Jim Hagarty

I live in a Canadian city that has a population of 30,0000 plus.

It’s a pretty good place but I have always felt a little nervous living here.

That is why I am pulling up stakes next week and moving to Kennesaw, Georgia, a city the same size as mine but with one major difference. Every home in Kennesaw is required by law to have a gun on the premises. Every home. REQUIRED. BY LAW.

It is not just legal to own a handgun, shotgun, rocket launcher, etc., it is mandatory.

I would feel much safer living there knowing that whenever I knocked on someone’s door, the owner of that home would be armed.

And everyone who knocked on mine would know that I am packing heat as well. That would be so great.

I had a big fat groundhog in my backyard last summer. Took me weeks to encourage him to move on. In Kennesaw: BAM!!! Critter gone.

Noisy freakin’ crows in my maple trees. BAM!!! BAM!!! BAM!!! What is that I hear? No crows. Yay!

Annoying door-to-door salesmen? I’m pretty sure there is no such creature roaming the streets of Kennesaw.

Yes, this morning six people were shot in Kennesaw and the shooter was shot and killed but hey, we have traffic accidents in my town but we don’t ban the cars, do we?

Exactly.

I’ll miss you all who will stay behind in Canada but if you’re ever down in Kennesaw, drop in any time. We can put on some bulletproof vests and take a stroll downtown.

Kennesaw is lovely this time of year.

It hardly ever rains during graveyard services.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I love this sort of thing.

When I went to university in London, Ontario, Canada in the 1970s, we drank regularly at the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) hotel by the tracks on Richmond Street. The place was known affectionately and unofficially by everyone in the city as the Ceeps.

Many years after I graduated, I was driving by the place one day and chuckled to see that the sign out front had been changed and upgraded and now read simply, “The Ceeps”. No more CPR Hotel.

In fact, I bet today’s university students who raise a glass there don’t know where the name Ceeps came from or that the building was once a railway hotel.

Customers of Canada’s Giant Tiger took to calling their favourite discount store the GT Boutique, as though it was a high-scale clothing outlet.

Rather than be offended, the owners of the place saw the humour in it and capitalized on it. They now use GT Boutique in their signage and marketing.

Today, I was in a stationery and computer store and was checking out some printer paper when I saw a bunch of paper labelled Dunder Mifflin Paper. That was the name of the fictional paper company in Scranton, Ohio, in the great sitcom The Office which ended its multi-year run this spring. Somebody was thinking.

I don’t know if I would buy the paper because of its connection to a fictional TV show I loved, but I might. Never know.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

On Saturday afternoon I spent a few hours in a mall in the nearby city of Cambridge, a large shopping centre with an indoor skating rink.

I was waiting on some family and friends who were wandering the place, so I just sat in a seating area along a main corridor and watched people walk by.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy people watching and always have enjoyed it. I can’t tell you what it is I find so interesting, but I just know it always makes me feel good.

Teenagers walking in groups, most of them on their cellphones and smartphones, joshing each other.

Parents with their kiddies, grandparents with their grandkiddies.

Young men in wild attire I wish I had the nerve to wear. Young women who seem to have walked right off the pages of a fashion magazine. Young women who have no interest in fashion at all.

Twenty-something professional men and women with perfect grooming who look like they’d be riding home in BMW’s or Audis.

Old folks moving slower than everyone else but part of the flow nonetheless.

Some people marching with great urgency. Others meandering.

Teenage boys looking embarrassed to be with their parents and trying to walk as detached from them as they could. Boys and girls in the blush of first love walking hand in hand and enjoying the thrill of romance up close.

I had brought a book with me and tried to read it but kept looking up to watch the parade. Then I started nodding off and at one point, lost consciousness and almost fell on the floor.

Worried about staying awake for the ride home as no alternate driver was along, I wandered into a newspaper shop and searched the coolers for an energy drink.

“What are you after?” said the shopkeeper, a man in his early 50s perhaps.

“A Monster,” I replied. “The green one?” “Yes,” I said.

“Ah, a man after my own heart,” said the man. He got a can out of the cooler for me.

“I hear these are not good for you,” I ventured as I pulled out a five dollar bill.

“You know what’s bad for you?” asked the shopkeeper as he rang up the sale. “Everything!” He had drank two Monsters on his drive to work of several hours that morning.

“They save my life.”

That made me feel great. I had permission to do something I shouldn’t do. I liked this guy.

I went back to my seat, popped the top on my witch’s brew and savoured every mind-alerting sip. By the time we were ready to leave the mall, I was bright as a daisy. I could have driven from Cambridge, Ontario, to Cambridge, Massachusetts – and back.

It was a great day. I had watched a whole bunch of people I’d never seen before and drank my first guilt-free Monster. And made it home alive.

It’s a good day when you make it home alive.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

I sing and play guitar and sometimes I get asked why I don’t perform in public more often. The short answer is that the offers have dried up since Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson died. But there is a longer answer and if you can stand to sit through it, here it is.

