Jim Hagarty

Much has been made of how the computer and the Internet have totally changed the way human beings interact. Do people even gab on the phone like we used to or has e-mail taken over completely? Will text messaging practically wipe out the need to vocalize our thoughts, feelings, ideas and gossip to our fellow humans? Will our vocal cords atrophy in some future millennia due to our lack of need for them? Will I ever stop trying to get as quickly as I can to the bottom of this page by asking all these silly questions?

In the old days of what is affectionately known now as “snail mail”, it took quite an effort to communicate with a friend or enemy. Pen and writing paper had to be brought out, the letter carefully written by hand, stuffed in an envelope, a stamp attached and then in my case, walked out to the end of the farm laneway to put in the battered steel mailbox in advance of the arrival of the mailman in his car, who would fetch it back to the post office for delivery.

Not a lot of room for rash thoughts to be expressed. Too much deliberation was involved. Plus there was a long tradition of letter writers being polite on the page even if they weren’t particularly so in person.

That all changed with electronic mail. Now, an angry thought could be sent and be read by the target of the emotion, literally within seconds. With a touch of the good old “send” button, a lifelong friendship could be deleted much like a desktop file being dragged to the trash.

None of any of this is new and human nature, of course, hasn’t changed very much in a long while. Even in the old days, people did send angry letters, despite the delay between the time they felt the infraction and the time they sat down to complain about it and mail it.

But what is new is the computer’s power to let us send the wrong messages to the wrong people. In the past, it rarely happened that a letter intended for Joe Blow ended up in John Doe’s mailbox. And if it did, it would have contained the proper salutations so that John Doe knew any comments made in the note were meant for the other guy and not for him.

Years ago, after I had left university, I received a letter from a woman who had been grievously wronged by a man who has the same surname as I have, though he is not related to me, and I had never met him. He had pilfered a bunch of her money, as I recall her stating in the letter. The matter was easily cleared up when I wrote back to her about the mistaken identity.

But with e-mail, a touch of the button can so quickly share your thoughts with the wrong person. I have received the occasional message not intended for me and have had to notify the sender that they should redirect it. And once or twice my own mail has gone astray.

Last week, however, a crisis befell me. I received an email at work, press release attached. I prepared my own message about the press release which I intended to forward to a colleague. There was nothing offensive in what I had written; I was simply asking a colleague for some background on the organization that had prepared the press release.

But instead of hitting “forward”, I hit “reply”, meaning my message meant only for my colleague’s eyes was heading back to the person about whom the message was written. This was something I did not want to happen.

How to respond, how to respond? I screamed, of course, the only sensible thing to do. Then I grabbed the mouse and tried to freeze the message in mid-send. Finally, and frantically, I yelled across the room to a reporter to run over to my desk and shut off my computer, something I couldn’t accomplish myself in my compromised position. My plea was heard, my machine was shut down and all I could do was wait. I turned it back on again, opened my e-mail program and checked the “sent” box. My errant message had not been delivered. There is a Greater Power and it is called the Apple computer which has this kill feature. Fortunately, I had just read about how to stop an e-mail mid-flight.

My great-grandfather had to worry about trees falling on him as he cleared the bush on his Perth County farm. I have to make sure my e-mail doesn’t go astray.

However, in a way, when we are still at the dawn of the Computer Age, Great Grandpa and I share a bit of pioneerhood.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

I am getting a neighbourhood house ready for rental for the absentee owners. The renters moved to another province in a hurry and left more debris than a Tennessee tornado. I absconded with a few things I thought I could use (I was wrong) and gathered up all the rest for Habitat for Humanity to pick up on Wednesday. When the charity’s Restore truck showed up, I told the men they were welcome to take anything they wanted. They wanted a lot. Locusts have taken longer to clean off a wheat field and left more behind that the friendly Restore crew. They would have taken my cap if it hadn’t been sealed to my head by my hoodie. A toothpick fell out of my mouth and I haven’t seen it since.

