Jim Hagarty

Elly Mae Clampett is gone and so are my chances of ever skinny dipping with her in the see-ment pond, something I had hoped to someday do. Thanks Donna Douglas for all the fun you helped create for so many millions of people over the years.

My family and I still watch The Beverly Hillbillies on DVD and laugh like crazy. Elly Mae, I love how you tormented your poor cousin Jethro who had a healthy respect for your “wrassling” abilities. How you managed to hang him by the heels from the front verandah of your mansion I will never know but thanks for doing it.

I loved the big oaf too but let’s face it, he was as thick as a brick.

Your Pa had his hands full trying to feminize you but all he really had to do was have you stand next to Miss Jane Hathaway and the job was done.

You aged well as have your shows which make up maybe the best sitcom ever, in this humble hillbilly’s view. I hope there are lots of possums and grits to eat in Heaven and plenty of critters to befriend. Say hi to Granny and Jed.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

All hail to the most brilliant man or woman ever to live in our times.

I speak, of course, about the person who invented raspberry lemonade. How can it possibly be that the name of this incredible inventor is not known by every school child (and blogger) in the land? They all know Alexander Graham Bell, but not this guy? No Time magazine cover, no Nobel prize. What the heck?

Raspberry lemonade is nature’s perfect food. It is grown on raspberry lemon trees and harvested in late summer. The yellow-red fruit produces a nectar not matched by any other substance on earth.

Unfortunately, the company that markets the brand I love have priced it in such a way that only the very wealthy can buy it. This is a terrible social crime, really, but the one bright light is how it comes on sale now and then and if you are a cagey shopper, you can just snap up a quart or gallon or litre or pint or whatever, for a reasonable buck.

And so it was, with the big holiday season ahead of us, that I worried I would not have any raspberry lemonade in the fridge and that was making me sad. In a desperate search for affordable raspade, as I call it, I wandered into a big box grocery store Friday afternoon.

I don’t want to take away from the true Christmas Miracle, but there before me, in the cooler section with all the lesser juices, were three (like the wise men) big gallons of raspade at a cut rate price. Marked down from $5.77 to $3.77. I don’t know if I have a heart murmur but something started murmuring inside my chest and I moved in for the kill. An old lady seemed to be looking at the jugs. She can look at them forever in her dreams tonight. I grabbed them all.

When it comes to raspberry lemonade, there is no goodwill to all, no first shall be last, no golden rule.

It sometimes takes me a while to get into the Christmas spirit, but obviously, I am there now.

And to all a good night.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

I really don’t want to gross anyone out here, but a story in this week’s news reminded me of something that happened to me a few months ago.

First, the story.

A woman and her adult son in Newport News, Virginia, were convicted this week of trying to extort money from a restaurant chain by claiming they found a dead mouse in a bowl of soup while celebrating Mother’s Day in 2004. Their conviction was apparently not a slam dunk but their chances of getting the $500,000 they wanted from the restaurant were hampered by the size of their demands. Had they been a little less greedy and gone for a reasonable sum – $10,000 maybe, give or take a few hundred – the company might have rolled over, but with that kind of money on the line, they decided to fight back.

Now, Carla Patterson, 38, and her 22-year-old son Ricky probably thought they were pretty clever when they plunked a dead mouse into her bowl of soup. But they hadn’t counted on the wonders of science and the potential for them to be done in by the findings of a little procedure called a necropsy, kind of like an autopsy for mice. And who would think that anyone could possibly prove that that mouse didn’t arrive at Carla’s table in the bottom of her soup bowl, but instead made its way from her purse to the dish? I would have thought it impossible to prove. I’ve had sleepless nights, sitting up trying to think of ways to prove that.

But the restaurant’s defence team did exactly that.

The necropsy showed the mouse died of a fractured skull (meaning Carla or Ricky must have beaned it with a bat or hammer, or maybe a soup spoon). It had no soup in its lungs and had not been cooked. The jury agreed, after four hours, that these were signs that the rodent was dropped into the soup after its death.

The Pattersons fell, as it were, into their own mousetrap and for their trouble could each spend the next 10 years behind bars. But mercy has been recommended so it’s doubtful they’ll spend more than a year in the sinbin. It was a nice try, I guess, but also a good lesson for all future rodent extortionists. Make sure you don’t conk the mouse on the head but find some way to send him off that won’t leave any trace of violence that could be picked up later. A good idea might be to cook up the little guy in a pot of soup at home before taking him out to dinner with you. Just make sure you order the same kind of soup at the restaurant as the type you boiled up at home.

What is the world coming to, you have to wonder, when it’s getting so darned complicated just to pull off a simple scam?

