plowing, cultivating, disking and harrowing the fields on my parents’ farms. Has it been almost 10 years since I climbed up onto the seat of a tractor, let out the clutch and wheeled the machinery out the yard and over the rich, brown earth?

I say “generally happy” days because I also remember the many hours I resented the work which had to be done regardless of whether or not all the other teenagers in the world were lying on the beach at Grand Bend or sitting at the drive-in movie theatre in Stratford. At those times, it seemed no worse fate could befall a kid than to be born the son of a farmer.

But more often than not, being assigned to the tractor for the day was a real break and I didn’t have to be asked twice whether I wanted to do it. It was a chance for a bit of privacy – a rare thing in a family of seven kids – and it beat the heck out of fixing fence, cleaning stables, straightening up the driving shed or, and I can hardly bring myself to write the words, picking stones.

Plowing was by far the best job there was where tractors were involved. For one thing, it made the most dramatic change you could make to the ground and thus, what you had accomplished with your time was clearly visible. Secondly, it was the simplest of jobs – just drop that right front wheel in the furrow and settle back. The tractor practically steered itself. It was so easy that it was even possible to fall asleep shortly after starting off down the field. And plows seem more sturdy than disks and cultivators so there were not a lot of breakdowns.

Driving tractor offered another great advantage. It was the best place on earth to practice singing like Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney or the Everley Brothers. After all, who could hear you? You could hardly hear yourself above the banging of the tractor’s engine.

At least, it seemed no one could hear you. One clear, summer’s evening, I was heading from the shed to the house when I heard a farmer belting out a tune at the top of his lungs as he rode his nearly silent tractor along the road past our place. It seems a man’s voice carries better through the warm night air than the chugging of an engine. I thought, “Oh no! You mean people have been able to hear me all these years?”

I bet, at this very moment, there are a few farmers out somewhere in Perth County singing up a storm while they cultivate their crops. Others, maybe more of them these days, will, instead, be listening to FM stereo radio or cassette tapes in the climate-controlled cabs of their machines.

But, over and above the sputtering of some old Ford or Massey Ferguson tractor somewhere across this county, the lines of Don and Phil’s Bye Bye Love are breaking through at this very moment. They have to be.

Tractors were also great places to figure things out. That was all right if what needed figurin’ out was something pleasant like some romantic encounter from the weekend before. It wasn’t quite so wonderful, however, when you headed out on the tractor filled with doubt and trouble but even then, those few hours alone often helped to soothe a worried mind. Yet today, when problems crowd in, I head out onto the back roads in my car for slow drives through the country and it helps.

I never in my adult life felt so big a lump in my throat as the day of my parents’ auction sale when I had to drive each of our four tractors in turn up to the gas pump to be readied for the farmers who had bought them to drive them away.

To this day, I can still see the old John Deere AR and my favourite, the John Deere M (the Little M, we called it), heading up the road and out of sight.

They weren’t just tractors. They were my friends. They came to the farm the year before I was born, like they were getting ready for me. And they didn’t come cheap. Each one cost $500, brand new.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

Years ago, a farmer in southern Ontario near where I live, made a series of very bad decisions one night. The first one was to leave a local hotel in a drunken state and start up his car for the ride home. His second foolish move was to try to outrun the police who attempted to pull him over. A high-speed chase ensued through the countryside. The farmer drove straight (well, maybe not so straight) home, in the lane and right up his barn bank. He jumped out of his car and following another very bad bright idea he had, he hauled open the gigantic wooden doors at the top of the bank and drove his car into the upstairs of his barn. He then closed the doors.

The perfect crime. The police, still in hot pursuit, would never find him.

In one final dumb decision for the ages, the farmer then climbed back into his car to move it ahead but tramped too hard on the gas and crashed right through another set of doors on the other side of the barn. The car went flying out the second storey of the barn and landed in a huge pile of cow manure in the barnyard.

I am not sure of the outcome of the whole sordid episode but I do know he was in deep shit.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I have got a bad case of the iPoor Blues.

I was in a big, modern computer shop the other day and l didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well, actually, I did know enough to cry as I could not afford to buy all or any of the goodies displayed all around me.

Especially what I could not afford to buy was a sleek new iMac. It is a beauty. If it was a car, it would be a Corvette. Small, compact, all white. It has a flat monitor, as do most personal computers these days, but unlike most, it has no tower – the entire guts of the thing are somehow squished into the monitor itself. Even more perfect: it has a remote control. It would take up little room on my desktop and is the only thing standing between me and complete happiness. (That and the fact that my town does not have a caramel popcorn factory and Gordie Howe doesn’t live at the end of my street.)