One item I left in the garage was a big plastic scrub bucket on wheels complete with mop. The Restorers were not the first people to set eyes on this prize as several visitors over the past while have asked me about the future of bucket and mop. I doubt, in fact, that a ’58 Corvette convertible would have attracted the same level of interest. Each time I betrayed no interest in the bucket and yet it failed to roll away. As they hauled off every single item but my cap, the Restore guys paused by the bucket and mop and asked, “Are you giving this away?” as if only a crazy man would. “It’s yours,” I announced but the glee they betrayed as they loaded it on the truck made me nervous. Had I made some sort of horrible mistake? Nah. It was just a bucket.

Today, two days later, I went to the driveway to wash my car and it suddenly came to me: That wash bucket on wheels would make my life more complete than a month of Caribbean vacations. As my mind dwelled on this fact, the enormity of my loss crowded out every other thought and the mission was underway. I had to get that bucket back.

I hopped in the as-yet-unwashed car and raced across town to the Restore outlet. Bursting through the doors like the desperate man my three-minute drive to the place had made me, I searched the facility from rooms to rafters but no bucket could be found. Some wise person had already bought it, no doubt, and was at home enjoying life. I once had a car stolen which was almost worse than this.

I left the building and walked despondently towards my filthy vehicle. It was then I noticed a door at the back of the building and a sign, “Staff Only.” The only thing a bucket-searching man can do with a door like that is go through it and I did. My eyes surveyed the somewhat dark scene but there in a corner with a halo around it (sun streaming in through a skylight, I guess) was the bucket. I stood in awe of it for a few seconds. Only the site of a famous babe in a manger might have equalled the glory of what I beheld.

I approached it and realized it did not have a pricetag. Had it already been pressed into service by Restore and was that the reason for the Restore pick up crew’s obvious joy? Who can say? I picked up the bucket, mop still inside it, and crept out of the staff area more quietly than the stealthiest cat burglar. I was expecting to be detained by a phalanx of Restore guards but none showed. I took bucket and mop to the front counter and explained that I had donated them just two days before and how I now realized what a horrible error in judgment that had been.

“How much?” I asked the woman behind the counter and I found myself falling in love at first sight with her when she said, with a smile, “Just take it.” I left the woman behind (regretfully) and drove home with my treasures and realized I would not have been happier if my car was jammed with the priceless contents of King Tut’s Tomb.

I washed the car when I got home. The bucket made its debut at my place and it performed its function flawlessly.

And here is my moral, keeping in mind it is offered by a man whose moral code allows him to steal things from a charity: Things worth having are worth the trouble of becoming a temporary staff member at Habitat for Humanity. Remember that. I will remember that from now on till the day comes when I kick the habit. (I would have used the word bucket again but I couldn’t see how it would fit in that sentence.)

©2013 Jim Hagarty

It wasn’t my idea to rent a tuxedo. Someone talked me into it. It would be good for my image, he said. My image was crying out for something more dignified than the ancient blue suit with the pin stripes hanging in my closet. Clothes, after all, have to make a statement nowadays and all my old suit has been saying to me lately is, “Leave me alone!”

I walked by the men’s store a time or two and gathering up my nerve, headed in. A young man listened to me explain what I needed and realizing the importance of the request, summoned his boss from the back of the store.

“This image thing is working already,” I thought. Just the mention of a tuxedo has started to bring me respect.

Together, the clothier and I leafed through a picture book showing all the various models of tuxedo available, much like a prospective car buyer and salesman discussing the new fall lineup. First we looked at the hardtops, convertibles and top-of-the-line models and then at the compacts. I chose a black sedan.

The negotiations on price followed. When he said the cost would be $80.25, I assumed the store rented them by the month and was shocked to find out I would be able to keep it for only one day at that amount. The last thing I rented that cost that much took unleaded gasoline.

But this suit came with the works. Cuff links, studs instead of buttons to fasten the shirt, a fancy bow tie, something called a cummerbund and suspenders. When I first tried it on at the store, I ran into a few minor hitches. I had trouble doing up the pants but finally got them hooked, put on the frilly shirt and jacket and went out to be admired. I was fairly happy with the fit, I said, but something was wrong with the front of the trousers which seemed to sag and crinkle. On inspection, the clothier found I had fastened the waist band to a suspender button instead of the pants button it was intended for. I didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

Finally outfitted, I admired myself in the full-length mirror and marvelled at how, until that moment, I had never realized how much like Engelbert Humperdinck I look. An irresistible urge to sing a verse or two of Blue Spanish Eyes came over me. Whatever a fandango is, I wanted to do one.

