Jim Hagarty

Sometimes, those newspaper columns which offer tips for homeowners with problems, wrap things up just a little too neatly, as far as I’m concerned.

First of all, the cost of implementing the columnists’ solutions is never taken into account by their authors. They feel no remorse at all about sending you out to the shops to spend hundreds of dollars to get the water stains off your ceiling or the dog smell out of your carpet.

Secondly, all handyperson writers assume you are intelligent enough to be able to follow the directions they give in their columns without gassing yourself into brain damage or riveting your arm to the basement floor. This is a self-negating assumption because if the homeowner was smart in any way, he’d be living in an apartment and wouldn’t be a homeowner at all.

But worst of all, newspaper handypersons can always think of solutions for every problem, no matter how severe it may be, and all their solutions sound simple to them, complicated to you. Real, everyday, homeowners, on the other hand, know some questions have no answers when it comes to owning a home and the happy homeowner is not the one who can solve his problems the best, but the one who can ignore them the best.

Take a handy tips column I read just this week. First off all, the writer stated it has been a particularly bad summer for fleas. What he must have meant to say, I’m sure, is that it’s been a bad summer for humans, cats and dogs because it’s been absolutely great for the fleas. There’s millions of them everywhere and they’re just having a ball.

The columnist referred to had lots of expensive suggestions for making your house flea-free including having a vet dip your pets (just before he dips into your wallet), placing special flea-control “bombs” throughout the inside of your house and spraying a liquid flea killer everywhere outside including on fences, the walls of your house, tree trunks, low hanging branches, shrubs, outdoor furniture and anywhere else where fleas might hide including, I presume, on neighbours who happen to be walking by. And this is all to be done once a week. Though costs weren’t stated (they never are), it’s pretty clear this whole operation will set you back many, many days’ pay.

A typical handyperson answer to a homeowner’s question usually goes something like this:

“To solve the problem of the discoloration of the cement on the deck of your front porch, rent a Blurdsen B-42 concrete grinder complete with Size 79-A or 79-C buffer cloth, white only, along with a Chesston AP-25 power-polisher with either medium or heavy duty bristles, nylon only. Alternately grind and buff the porch for 10 to 12 hours, vacuum thoroughly with a Suckelsior 960 power-intake blower and apply a thin coat (.05 millimetres only) of Pioneer’s Cement Clean 920. Repeat operation twice, then let sit for three days.”

Now here comes the simple part:

“After preparation work has thoroughly set, simply wash with an ordinary dish detergent, let dry and presto! Start enjoying your good-as-new front porch.”

As a real, everyday homeowner, I have three pieces of advice, all cost effective.

First: Ignore any householder’s tip that includes the word, presto.

Second: Blow up the front porch and start using the back door.

Third: Check out that apartment thing.

©1989 Jim Hagarty

For the last several millenia, the dog has been man’s best friend. It was a great arrangement. The four-footed creature was good for the soul and for fetching newspapers and slippers and keeping away the bad guys.

But the canine has fallen to number two on the best-friend hit parade, having been supplanted by the cellphone. And rightly so. You don’t have to take your cellphone out to pee at 6 a.m. And it doesn’t take chunks out of postal carriers’ bums.

So, given all this, it is only natural that the cellphone would become a status symbol in a society where status is no small matter. It’s a deep human need, we all have to try to get other humans to believe we’re better than they are. Or than we ourselves really are. What this achieves for the unfolding of the universe isn’t clear, but no biggie. (Whatever happened to the expression, no biggie, which evolved from no big deal which came from no problem?) Don’t think about it; just get a cellphone.

Even better: get your company to get you a cellphone. This is what happened to me shortly after I started work as the editor of a community newspaper a few years ago. The publisher walked in one day with my own cute little jobbie, with a wee number pad and a handy, dandy flip cover. Stubby little aerial. Tiny call display window. Adorable.

But best of all: a belt clip. I tell you, I felt like Marshall Dillon the day he first pinned on that badge as the sheriff of Dodge City. I carefully affixed that little doodad to the piece of leather that holds up my pants and couldn’t have been prouder if five gold Olympic medals had just been hung around my neck.

Immediately, I could feel a definite increase in my importance, both to the business that employed me and to the community as a whole. I was on my way.