However, the store wants $1,300 plus tax for it – about $1,500.
Seems a lot for a personal computer when you can buy brand new Dells and Acers for $500.

Still …

To me, this little episode, besides illustrating my ongoing addiction to toys, also shows how expectations have changed when it comes to modern electronics and the prices we are willing – or unwilling – to pay for them. Because sitting in my basement is the first computer I ever bought – also an Apple – for which I somehow had no trouble writing a cheque for $4,000. That was in 1994 and although Macs were more expensive even then than Windows-based PCs, all computers were much more expensive than today. It was just assumed that to get one, you’d have to be willing to part with a few thousand.

So, $4,000 then and $1,500 now. But, the difference in price gets even greater if you count in the disparity in computers.

My 1994 Mac has eight megabytes of RAM. The one I checked out this week has 512 megabytes. It is, by my calculations, 64 times as powerful. Its speed (as far as I can figure out these things) is 667 megahertz. My first rig runs at 66 megahertz. Ten times as fast.

But what hurts is the fact that the new iMac has a hard drive which contains a whoppin’ 160 gigabytes whereas my first Mac has 250 megabytes, half of what my son’s MP3 player, the size of a small cigarette lighter, has. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. If my math is right, the new hard drive is 640 times larger than the old one.

So, just to round out a few figures, it seems to me the new Mac is about 50 times the computer my old one is at just over 25 per cent of the cost.

Therefore (Einstein I am not) that would put the real price of the new computer, in relation to the old, at about $100.

Now, $100 I can afford. In fact, I’d be willing to double that, on a dare.

But I’ve got a feeling the good people at this big computer store, with their identity tags around their necks, would probably not see my reasoning and slip me a new Corvette, er, iMac, for $200.
So, I could go the other way, and tell you that in today’s terms, my old computer is worth about $200,000. And I am willing to part with it, for a very good price.

Say, $1,500?

Ah, the heady days of 1994. During a few subsequent shopping trips back then, I bought a laser printer (black and white, eight-by-ten-inch copies only) for $2,000. I just looked up a (probably superior) brand new Samsung laser printer on the Internet for about $100.

I bought a scanner for $600. Today, you can buy a better one for pocket change.

I guess what has me crying is the fact that I have computer equipment at home for which I paid about $8,000 and for which, assuming I was able to sell it, I could probably now get enough to buy me a couple of Happy Meals, which, given the preceding information, would not make me happy.

However, at least I do not have to agonize over having paid too much for a cellphone. My first, about 15 years ago, cost $100. But a friend, an “early adopter” who bought one of the original “car phones” years before, paid $4,000. Today, they give them away like popsicles. And they can do everything but scratch your back.

And speaking of back scratchers. The first one I ever bought …

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I am a fortunate person. I have so much. Including my own special toast-disposal service.

The service is conveniently located nestled between my ankles below my chair at the breakfast table. As I munch away on my flakes and toasted bread, the service idles patiently below me. Now and then, I break off an unwanted small sliver of toast and lower it carefully with my right hand in the direction of the floor beside my chair. When the toast bit reaches the level of about halfway between floor and chair, the toast disposalater sends out a jaw-like contraption complete with what can only be described as a set of teeth. These instruments clamp down tightly on the toast and sometimes on the fingers holding the toast. The toast then disappears under the chair, never to be seen again.

It is a very convenient service I have lucked into and it can also be depended on to remove many other table items such as cereal flakes, shreddies,and krispies. The device can also be used to remove other food items such as bits of noodles, meat, potatoes and pancakes.

It is sort of a mobile waste-disposal contraption which, unlike the stationary ones installed in sinks, requires some upkeep and care. It is necessary, for example, to attach it to a leash and take it out of doors several times a day to capture the waste products that the waste disposer itself generates, ironically.

Also, unlike most waste gobblers, the one I use needs more than table scraps and must be topped up several times daily with store-bought nuggets of meat and cereal kept under the kitchen sink in order to keep it in peak running order. It is also necessary to sit the device on your lap while watching TV at night and it is even recommended that it be taken to bed with you.

It is an unusual contraption, to say the least, but almost human-like in many ways. So uncanny is the resemblence that many times, owners of such machines are tempted to give them a name. Mine, for example, is named Tobe which is short for Total Breakfast Eater.