When I now consider the respect a tuxedo brought me on the day of the big event and on the next day – I wore it all day Sunday – I will never again say $80.25 is too much to pay. For one night, I moved up the social ladder a class or two. I felt like tipping anyone who did anything for me and I walked straight and proud like I imagine a man of refinement should walk. I felt sorry for the poor guy next to me at the meal that night who wore only an ordinary suit but I resisted the urge to toss him a dollar or two.

When we sat down to the banquet, I knew the tuxedo had been a stroke of genius. Before me, around my plate, lay various pieces of cutlery, including four spoons. I am not sure why one person with only one mouth needs four spoons but I am glad that I was properly outfitted to deal in a dignified way with the perplexing dilemma of trying to decide which one went with which food. At least in a tuxedo, you look like you probably know things like that.

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The night carried on without incident. The tux was a hit even though there were a hundred others in the room. I felt like a millionaire.

In the morning, though the day was sunny and warm, I couldn’t resist wearing it again to an out-of-town party for one of my nieces.

“You look nice, Uncle Jim,” she said.

“Thanks,” I answered her. “I rented this suit just for you.”

And on the way home, I went into the coffee shop I go to every night, just to soak up a little more respect and awe before Monday returned with its blue jeans, T-shirts, running shoes and reality.

“Get up, dress up, show up” is an expression someone put forward as the keys to success. I don’t know if going out into the world dressed like a king made me a success, but for a few hours, at least, I felt like one.

©1987 Jim Hagarty

Water, water everywhere; be seen without it, if you dare

All Bottled Up

I was sitting in a pew at a wedding on a recent sweltering Saturday when something new caught my eye. A young woman in fancy dress, was seated by an usher, and all was as usual except for what she carried in one hand. The wedding guest had a bottle of water, from which she promptly began sipping. A quick survey around the rest of the church revealed that she was not the only one hydrating herself during the marriage ceremony.

To be fair, which l usually see no reason to be, the families who organized the wedding were thoughtful enough to have stacked several cases of water bottles in the back entrance of the air-conditioning-free church for anyone to pick up. However, l don’t know whether they intended people to help themselves to a bottle on their way into the church or on the way out.

In any case, the mass hydrating continued on, which led me to do some thinking on this phenomenon later on. And I have to admit, some of the thoughts were troubling, beyond the idea that church might now be fair game for wining and dining. How long before burgers and fries make it from drive-through to sanctuary and moments of silence, called for by the priests, are interrupted by cola slurping from various parts of the building?

What bothers me most about the hydration craze is this: When on earth did human beings become so desperately in need of water every 15 minutes, especially in a country which is normally teeming with the stuff? Go anywhere, anytime now, and you’ll see folks standing around clutching those distinctive little clear plastic bottles with the white tops, and sucking back the fluids as though they were on life support.

On a recent telecast of a hockey game, I watched the coaches make their way across the ice to the bench, carrying – you guessed it – bottles of water. Performers at rock concerts have them as do politicians at debates. The big oblong tables in committee rooms are covered with them. Kids on in-line skates, people in parks and I am guessing, though I haven’t seen it yet, farmers in their tractor cabs.

When I was a kid on the farm the best water in the world came out of the end of a garden hose, and I think it still does. Whatever effect the rubber had (and the odd spider that had crawled up the pipe) on the stuff, I don’t know, but it beat purified, sanitized, de-thisilized and de-thatilized water ten to one. It had good old iron in it. Oh, how I miss the iron. And who knows what else?

Name any mineral – zinc, copper, lead (that’s all the minerals I can remember) – and I’m sure it came shootin’ out the end of that flexible, green lifeline. And it tasted sooo good!