All that was left now was for the thing to ring. I could make all the calls I wanted on it, which I did. Ten calls home to see how things were going, for example. But, I wouldn’t be happy, I knew, till the darned thing called me. That part, I found out, I didn’t have much control over.

A day and a half went by and not a call came through. I swear I saw a spider eyeing up my phone and belt as a good place to spin a web. The fact that nobody had my number yet might have played a part in the lack of activity, but surely it would soon go off. It could have rung while I sat at my desk. Or behind the wheel of my car. Or in the restaurant, eating lunch. But a cellphone, it seems, unlike a dog, has a mind of its own.

One cola too many sent me to the washroom at work that second day and as I stood there contemplating the meaning of life, it finally happened.

Brrrrrrrrrrr. Brrrrrrrrrrr. Brrrrrrrrrrr.

Now, I ask you, what is the proper cellphone etiquette in such a situation? Do you try to put matters on hold and take the call, or put the caller on hold and risk losing the first one? Or, do you attempt a bit of men’s room multitasking?

Unwisely, perhaps, I went for the latter course.

What, I wonder now, would my great-grandfather have thought if he could have seen me at that moment. What, in fact, would anyone think if they happened to walk by the tiny washroom and heard me conversing with someone in there? That a business meeting was in progress?

Shortly after, the paper was sold to another company, which, gratefully, made it a priority to take away my cellphone. I complained only mildly.

I’ve always had trouble doing two things at once.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

“We’ve got to get you out on the town some night,” my friend said to me the other day.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Why?” he enquired in mock reply. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because all you ever do is watch TV. That’s why.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I wondered. “Isn’t that what it’s all about? You work all day, rush home, watch TV till midnight and go to bed.”

“My gosh, man,” he said to me, sympathy showing on his tired face. “You really don’t know, do you? There’s a whole world out there. So much fun to be had. So many things to do.”

“I do things,” I protested.

“Come one,” he answered. “Tell me one thing you’ve done all week that wasn’t connected with TV.”

I thought for a minute.

“I give up,” I said. “You’re right.”

“That’s more like it,” he said, with relief. “Face it. You’re in a rut. The most exciting thing that’s happened to you lately was when they moved Family Ties to Sunday nights.”

“You’re right about that,” I admitted. “I can still remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news they were giving that show a new time slot.”

So, I got all dressed up and my friend and I headed out for a night on the town.

To say the tavern was packed with people would be like describing a gorilla as having a full head of hair. There were smiling people everywhere – standing in corners, sitting on stools, leaning
against walls and jumping up and down on the dance floor. Rock ’n’ roll music shot out of four speakers hanging from the ceiling.

“You were right,” I called to my friend.

“I don’t have a light,” he shouted back.

“No, I said I’m glad,” I screamed.

“Whadya mean ‘that’s too bad’?” he yelled in return. “You don’t smoke.”

“I’ll tell you later,” I hollered.

“Tell the waiter what?” he roared back.

The only two empty chairs we could see were located at a table where two young women were sitting. We went over, sat down and started yelling at them. They yelled back and we all carried on as if this was the most natural thing in the world to do.

“Do you want to dance?” I shouted at one of them.

“No,” she hollered back, loudly. More loudly, in fact, than I think was necessary.

The drinks came and I pulled out a $5 bill to pay for the first round. The waiter asked for $7.70.
With a tip, $9.

“Do you know how many movies you can rent for $9?” I yelled to my friend.

“You spent $49?” he asked. “On what?”

With so many people in the place, it was warm and I started to sweat in my brand new winter coat. I’d have hung it up at the coat rack by the door but I was afraid it would get stolen. Looking back, I wish I had left it there because then I wouldn’t have been wearing it when the waiter’s tray got bumped and a full glass of beer tipped over, spilling its contents down my back.

A bright light on a dim horizon. A woman at the next table waved to me. I waved back. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. She blew a kiss. At the man at a table behind me.

The fun which had been coming at us in waves up to this point, started to taper off but it was about then that I noticed it. A big-screen colour TV hanging from a ceiling in a corner of the room. It was at least four times the size of the one I have at home. For the next two hours I watched it. I couldn’t hear it, but it was interesting nonetheless.

“Well, wasn’t I right?” my friend said on the way home. “You had a great time, didn’t you?”

“I sure did,” I agreed. “I especially liked the part where that guy came over and asked me if I didn’t think I was a little too old to be looking at his girlfriend like that.”