But now to my story. Not too exciting, I’ll admit, but at least my misadventure with food was not planned by me as a scheme to bilk anybody. If you’re squeamish, don’t read this next sentence.
One day, I was drinking a can of pop, when I felt something catch between my lips. I set the pop down, investigated and pulled out a fingernail clipping. Yippee! What a wonderful world, I thought. My one consolation was that, as I understand it, cola is kind of a powerful cleanser in its own right so at least the stray human body part I almost ingested was probably germ free. I forget which pop company it was that has an employee who clips his or her nails on the assembly line, but it didn’t occur to me to sue. With my luck, some brainiac somewhere would do a DNA analysis and find the fingernail was my own which it most definitely was not as it has been more than 30 years since I worked for a pop company.

I guess Carla and Ricky’s one consolation is that all the mouseless soup they eat during the coming year will be for free.

©2006 Jim Hagarty

This column is dedicated to Jack Hammer, the power-tool salesmen about whom I have written before, the man with the perfect name for his job. Someone whose destiny was pounded out the day his parents named him.

And to all the others in the world who have it so easy, I say, well done. For you needn’t fret over career choices. Just follow your moniker; it will show you the way.

I cite, as my first piece of evidence, Your Honour, the person of Bonnie Beaver, president of the American Veterinary Association. I can’t imagine her in any other capacity. Ditto Jen Cutting. Surely she was accepted into hairdressing school based solely on her surname, and now is a successful coiffeur.

Chris Moneymaker, the accountant, won the 2003 World Series of Poker, and what else would you have expected him to do?

If I was president of 3M Canada, and chances are good that I may someday be hired for that position, I would rush out and hire Penny Wise to be my business manager, which the company has done. I’m not a huge believer in luck, but how could a person with that name mismanage any denomination of money?

Of course, there are the simple ones, such as former Blue Jays slugger Cecil Fielder. Or the laughably easy, John Tory, the new leader of the Tory party in Ontario. He showed a lot of Grit in running for the leadership, but the result was a Never Doubted Probability (NDP).

Those of us old enough to remember the little incendiary device known as the “match stick” which, with a bit of scratching and thrusting against a rough surface would burst into flame – for the disposable lighter generation a concept surely too difficult to imagine – will remember a certain name associated with those matches and that is why it does not surprise us that Mike Eddy would be named president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.

And who couldn’t know that the Ontario caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada would choose Gary Goodyear to comment on recent meetings the party held with auto industry representatives to hammer out a party policy in that area?

And just as Alison Fryer didn’t really have much choice but to open The Cookbook Store, Kevin Sites had to become an NBC videographer to travel the world and show the people back home all the you know what he was seeing.

I think Zak Firestone is the right person to be sending out press releases for the Fire Safety Days a battery company holds. And when I send my son out with the Boy Scouts to learn all about living in the wild, I want nobody else but Terry Wilder looking after him.

And in what has to be the crop circles of surnames, this item appeared in newspapers this summer, surely emitting some sort of signal that aliens really have arrived: In August, Rev. James Profit, a Jesuit priest in Guelph, opposed plans by Walmart to build a store near a Jesuit retreat centre. OMB panelists Bob Boxma, a Toronto lawyer, and John Aker, a former Oshawa and Durham Region councillor, listened to arguments from lawyers representing Walmart and the city on one side, and the Jesuit Centre and a citizens’ group on the other all about the arrival of a big-box store next to the Jesuit Centre and how this would bring about the paving over of acres and acres of prime farmland. In a battle of wits between Boxma and Aker, I wouldn’t know on whom to bet.

Maybe I should ask that gambler Chris Moneymaker. He’d know.

©2004 Jim Hagarty

I was flattered to be asked to speak at the meeting, even if the invitation was casually delivered. I had been talking to the president of the club on the street corner as we waited for the walk signal and he mentioned that maybe I’d like to say a few words at their next meeting. I’ll be there, I said.

And I was there. Early. People were milling about the coffee machine, some of them starting to fill up the chairs at the back when I arrived. The president greeted me warmly. Said he was glad I could make it. I was a little nervous and headed for a seat, so I could be alone a few minutes and collect my thoughts. I sat in the front row. Easier to get to the podium from there.

The chairs behind me started to fill up but with only a few minutes to the start of the meeting, I counted only 40 people, a rather small turnout, I thought. Did the organizers not advertise the meeting topic, the location, the guest speakers?

Oh well, better a big fish in a small pond. And as the chairman droned out announcements before the first speaker got started, I began to relax and enjoy the occasion. I felt good. Almost elated. This is the way the picture was supposed to develop. First a writer, then a speaker. Who knows what after that? If this audience was small, all the better. A good chance to sharpen my speaking skills where there was less at stake.