But, now, like Pavlov’s dog at the sound of a bell, we’re hauling home water bottles by the caseful and jammin’ up our fridges with ’em. Using all sorts of electricity to cool the stuff when it’s already coming out that hose nice and cold. Some genius has even come up with flavoured water. Lime. Lemon. Etc. Giant pop companies want permission to put caffeine in it. Soon enough, if they keep adding things to it – cocoa, some brown colouring, fizz – we’ll be right back to good old cola, where all this got started.

Because I don’t think all of this is about hydration – how I love the word, though I admit when I first heard it I thought of dogs and big yellow, cast-iron street faucets – but about fashion. How cool can you get? Water bottle in one hand, headphones in ears, cellphone on belt …

Oh, for the chance to call up a long-ago farmer ancestor and tell him people are laying down good hard cash these days for water in bottles. Even people with green garden hoses.

When the disbelief ended, the guffawing would begin.

“Well I’ll be darned,” my ancestor would remark.

My belief is, if my ancestors could spend a day walking around my town today, they’d be darned a lot.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

Everywhere you look nowadays, cars and trucks and motorcycles and vans are racing up and down the highways, charging ahead to wherever it is they’ve just got to get to right away.

Everywhere, that is, except in Tavistock where, at the main intersection, vehicles of all description are lined up at the village’s new and only traffic lights, day and night, looking as if they’re waiting for the ferry to get back from the other side of the river so they can drive onto it and get off the island.

The lights, which went in at the five-corners’ intersection in downtown Tavistock about two years ago, were supposed to improve traffic flow, reduce danger to pedestrians and, I suppose, bring the village squarely into the latter half of the 20th century. Instead, according to people who live and work there, the lights haven’t done any of the things they were supposed to do, resulting in even more traffic tie-ups, putting pedestrians in more danger than ever and driving Tavistockians (Tavistockites? Tavistockarians?) to distraction.

The lights are also having an effect on the youth who live there. One Grade 3 boy, for example, on his way to school one day, found himself in Grade 4 by time he made it across the intersection.

The authorities – in this case, Oxford County officials – seem stumped when it comes to ways to fix the problem. Removing the lights has been ruled out.

Fortunately, Tavistockinians (Tavistocklanders? Tavistockans?) young and old have lots of good suggestions on what to do about the whole headache.

Here are some of them.

1. Leave the lights where they are and move the village somewhere else. This may be one of the more extreme measures, but given the basement floodings during rainstorms these past couple of years, it might be an idea to move to higher ground somewhere. There’s lots of room in South Easthope Township, for example.

2. Construct parking lots beyond the four entrances to the village – near Shakespeare, Harmony, Hickson and Punkeydoodle’s Corner (and yes, that is an actual place) – and let those having business to do in Tavistock take the subway to the downtown area.

3. Build an overpass across the main intersection. This idea was floated by township councillor Doris Gladding at a council meeting Wednesday. With Canada’s prime minister looking for infrastructure projects to take on, this one might just fill the bill.

4. Require every driver to stop and give a pedestrian a ride across the intersection, dropping him or her off at the other side. This way, the walk signals could be done away with and the traffic flow speeded up.

5. Force all Oxford County officials to drive their vehicles through the intersection five times a day. This idea has potential. The prevailing opinion is that if this was done, a solution to the lights dilemma would be found in a week or two.

Maybe even sooner.

(Tavistockers?)

©1993 Jim Hagarty

To: randy
From: jim
Subject: No subject

hi there:

srry for being so late getting back to yu. i got your message that you sent an hour ago but i’ve just been way too busy to reply to it. i hope you can forgive me.

thanks for yet another batch of jokes about elvis and his big belly. i just can never get enough humour about former pop music stars who ate and drugged themselves to an early grave. please resend that list of the top 10 things that went through john denver’s mind before his plane crashed. i laughed so hard when i read that; how clever it was of whomever wrote that to think of all those funny things to say about that dead guy, too. boy it doesn’t seem that long ago that i used to just love the songs those guys sang and took so much comfort an inspiration from their music. now i get to laugh uproariously at them, since they’re dead. thanks.

got your list of how to tell when you’re officially over the hill. that line about peeing in the cup – what a hoot! who would have ever thought that getting old could be so gosh-awful hilarious?