Back home, I passed up Carson and Letterman and headed straight for bed.

Party animals need their sleep.

©1987 Jim Hagarty

Words have been a big part of my life, as they are with everybody’s. The majority of people, however, don’t count on them to make their living. I do, and I enjoy working with them as a carpenter might revel in the smell of newly sawn lumber.

Lately, for some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about words and their place in my life. I have no idea what my first ones were, maybe something along the lines of, “Can I have a cookie?” I also have no clue what my last words will be, but they could very well be the same as my first. In fact, an interesting endeavour is to look up (easy on the Internet) the final words of famous people throughout history. Some are sad and touching, some rather funny.

All through my growing up years, words became useful tools, put to work in a variety of ways to avoid responsibility, to enact revenge, to ask questions and learn about the world. The same mouth that could produce words of such beauty they were the linguistic equivalent of a string of pearls, could let loose a volley meant to cut down and destroy.

In fact, though I had pretty much heard all the profane words available to me by the time I was 16, it wasn’t until I worked for a summer building a bridge in Kitchener that I learned from two recently immigrated Scottish carpenters how to put them together into very effective sentences. If there were any sort of awards handed out for cussing, the walls of these two feisty guys’ homes would be lined with plaques.

Even today, under great pressure, charged with anger or filled with fear, the teachings of the Scotsmen can still bring themselves forward to my lips.

Other, gentler words, made their appearance in high school, as the interest in girls grew. Of special importance became the phrase: “Can I kiss you?” sometimes followed by the question, “Why not?” Even more awkward: “Would you like to go out with me again?”

Other useful phrases at the time: “Can I bum a cigarette?” “Here’s the money I owe you.” “Can I have an extension on the assignment?”

Words you hear spoken to you in your life are also highly important. In your working years, “Can you start work on Monday?” is a pleasant thing to hear. Not so welcome is, “We expect you to be out of your office by noon tomorrow.”

As you ascend the ladder of success:

“You’ve bought yourself a car.”

“They’ve accepted your offer on the house.”

“Your loan has been approved.”

Of course, being no different from the rest of humanity, “I’m sorry” are two of the hardest words for me to say, though usually the most valuable if I can find the guts to get them out. And “I love you” is still a stickler. Not so hard for your kids. Not so easy for your parents. Sometimes very difficult for your wife.

Why are the most valuable words often the hardest to use?

And why, in a crisis, do the words “God help me!” just come flying out?

I remember years ago reading somewhere that we have about 400,000 different English words available for our use. I’m sure I don’t know a fraction of those, but I know quite a few, I think.

Of all those thousands, what is my favourite one?

Chocolate might rank right up there.

Beatles is a big one for me.

What is the favourite word I have ever had spoken to me?

“Yes” was right up there, after I said the words, “Will you marry me?”

But never have I heard, in my 55 years, a word that even came close to the beauty of this one, especially the first time I heard it directed my way:

“Daddy”.

I will never get tired of hearing it, no matter what future form of it is used to address me. To hear the word “Dadda” spoken to you by a child just before he or she drifts off to sleep in their bed at night, is to experience joy.

Another favourite word.

©2006 Jim Hagarty

It had been a nice Sunday afternoon. Peace and serenity ruled supreme. The hours were spent shuttling between the coffee shop and the couch, with the odd time out for a glance at the newspaper headlines. It was the very day of rest church leaders have advocated for so long.

But the guys who wrote the Bible didn’t own houses or they might have put out a different message about taking Sundays off. In fact, had they owned houses, it’s possible they might never have been able to find the time to get around to writing the Bible in the first place.

But I digress.

To homeowners everywhere, true days of rest are only a memory, Sunday or otherwise. They exist somewhere in that hazy, long-ago childhood when Ma and Pa performed all the vital services in life. The days when meals just appeared out of nowhere and clothing washed itself.

This past Sunday, about an hour before supper, I realized the bathtub drain was plugged. Actually, I came to that conclusion several weeks before, but ignored it. But the day of reckoning – not rest – had come.

On my knees, tools spread out on the floor, head plunged into the tub, I started to work. After a quarter of an hour of twisting and turning, the stainless steel stopper popped out of its anchor in the drain hole. As did two springs and a small, metal washer.

Grabbing a tweezers, I carefully removed all the matter that had been clogging the drain. Soon, it was running as freely as the day it was installed. Mission accomplished.