When I agree to play somewhere other than the elaborate stage I have set up in my bedroom where the acoustics are awesome and the imaginary audience is all-adoring, the body that would need to accompany me on such a gig raises a major objection.

“You drag me out to that concert, Jim, and I WILL SEE YOU IN HELL.”

Rare has been the occasion when Body did not make good on its promise. And the sequence of steps by which my general and alarming physical decline is made manifest is predictable and awful.

To begin with, though I left my teenage years behind a full 44 years ago, Body is still somehow able to work up a good pimple just in time for a show. As it did this week in the days leading up to a few songs I played at an event on Saturday.

At the beginning of the week, I started to feel a pain on the side of my nose and I thought to myself, “No way. It couldn’t be.” But it could be and was.

When I looked in the mirror on Saturday morning, there it was in all its glory. Blossomed and white like a beautiful puffball mushroom on the edge of a forest on a nice summer’s day. My first “whitehead” since last time I played in public.

When you’re 63 and still able to work up a pimple that would cause a baby to fill its Pampers if he saw it, you are probably owed some sort of rebate from God, but there it was.

So you heat up a sewing pin and lance it and hope it doesn’t ooze too badly all day. (I am an expert at this, having lanced dozens of them before first dates in high school and beyond.)

My cat has a pimple behind his ear. Why couldn’t I just have one there for once?

Then comes the shaving. I can shave my face a thousand times and draw nary a drop of blood but on the day of a public performance, Marie Antoinette and I have a lot in common, though I don’t manage to lose my head over it.

Saturday morning, fully aware of what was almost certain to happen, I took out my “safety” razor and started scraping away. Soon, one gusher appeared and then another beside it. Two nice and lovely slices on my cheek that at least, with the blood they emitted, distracted somewhat from the pimple on my nose, about two inches away.

Finally, at the concert, shaking like a popcorn maker, and about an hour before I was to appear, guitar in hand, came another stage in this fun-filled adventure. My bowels, which, strangely, had not been heard from much all week, decided that now would be a perfect time to cripple with pain the expanse of muscle and skin enclosing them.

I rushed to the, thankfully unoccupied, stall in the washroom. Emerging from there, feeling better, my bladder soon announced that from then until the end of the show, it would be filling up and in need of emptying faster than a farmer’s bathtub on Saturday night.

Minutes before showtime, my hands began to sweat. The palms of a person’s hands are not supposed to sweat, but here they were, moistening up like a mama’s eyes at her firstborn child’s piano recital.

“And now we would like to welcome to the stage, Jim Hagarty.”

Guitar in slippery hand, feet shuffling to stool on stage, vibrating butt on seat. Fingers begin to shake faster than Elvis’s hips. Audience seated, big smiles on faces. If these people were teenage girls, they’d be screaming their heads off about now.

And then, saving its best for last, Body sends out Brain to finish me off. Three seconds before I open my mouth, Brain completely erases the memory from my hard drive. Song is gone. Lyrics gone. Tune gone.

Trembling hands unable to form chords on guitar as the memory of all that is gone too. And yet, somehow, a few minutes later, I hear applause.

Maybe I imagined it. My imagination rarely stops working.

During my performance on Saturday, I said between songs, I haven’t done this in 30 years but I believe that every 30 years a fella should get up and sing a song. And I do believe that.

Catch my next show when I do my encore at 93. Should be fun to see what Body has in store for me by then.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

Has this happened to you? You go to bed, maybe earlier than usual, then sleep for hours and hours and hours. You dream three, maybe four movies. You toss and turn more than a huge cement mixer truck. Finally, you wander down to the bathroom to check in the mirror to see how bright your teeth are, and wander back to bed. Before you dive in one more time, you glance at the alarm clock and expect to see it read 5:30, maybe 6 a.m. Instead, it says only 1:30. What the heck? Something should be done about that.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

This morning’s headline: Yogurt-eating mice found to have larger testicles.

A few questions: Who left the yogurt out and then who first noticed a mouse run by and commented, “Look at the set on that guy. Holy mackerel!”

To liven up the story, these are elderly mice. So these old guys are chowing down on yogurt and literally, growing a pair.

Which begs one more query: When you see a mouse, can you tell its age immediately? Does an old one have grey hair, bald patches and a belly? Does it have trouble hearing the cat sneak up on it?

This is all too much for me except for the uncomfortable feeling that my taxes are paying somebody to figure all this out. Somebody who spends his days running along behind old yogurt-eating mice to see how much their balls are growing.

Oh well, back to my yogurt.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I had a great day today, the 62nd anniversary of my birthday. I am a lucky, lucky man.

But every birthday I have now gets compared somewhat to two doozies I experienced earlier in my life.

My family and friends threw me a surprise party on my 40th and another one when I turned 50. They were great events and I appreciated them very much.

But the second one was a little bit of a heart stopper and one aspect of it still haunts me from to time.

My wife and kids and I had just returned from church, a little too early as it turned out, and noticed no unusual activity around the house. But as my son and I walked up the steps to the front door, I noticed it wasn’t completely closed and I had a strong feeling that someone was in the house. I sent my son back to the car, then carefully opened the door.