where do yu get all these great jokes and stories? and when do you find time to send them all out to the 200 people on your mailing list? amazing. keep up the good work!

thanks too for all the notices about the great websites i shold be looking up. i really want to check out that one on the history of bagels and the one on how to cure yourself of nearsightedness. also the one that reprints all the love lettrs of woodrow wilson.

i don’t have much news to tell you since i last wrote you this morning at 9 o’clock. everything’s pretty much the same now as it wa then. what a dull life i lead, eh? oh, by the way, i have included an attachment i received yesterday. it’s a letter telling you how much you mean to me, and what a great friend you ahve been over the years. it was sent to me by another close friend of mine last night. he said in the letter that i was to send it right way to 10 more people and if i didn’t, it was quite possible that a member of my family mght cotract a terminal illness before friday. so, pleas, for my sake, send this out right away to 10 people, thanks a lot.

[the_ad_placement id=”ad-widget”]got the pictures of your cat in the bathtub. what a little cutie he is. i can see he’s putting up a bit of a struggle there but you know, i think cats do a lot of protesting just for show. they really do like being treated like human babies their whole lives don’t you think? also, thanks for the 24 shots of yur trip to maine. i’m afraid it took about two hours for them to download. actually i didn’t get them all as they crashed my system and i had to take my computer in this afternoon for repairs. but now that i’m up and runing again, could you resend the last five shots? I ‘d like to print them off on my colour printer and keep them in a binder? arne’t computers great? how else would i ever get to keep photo albums of my friends’ vacations?

sorry i have not seen you in the past, gosh, has it been six years? but it’s so great we can keep in touch this way. i know we live in the same city and it seems ricidulous that we can’t find time to get together any more but at least we can send e-mails to each other. remember we used to talk on the phone once a wek, too? wow, that seems like a long time ago. may as well sell my phone (laugh, laugh).

i have snet you a couple of columns from the new york times i though you might get a kick out of also one from a newspaper in glasgow. if you don’t have time to read them, just junk them.

well, i have four other messages to send before my shift ends in another two hours so i better get busy. i have to watch thta the boss doesn’t cathc me but what i do is quick put on the screen saver and he never knows the difference. he gets pretty mad when he finds any of us sending private mail on company time. what a grouch! one day he caught fred markens downloading pcitures from nudes nudes nudes magazine. oh well, at least old freddy got to have a long weekend that week. what a laugh.

so i’ll go now. good luch finding work. that’s amazine that yu sent your resume out by e-mail to 300 companies and didn’t even get one reply. what’s the world coming to? what, do they expect you to get dressed up and go down to their places and knock on their door? as if. keep plugging. i know yu’ll get ther. maybe you should get your own website. my neighbour darns socks to make extra money. she has her own website. it’s cute. get this. her domain name is www.fixinahole.com. she hasn’t had any orders yet but i think it will soon take off.

well spekaing of taking off, i’m outa here. oh, by the way, tonight is apparently the best night in 200 years for looking at the planet mars. you can see a webecast of it at www.seemars.com at 11 p.m. my wife said why don’t you just go outside and look up at it. right. i’ll get right on that, i said. some people.

take care,
jim

* p.s. how do you know if you’ve got the chicken pox? answer: when a pciture of col. sanders gets you all excited.

* p.p.s. did you konw that if an ant were the size of a man, it could lift up a full-size car and carry it half a mile before seeting it down (see www.antfacts.coin)

©2004 Jim Hagarty

Last week, the goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team set a bit of record when he failed to stop a puck that had been fired by a defenceman from the other team all the way down the ice from the New Jersey Devils’ end during a Leafs powerplay. Within minutes, before the game had even ended, video of the goal began playing on the popular YouTube on the lnternet and it’s been a hot item for web surfers ever since.

I haven’t been a big YouTube fan so far because for the first long while it was around, I had no idea what it was, and then, having somewhat figured it out, discovered that it doesn’t work that well unless you have super high speed Internet, which I don’t have yet. I’ll get around to getting that the day before some other amazing new technology is introduced that will take me another five years to try, the day before its expiry date, of course.