But the mission soon became a battle and the battle became a war when I tried to reinstall the metal stopper. In went the first spring, then the washer, then the second spring and then …
“SPLINK!!!”

The washer jumped from its mooring and fell down the pipe to the bottom of the drain, taking with it all my hopes for an early end to the job.

What followed were efforts that would have made an open-heart surgeon proud. Down the hole I lowered a wire with a hook on the end, hoping to catch the washer as if it was a speckled trout. When that failed, in the true spirit of Sylvester the Cat after Tweety Bird, I sent down the same wire with a magnet attached to the end, all the time holding a flashlight above my head like an operating room light.

Before long, inevitably, I was in the basement, under the bathroom, taking apart the plastic drain pipes leading from the tub. When they finally came apart, water gushed out over my hands and down my arms. Into the freshly opened pipe, I inserted the wire with the hook, then the wire with the magnet and then my own long bony finger until, at last, I felt the washer.

Success.

In another quarter of an hour, the pipes were all hooked up, the drain stopper was reattached and the trial run commenced. The bathtub was half filled, the stopper button in place. But it wasn’t holding to my satisfaction. And though my precious Sunday supper was ready, I decided to take the stopper apart one more time.

So, off came the stopper, out sprang the springs, and the washer went …
“SPLINK!!!”

I can record the noise the washer made as it tumbled down the drain again, but the sounds I made, unfortunately, are unprintable. They involved graphic descriptions of how I felt towards the inventor of the stainless steel drain stopper and my feelings about metal washers, home ownership, etc. The guys who wrote the Bible would not be pleased.

Supper was late Sunday night but it didn’t matter that much.

Sylvester was never very hungry either after Tweety Bird got away.

©1991 Jim Hagarty

Anyone with a water softener can surely sympathize with me.

There are no two stores on earth which sell water softener salt at the same price.

The same salt in Store A never costs the same in Store B. If it is on sale in Store A, it’s the regular price in Store B. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find out which store is selling salt for which price on which day.

This would be a simple exercise if there weren’t so many places to buy water softener salt. But alas, it’s everywhere. And like everything else nowadays, there’s 47 different kinds of it.

Therefore, throw a conscientious, bargain-hunting guy like myself into this mix, and you’ve got periodic nervous breakdowns on your hands. Not being organized enough to set aside flyers and ads announcing sales on salt, I end up spending the odd Saturday rushing from store to store comparison-shopping, vaguely remembering a picture of a bag of salt I saw in an advertisement somewhere announcing a LOW, LOW, price on salt.

If I buy a bag for $8.99, on the way home from the store, I’ll pass another store with a big sign: SALT. TODAY ONLY. $7.99. If I buy a bag for $7.99, the sign on the way home reads $6.99.

This has been going on for five years and it has robbed me of many an hour of peace of mind.

THEREFORE!!!!

Last weekend, I decided to take control. I woke up Saturday morning and had, what can only be called a vision, of some sort. It all came clear to me. “Forget the price,” a voice inside my head said to me. “Just buy the frickin’ salt.” (My inner voice swears a lot.) (So does my outer voice.)

In an instant, I knew what to do. Go to the nearest store. Buy a bag of salt. Dump it in the softener. Go to the coffee shop.

How simple.

I was almost giddy as I went through the checkout. “Two bags of water softener salt, please,” I said, smiling. My bill was rung in. I paid the amount and went outside to load my car.

I heaved one bag into the trunk and then turned to get the other when I noticed a senior citizen standing there.

“What’s the price of salt today? “ he asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” I replied, and reaching into my pocket, I took out the bill. “It looks like I paid $9.99,” I said, helpfully and cheerfully.

“Holy mackerel!” said the man. “That’s way too much. It’s on sale a lot cheaper somewhere else in town.”

“Don’t care,” I said. “I used to run all over the place, looking for the best price on salt, but not anymore. From now on, to heck if I spend a few bucks too much.”

“Well son,” said my new salt-concerned acquaintance. “I grew up during the Great Depression and if I hadn’t lived on a farm, I probably would have starved. There may come a day when you wish you had that few bucks.”

Everywhere, the sky was clear and sunny. There was one dark cloud for a hundred miles around, and I was standing right under it. On the one day I decide to skip the bargains and pay the full price, a survivor of the Dirty Thirties descends on me like the angel sent to talk Jimmy Stewart out of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Dozens of people in the store and the parking lot and the one out of them all to approach me has the very message I don’t want to hear.