All was quiet but then I saw a foot partially protruding from a doorway. My heart speeded up and I yelled, “Who’s in here?”

Realizing they’d been caught, everyone jumped out to yell “Surprise!” It took a few minutes for me to calm down and we had a heck of a good party.

But 12 years later, I sometimes still see that foot when I come into the empty house.

I don’t know what I would do if the foot ever turned out to belong to a home invader. A home six doors up the street from ours was broken into two weeks ago.

No thanks.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I just might need to set up a little recording room in my house, garage or shed.

The other day, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my recorder, wearing a set of headphones and holding my guitar. I pushed the record button and instantly I could hear everything with a lot of clarity. That is the value of wearing the headphones – you can hear your voice and guitar so well and as a result, sing and play better.

So, I began strumming away and started yodelling up a storm. But I was distracted by this weird scratching and scrabbling noise in the background.

I thought, as I sang, “What the heck is that?”

I stopped recording. The noises stopped. I started up again and so did the scratching.

I looked out the window. It sounded like there was a hailstorm in the backyard. There was not. I started again, so did these annoying sounds. I stopped. They stopped.

I took off the phones and looked around, then started playing guitar again.

It was then I realized that the eight gerbils who live in four aquariums in our living room came alive when the music did. They jumped in their little ferris wheels and ran up and down and in and out of their coconuts, looking for all the world like the happy feet crowd at a teen dance.

When I stopped playing, they slowed down and stopped.

I put the headphones back on and started recording again and thought, well, maybe it’s not so bad. It just sounds like some percussion in the background.

So I sang away until our dog, lying on top of the couch and looking out the window, started barking his head off at the mailman.

“Shaddapp!!!” I yelled at him, in the middle of my song. This was clearly not working out. The recording of a sensitive song interspersed with gerbil scrabbling, dog barking and Shaddapp!!! was obviously flawed.

Oh, and the furnace came on now and then, adding yet another delightful little element.

I finally gave up, went out into the garaqe and accomplished my mission. The only ambient sounds that intruded were those made by the occasional passing car in the street.

I don’t know. I might have missed my chance. The gerbils and I did sound pretty good together.

Could we make an act out of it? James and the Jurbils? Jimmy and the Jerbys? Maybe we could figure out a way of working the poodle into the ensemble.

I’ve been told for years, after all, that my music has been going to the dogs.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

Jim Hagarty’s neighbours are a prosperous gang and he is happy for them.

One neighbour has a big new pickup truck, a $70,000 pricetag but he got a break on it. What a wonderful machine.

Two doors down, another neighbour bought a beautiful motorhome last summer. Hagarty had a tour inside. He speculates it comes with room service. Or should.

Across the street, one man has a Corvette. It’s used, but still, it’s a CORVETTE! The neighbour beside him has a shiny, fancy motorcycle. Hagarty is not sure of the make but it’s extremely noisy so that must be good.

Still another neighbour directly across the street has a widescreen TV that appears to cover one whole wall of his living room. If the blinds are open, and even if they aren’t, Hagarty can see all the shows his neighbour watches. He seems to be into action movies.

Next door, just yesterday, Hagarty smelled some wonderful cooking aromas coming from those neighbours’ verandah and he looked over to see that the couple there has a very fancy new barbecue. Not sure if it has a sink and running water, but it might.

Farther down the street, in the driveway, sits a new, candy apple red Kia Soul. A few doors to the east, is a new Toyota Rav4. Black. Very sleek.

Then there is the array of backyard hottubs, above-ground pools, in-ground pools, and who knows what else.

Hagarty is not envious of any of these people and the proof of that is the fact that he discusses all these glorious new acquisitions with his neighbours when he sees them out and about.

But he worries that they are jealous of him. Because he has a brand new pooper scooper with which to gather up his doggie’s offerings on their twice-daily walks. It is a marvel of modern engineering. Black. Easy to use. Very efficient. Lightweight, even when filled with poop.

And not one of his neighbours has made any comment to Hagarty at all about his new device. When people will not even acknowledge something new you have, you know they are burning up with envy.

To be honest, Hagarty is a little disappointed in this obvious character flaw in the spendthrifts living around him.

So he happens to be super fortunate.

So what?

©2020 Jim Hagarty

Like a lot of things these days, road rage just ain’t what it used to be. A man on a freeway in Florida cut off a woman while changing lanes so she shrugged her shoulders as if to say WTF? That was his cue, of course, to start chasing her and her carload of kids. Chased her, then pulled out a gun and pointed it at her kids. She dodged him. So he grabbed an assault rifle, a perfectly logical response to the situation, but before he could mow down anybody, he shot himself in the leg and crashed his car. I believe what this calls for, to prevent further injuries like this, is the installation of assault rifles on the hoods of cars in Florida. Road ragers are people too and have the right to not shoot off their legs when pursuing mommies and kiddies with murder in their heart. It’s in the Constitution.

©2015 Jim Hagarty