Keeping up with advances in the digital age is like trying remember the dates of your siblings’ birthdays. By the time you recall the day, you’re well on your way to their next birthday so you may as well wait for next year, except for the fact that the same thing happens then too.

Each Wednesday night, when the weekly newspaper I am editor of is finally “put to bed”, I go home to my own bed and reward myself with a feast of TV shows, sometimes well into the early morning. One recent night, I happened across a special PBS program broadcasting the 1983 reunion concert by the Everly Brothers (the “Elderly Brothers”, as someone has dubbed them). I sound too much like my parents, I know, but this was popular music at its best. Harmonies so good, no one since has been able to come close to singing together so well, not even the Beatles who admitted to trying hard to sound just like the Everlys, at least in their early days.

I taped the concert and it’s been playing almost non-stop since that night. I think it’s significant that the pre-teen members of our household are now going around humming and singing these 50-year-old classics they’ve been hearing night and day.

In any case, last Friday night, I took to the Internet when the house was finally quiet to learn more about Don and Phil, who I thankfully saw in concert at the once-great Lulu’s Roadhouse in Kitchener, a nearby city to me. Within a short time, I’d read biographies of them both, and learned about how their harmonies grew out of the relatively small region in the southern U.S. from where their family (their parents were professional entertainers) came. The Everly Brothers performed together almost before they hit grade school and eventually got so sick of each other that Phil busted up his guitar during a concert in the ’70s and walked off the stage.

From the singers’ bios, I ended up on YouTube and wiled away the next few hours jumping from one video to another, seeing some amazing things. A young Bob Dylan doing an Everly Brothers hit. Same with the Beatles. Art Garfunkel and James Taylor singing Cryin’ in the Rain. There were dozens of videos by garage bands doing fantastic tributes to the Everlys. I was able to watch Don and Phil themselves on stage with Simon and Garfunkel and, sadly, looking a bit over the hill. But still sounding great.

Another few clicks and I had the lyrics to every hit song the brothers ever recorded.

I don’t know whether all this instant access is a good or bad thing. The Maple Leafs’ goalie might wish his flub wasn’t out there for everyone in the world to see forevermore. But I do know that the speed of the Internet really amazes me. What a long way from that 45 RPM copy of Bye Bye Love playing on our old Seabreeze record player in the early ’60s. when the brothers weren’t so elderly.

And neither was I.

©2008 Jim Hagarty

People with children can count on some unexpected consequences of their decision to reproduce. Adventures, let’s say, that they didn’t exactly dream of when they were gazing lovingly into the eyes of the person they would need some participation from to complete the procreative process.

One of those unintended consequences, of course, was the onset of many years of uninterrupted exhaustion. Another was the opening of a direct, one-way line into the family bank account, much like the tapping of the maple trees in the spring, that would keep the dollars flowing through the financial institution with hardly a chance to stop for a rest.

But the one that has most affected me over the years is the way in which the presence of children make the simple things, well, not so simple anymore.

I refer, in this article, specifically, to how hard it becomes to make any changes whatsoever in the family environment, once the kids become familiar with every nook and cranny of their home. Guilt by the bucketful awaits the parent who re-arranges things or, heaven forbid, discards some treasure which is only a treasure by virtue of the fact that it has been discarded.

So, clutter clearing becomes an exercise in stealth, best performed during hours in which offspring are abstracted and occupied, such as they are, say, in a classroom.

“Out of sight, out of mind” is all a dad has to hang onto sometimes and amazingly, it often works. Articles disappear one by one and providing they aren’t somehow reminded of them, the younger ones leave them behind.

But sneaking things away from the grip of ever-sentimental sons and daughters is not so hard, sometimes, as getting their Dad to give them up. That first trike, first hockey helmet, first two-wheeler bike, first wagon, etc., etc. You finally get up the courage to give them away to a local second-hand shop, but look back longingly as you drive off until they are out of sight. Saying goodbye to a bike or baby buggy is saying farewell to a child who no longer exists, an older, taller version having taken her place.