Later, in the coffee shop, I figured the odds of that happening were just slightly better than my chances of actually ever paying the lowest price around for a bag of water softener salt.

©1991 Jim Hagarty

I recently wrote a story about a woman who, in recalling her early days in a one-room schoolhouse near here, told this tale:

The boys in her school used to spend some of their recesses and lunch hours flinging their jackknives at a wooden door to the school. One day, a boy happened to walk by the door at just the wrong time and a knife punctured his neck and stuck there.

The boy went into the school and told his teacher, “Teacher, I have a knife in my neck.” The teacher said, “Well, I guess you’d better go home.” So, he walked home – knife protruding from neck. I don’t know what happened to him once he arrived home, but I assume he survived. (I imagine his mother yanking out the knife, tossing on a dollop of iodine, and covering it all over with a big bandage before telling him to go out to the barn and do the chores.)

That happened about 1954. If it happened today, 50 fears later, the reaction would be somewhat different. This, with a variation or two, is what would probably happen:

The boy with the knife in his neck pulls out his smartphone to notify his parents and show them a photo of his injury before running into the school to tell his teacher. The teacher immediately dials 911 and to the scene rushes a firetruck, ambulance and police car. Reporters from the local newspaper, radio station and TV station hear police discussing the emergency over their police scanners and also race to the scene.

At the school, the firefighters demure to the police and paramedics who take over from there. The paramedics enter the school and assess the boy’s condition, bringing in a stretcher and trying to calm the boy. Unsure whether or not the knife has severed some major artery, the medical personnel radio the Stratford General Hospital where a decision is made to remove the boy by air ambulance to University Hospital in London.

By now, yellow tape surrounds the schoolyard as police declare the area a potential crime scene and prepare to take statements and fingerprints. Reporters strain to get video and photos of the boy but are held back by officers who have shown up in two more cruisers to secure the area. The TV station, with its van and satellite dish, prepares for its story, as a reporter goes through her intro and a suitable background is found by a cameraman. A newspaper reporter has bribed a kid into giving him the boy’s cellphone number and he calls him up to try to get an interview. The boy, lying on the stretcher, refers all questions to Priority Communications, his family’s media relations firm.

Meanwhile, police inspectors have isolated the 10 boys who were participating in the jackknife throwing and are trying to shake them down, to find out the culprit. Nobody budges, however, and they all demand to speak to their lawyers, youth counsellors and psychologists before saying a word. One officer videotapes the interviews to ensure no police brutality charges are brought against them later.

The teacher, meanwhile, is in deep trouble and knows it. She was not on the playground when the incident occurred and will suffer the repercussions of her negligence. But to get her version of the whole mess to her superiors before they hear it on the nightly news, she spends her time, between interviews with police, text messaging the Board of Education to explain the terrible chain of events that led to the calamity. Meanwhile, a Children’s Aid Society worker shows up to assess whether the boy deliberately walked in front of the knife because of unhappiness in his home.

The hospital helicopter lands in the schoolyard and the boy is whisked out by the paramedics and loaded on board while reporters work feverishly to get visuals to publish. As police and firefighters restrict their access to the schoolchildren and teacher involved, reporters take to interviewing each other on their reaction to the news.

The air ambulance ascends into the sky with the boy and his divorced parents just as a team of grief counsellors arrive to settle the nerves of the shaken students who have already started a little shrine of jackknives in his memory at the missing boy’s desk. And as one helicopter leaves, another lands, carrying Peter Mansbridge and a news crew to report on location for an item on the CBC National News. Two other national reporters arrive with him to do documentaries on the growing phenomenon of youth and knife-in-the-neck injuries while Rex Murphy jumps out in his ground-length overcoat despite 35 degree temperatures to prepare an opinion piece on the matter, large, obscure words at the ready.

At a computer in the school, meanwhile, some of the boy’s friends are busy creating a website so everyone can send best wishes and keep posted on the medical progress of the unfortunate lad while several local humanitarians have shown up and are discussing holding a walkathon to raise awareness of the danger of jackknives and some money to pay for brochures, ads, etc.