A mother of three kids told me one time to not be too quick to get rid of things, not to be too efficient at clutter clearing. Kids will use any article they can find as props in their games.
I took this advice to heart with a huge pile of soil that was dumped behind our new shed when a hole was dug to lay the concrete floor a dozen years ago. Every year, I intended to do something with the pile – build up the flowerbeds, give some away, anything, so that the lawn could be nice and flat again. But, alas, the kids discovered it before my good intentions could take effect.

And procrastination, though it rarely pays off, did so this time.

Every winter, the “mountain” became a mini toboggan hill. Every summer, it was used as a fort. Many a brave knight ran up to the top of that mountain and challenged his enemies to a sword fight. Many a slain swordsman fell and rolled down the mountain. Many a participant in hiding games found refuge behind the pile.

But this spring, it seemed time for the mountain to finally go. And so I announced on a recent Saturday that I would be outside taking down the mountain. Not a peep of interest did I hear. I repeated myself. Again, no peep. Tobogganers and mountain climbers had acquired new interests.

Almost every night for two weeks now, my shovel and I have been slowly chopping away at the mountain and, moist from the winter’s snow, it is yielding up its contents easily, as though it too knows it is time to spread its wings.

Each evening, I go back into the house and report my progress on my project. No response. No one has even come out to see what’s going on.

They’ve moved on.

I barely have.

With each cut of the digger, I see those little snowsuits rolling down this side of the hill, or that sturdy caped warrior standing proudly at the summit.

I’m going to miss that mountain. And someday, I’ll bet, my kids will too. And as they are already showing signs of having the family writing bug, I know that someday, some story will begin, “I remember the summer our Dad took down the mountain.”

©2007 Jim Hagarty

It helps, when you’re reading this story, to realize that l’m a worrier. A little genetic trait, I think, left over from my ancestors’ experience during the Famine in Ireland. I’m not as bad as some, maybe, but I confess I do look out the kitchen window sometimes in the middle of the night and imagine I see Osama Bin Laden in my backyard, fooling with some fireworks.

So, when I agreed to take three young kids skating on the a public outdoor rink in town last Friday, I began to fret before we left the house. Into the trunk went everything associated with skating and hockey that it was possible to conceive of, short of a Zamboni. And as anyone who has surrendered a credit card for the purchase of much of this material, not even one piece of it is something the average parent would want to lose.

I got to the outdoor rink, already in this heightened state of the expectation of impending doom, only to be greeted by an ice surface packed almost wall to wall, if there had been walls. It was, after all, a school holiday and a lot of Stratford parents had similar ideas on how to wile away the afternoon without spending a hundred bucks.

The crowd posed the obvious problem of leaving limited ice surface to play on, but for the dad intent on taking home 100 per cent of the items we arrived with, the high numbers of strangers heightened the chance that someone other than those who sleep at my house every night would make off with something either of monetary value – helmets, skates, etc. – or sentimental value, like first hockey sticks and old hockey sticks. Not because there were any young hooligans on the ice, hooligans in our town having better things to do than go skating, but simply because there was so much clothing and hockey gear around, it seemed entirely possible that someone might pick up something by mistake.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this quality time with my kids but given the above circumstances and my agitated state of mind, I was well beyond any chance of contentment. My eyes rarely strayed from the snowbanks and the sticks, pucks, helmets, goalie pads, boots, mitts, hats, coats, scarves and backpacks that lie there for the taking. The inventory kept changing as one boy would wear goalie pads, then shed them; another would wear skates, then trade them for boots. Helmets were on and helmets were off. Sticks here, sticks there.

Finally, I took to ferrying items I thought had outlived their use this day to the ironclad safety of the trunk of the car. First this stick. Then that helmet. This empty water bottle. That coat. This stocking cap.

By the time the day was winding down, I was pretty proud of my efficiency and while I did not do a complete inventory before I left, I was sure that no other mom or dad in Stratford had taken home anything that belonged to me and my family, because if it had been left to the younger members of this excursion, it would all still be lying there in the snowbank.

We arrived home, hauled all this weighty matter into the house, and began unpacking it.

“Where’d you get these?” my wife asked, holding up a pair of boy’s gloves.

“They’re ours, aren’t they?” I asked nervously.

“No, never seen them before,” she replied.

I guess it is more than a little ironic that the one who worried all afternoon about someone making off with something that belonged to us, made off with something that didn’t. With no way of returning them to their rightful owner. I guess we’ll have to claim reluctant ownership.

(They’re grey wool, with flip-open fingers, and a Thinsulate tag on them, and no, Osama, they aren’t yours.)

Then again, had the parent who had brought those gloves not been off frolicking on the ice with his boy on a sunny Friday afternoon instead of guarding his belongings as he should have been, the inadvertent thief I had become could have been stopped in my tracks.

Which is why I believe it is evident Osama bin Laden will be found one day by a worrier and not a laid-back dude. And found, hopefully, in somebody else’s backyard, cause I’m getting good and sick of imagining him in ours.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

OK, so the aliens have landed on the flats of Lower Queen’s Park in my hometown of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, and have jumped out of their saucer to have a look around. They have been sent to do some exploring and to report their findings back to the mother ship hovering over the other Queen’s Park – the Ontario government buildings in Toronto. (The mother ship, by the way, has been able to switch off its engines, carried aloft as it is, by the hot air rising from the legislature buildings below.)

The three little green guys with their laservision and rayguns hide behind bushes and in the branches of trees as they inspect the lifeforms they see around them on this unfamiliar planet. They are surprised, however, to find that some of the things they see do not differ that much from the way things are back on planet Org. Buildings in which the lifeforms live have little round satellite dishes attached near their roofs, for example, to receive messages from their home planet.

However, other features of these buildings on Earth do differ from back home. Each building has large front and back porches but their purpose is not clear. The front verandah seems to be a place to hold two chairs – in which the lifeforms never sit – four flowerpots and shiny department store catalogues in plastic thrown about on the floor while the rear deck holds a black metal box that is set on fire a few times every week. Some of the properties have giant bathtubs in their backyards which their owners spend all day cleaning and five minutes a week bathing in, while they are well used by other lifeforms who live in the buildings nearby.

Other buildings must contain extremely valuable items as their owners have big, hairy lifeforms with thick necks and bad moods to protect them from intruders. These noisy four-legged creatures especially seem to dislike lifeforms in blue uniforms who deliver papery items to boxes attached to the sides of the houses.

But the biggest difference the aliens find is in the ways Earth’s lifeforms move from one point to another. A very few put one foot in front of the other foot and repeat this strange movement over and over, eventually getting from Place A to Place B. Others, with grey or white hair, wearing caps with peaks in front and holes on top to allow the head to poke through, travel up and down narrow concrete pathways on motorized chairs.

Many of the young lifeforms, on the other hand, have evolved to the point where they have wheels embedded in the soles of their feet, the better with which to scoot down the middle of the streets. Others have wooden boards attached to the ends of their legs, carried along by four wheels below. These strange vehicles do not travel smoothly down the concrete pathways but instead, jump from pathway to curb to street and back up again. Sometimes they are used to carry their owners up and down sharply curved ramps for no apparent reason.

Other young folk can be seen riding, with their arms crossed over their chests, on two-wheeled velocipedes with two handlebars that appear to serve no useful purpose. And here and there, a person is found awkwardly riding on a seat with only one big wheel attached below.

Another strange thing the aliens find about transportation is how there are many big, long steel and glass boxes on wheels travelling up and down the streets, stopping every so often, and opening their doors. The vehicles seem to have been designed to carry lifeforms, but most of the lifeforms apparently do not use them for whatever reason. Instead, they all have their own smaller boxes on wheels in which they prefer to ride from their homes to park a few blocks away on large asphalt lots and in which they like to sit and wait in long lineups to pass by the windows of buildings through which they are handed paper cups of hot brown liquid.

As for the human lifeforms themselves, most of them appear to be self-powered while many others, mostly the young among them, move robot-like down the concrete pathways with wires coming from small batteries they carry in their hands, backpacks or shirt pockets and through which electric energy appears to be sent to their brains through wires plugged into their ears.

The aliens’ report promises to be a long and very interesting one.

Eventually, all lifeforms on Earth will be able to read it by staring into glowing boxes on the tops of their desks.

©2005 Jim Hagarty