In London, the knife safely extracted from his neck, the boy finally consents to a remote satellite interview from his hospital bed in which he tells Lloyd Robertson, of CTV News, that he is looking forward to getting hack on his feet and returning to school.

“All I want now is to find some closure,” he says.

His family preoccupied with hospital activities and news demands, the boy’s chores at the barn are completed by a team of his neighbours who have formed a support group.

There is no trace of iodine anywhere.

©2004 Jim Hagarty

As a job, mine’s about as good as you can get. I’m in out of the cold all winter, I get to sit down most of the time and it’s interesting enough that I never find myself watching the clock and waiting for quitting time.

In fact, about the only time I really hate it is when it comes time to teach someone else how to do it. But if I want to take a holiday – or get the flu for a day or two – there has to be somebody around who can fill in.

It isn’t that what I do for a living is all that tough to explain to someone else, though to total novices it might seem complicated, and I don’t mind at all if they think it is. (Whenever a touring group of students stops by my desk to watch me work at my computer, I hardly glance their way and instead look seriously at the screen like I’m designing a better solid rocket booster for the space shuttle, not typing up fall fair results.) No, my trouble is, I have so many peculiar ways of doing things and to get someone else to agree to do them that exact way without rebelling is hard.

Job trainees nowadays have an annoying habit of asking why this has to be done this way and that, that way. And their trainers, by nature, don’t like to be expected to answer these impertinent questions from young upstarts fresh out of school. That’s why you might overhear them saying, “Listen, Socrates, I didn’t invent newspapers. I just work at one.” Or: “What, do I look like an information booth?”

The reason I hate the question “why?” is because a lot of the time, I haven’t got a clue why. Someone else who sat at my desk long before I got there started doing things this way and every one of his successors has just kept on doing it, including me. Kind of like the retired farmer who goes down to the barn every night to make sure the door’s locked, even though there hasn’t been an animal inside the building for years.

You can’t tell a trainee you don’t know why even though it’s pretty obvious you don’t, so you have to devise explanations and try to explain them. They don’t believe them and neither do you but pretty soon they get sick of listening and are darned sorry they asked. Trouble is, five minutes later, there they are asking you about something else, as if, by some miracle, you might know the answer to that mystery. It soon becomes obvious that they’re tormenting you and that they like doing it.

In the end, you have no choice but to lose your temper and demand that, right or wrong, this is the way it will be, my way or the highway. Before you’ve turned your back, they’re already doing it their way.

The trouble with training others for your job is the knowledge that they will no longer hold you in the high esteem they might have at one time, once they find out how ordinary the tasks you do every day actually are. When they’re new, they’re full of awe and this is a desirable state to keep them in. But as you train them, you can see that glow of admiration fading from their faces. They’re never the same again. Where they might have shown respect – even got you a coffee from time to time – now they call you by your first name and want to take their breaks with you.

And of course, it’s a sad, sad day when one other person in this world can do what you do and you know, with time, he’ll probably do it better. Because from that day on, you’re aware that your indispensability factor – the thing you count on to get you through all those days you come to work in a bad mood – has been removed.

However, since it’s unlikely that a hundred years from now anyone will be doing the tasks you think are so important to do today, you might wonder if any of this is worth losing sleep over. Then you come to your senses and realize that it certainly is.

If you can’t lose sleep over the thing that puts the corn flakes on your breakfast table every day, just what can you lie awake about?

1988 Jim Hagarty

I was idling at a very long stoplight the other day when a small car pulled up beside me, ferrying three females, two of whom were taking long drags on short cigarettes. This would not concern me in the least except that the third occupant of the car was a young girl, sitting in the front passenger seat.

Being an enlightened modern guy, acutely aware of the evils of secondhand smoke, I immediately formed an opinion on the scene playing out beside me and it wasn’t a happy one. I felt a judgmental cloud move in over my head as I put the inevitable two and two together: The girl was being forced to breathe in the smoke from women I guessed to be her mother and her aunt, and probably suffering damage to her tender lungs as a result.

To their small credit, the two women – one in the driver’s seat and one in the back – had their windows down a crack and were flicking ashes from their fags through the openings. And the girl, who I judged to be between 10 and 12 years in age, had her window partially down too, no doubt trying desperately to get some fresh air into her hurting chest.

Now, I’ve been told by friends and acquaintances that, despite my rather monotone demeanour, I have an expressive face that broadcasts my emotions like a flashing billboard, especially when I’m upset. And so, my gaze towards my neighbours in the next car cut like a laser and was soon noticed by its riders, even the young girl, and all three began stealing furtive glances at me, no doubt wondering what the heck could be wrong.

In this enlightened age, could a man be blamed if he put his car in park, climbed out and knocked on the window of the car beside him and suggested the women butt out? I think not and that is the thought that crossed my mind and I came very close to doing it too. It even occurred to me to somehow rescue the young girl and escort her to some authority somewhere, to provide a smoke-free safe haven for her. Maybe drive her over to the local health unit, located in a building on the other side of the traffic lights.

But, I didn’t do either of those things, and I’ll tell you why.

In the many moments that passed at that light that day, with my glances shooting their way and their glances shooting mine, something happened to remind me of why community activism, citizen’s arrests, public interventions and all other kinds of individual heroism are not in the cards for me, relating to my sometimes extremely poor ability to accurately assess situations, all the circumstances of which seem so apparent to me at first sight.

I inched my car forward slightly, to get just a bit better look at the girl, to see if I could confirm my first assessment of her age. She appeared to be pretty young, all right. She saw me looking, and glanced my way. Then stared straight ahead again, lifted her arm, put her hand to her mouth …

And took a lengthy pull off her own cigarette!

It’s always been amazing to me how quickly a man can lose interest in a thing. I turned on Canadians Boring Canadians (CBC) on my radio and caught up on the latest news, as my smoking neighbours revved their engine and prepared for the green light that was about to appear. But rather than leave me in the dust or the smoke fumes as I might have hoped they would have done, they instead stayed even with me in the middle lane for the next five blocks or so, sticking to me like a guilty conscience, or a nicotine stain on an index finger, or whatever.

For my part, I looked straight ahead, peering neither to the left nor the right, a practice I intend to cultivate daily from now on, whether driving or walking, and no matter what I witness my neighbours doing, age notwithstanding.

©2003 Jim Hagarty

It’s been coming on for quite a while now and all I want to know is, who started it?

Who was the first driver to decide that henceforth, a red traffic light would not mean stop? Instead, it would indicate: Speed up and drive like an Andretti! And why did the rest of the driving world follow that clown like kids at a circus?

As one old enough to remember when the yellow caution light was first added to the red and the green, I can recall the days when people slammed on the brakes to stop for yellow. Only those too far into the intersection to stop safely would keep on going when a yellow light appeared, and that was perfectly legal. By the time the red light flashed on, drivers facing the green could be sure everything coming from the other direction was halted and it was safe to proceed.

Still with me? I didn’t think so. But, I’ve got to finish this column so I’ll keep on going.

Over the past several years, slowly but surely, the yellow caution light has come to be totally meaningless, except that now, when most drivers see it, no matter how far out of the intersection they are, they immediately tramp on the gas. So the yellow light, which used to mean slow down! now means don’t slow down! No new laws have been passed to make the change. Instead, the people have spoken. It is now the law of the asphalt jungle.

Fine. So we’ve got that straight.

Or almost straight.

Let’s go over it again.

1. A red light used to mean stop! Now it means, accelerate! You see it all the time nowadays. The light turns red and the last car speeding towards the corner enters the intersection after the light has changed. He knows it will take the drivers coming from the other directions a second or two to respond to the green and launch themselves into his path. By that time, he’ll be long gone. Now, that’s being in a hurry when those two seconds are that important to you.

2. A yellow light used to mean slow down! Now it says, floor it! Basically, the yellow can be ignored as just a reminder that the red light which can be ignored is just about to flash on. The last time I saw someone stop for a yellow light, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were still strangers.

3. Finally, the green light which used to mean go! now indicates, thanks to all those awfully busy, oh-so-important drivers out there who have changed the rules for us all: Don’t go! Are you crazy? Wait at least three seconds and look both ways to make sure all the red-light jumpers are gone. Then go!

So, what’s the solution?

Tell you what, I’m going to save the Ministry of Transportation $2 million on a study of the situation with the following suggestion.

Because the yellow light is now doing absolutely no good after the green and before the red, let’s move it so that is comes after the red and before the green.

Then, in 20 years, when no one dares go on the green and no one bothers to stop at all on the red, we can switch back to the old system.

I think that system is: Every man for himself and the first one to the funeral home wins.

©1993 Jim Hagarty