The meeting could have stood with a little more formality. The chairman sat down and the first speaker stood up and there was no indication what the audience could expect to transpire during the rest of the evening. At 7:45 p.m., The Subject At Hand began to unravel before us all and a minute later, I imagined I heard the sound of 80 eyelids falling shut. Five minutes later, heads began to bob and weave and by 8 p.m., arms were falling off chests and hanging limply the sides of slumping bodies. Here and there, papers and books dropped off laps onto the floor and for a while I didn’t know whether I had come to a lecture or a slumber party.

By 8:30 p.m., And In Conclusion I’d Just Like To Say was obviously a long way off. At this rate, we’d all be a lot older when we left the room than when we entered it. And the orator was just getting wound up, like a storm gathering clouds over the next hill. He’d spent a lot of time on this speech and we were going to too.

But in a way, opportunity lie before me and I began to wonder if Providence had even arranged things this way. By the time I got up, the audience would be crying for something light, easy and interesting. I’d be like a lone, twinkling star in a dark and sullen sky.

In contrast to the speaker, who, by 9 o’clock was still churning out little stories the story just before the last story reminded him of, my cache of little-known anecdotes would glisten like a rainbow after a downpour.

Finally, like a jet decelerating for its approach to the runway, the speaker began heading for home and I knew my time was near. My palms began to sweat and I felt a slight lump in my throat, but I was ready.

To scattered and brief applause the speaker sat down and the chairman stood up. Heck of a speech, the chairman said. Didn’t know there was that much to know about that. Let’s hear another round of applause.

“Well, thank you all very much for coming out tonight,” the chairman finally said. “There are tea biscuits, scones and a big pot of coffee at the back of the room. Feel free to stick around for a while.”

I applauded, limply, like the rest, and shaped my face into a stunned smile. Even thanked the speaker for his interesting talk.

But my graciousness ended when the president of the club, who obviously had forgotten our little talk on the street corner, came over and asked me if I’d help stack the chairs.

I never wanted to be a public speaker in the first place.

©1987 Jim Hagarty

You see, this is how a good afternoon can turn bad.

You need two woodscrews. About yay big and about yay long. To fasten a board to a wall. A five-minute job.

You get down your jars of woodscrews you’ve been carefully saving for 10 years. You have about 3,000 or so.

You spill all the screws out on the floor and go through them, like a miner sifting stones in search of a nugget.

You face facts after going through them for a half hour. The two woodscrews you need are not among the 6,000 you have picked through.

You get in the car and drive two miles to the building supplies store, knowing that, even though you’re the owner of 12,000 woodscrews, you’ll probably have to buy a package of another 100 in order to get two.

You spend a half hour going through every box and bag in the store and finally find what you need in a plastic package of seven. But because they’re in a package, you can’t hold them in your hand to check them for their yayness. Nevertheless, they look like the right ones.

You remember suddenly that, among your many screwdrivers, you don’t have one to fit the screws you’re buying. So you pick one off the shelf.

You also remember that you’ll need a drill bit to fit the two new woodscrews so you go on a search. This store doesn’t have them.

You pay for your purchases and leave the building.

(Warning: readers prone to dizziness or nausea might want to be seated for the rest of this column.)

You go to another building supplies store, one that has drill bits. You describe your new screws. The clerk shows you various options. You go out to the car, get the screws and bring them in to show him. He shows you what bit would fit. You say, “Hey, wait a minute, I already have one of those,” and leave the store.

You get home, go back to the project you were working on and realize the following: The screws you have bought are too small. In fact, you already have several dozen that same size and held many of them in your hand a mere half hour ago.

You go back to the store, armed with more precise measurements. You want two screws a size bigger than yay and half an inch longer. You make the swap with the clerk, leave the store and head home.

You realize, halfway there, that having bought a screwdriver to match the woodscrews which were too small and which you have now returned, you now own a screwdriver which is too small to drive the proper-sized screws you hope you now have in that bag in your coat pocket.

You go back to the lumber supplies store for the third time in less than an hour, this time to exchange the only other thing you bought when you were first there two trips ago. You find the proper screwdriver and swap it for the other one. It costs 80 cents more.

You leave for home again, veins in your face about yay big, when you suddenly realize the drill bit you told the clerk at the other store you didn’t need because you already had one at home, well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but, now you do need it.

You go back into the second building supplies store for the second time in a half an hour, and tell the same clerk you were wrong and yes you do need a bit. He looks at you as if he thinks you need more than a bit. You buy the bit and hit the road.

You have made five trips to two stores and spent almost 90 minutes and a total of $9.41 for two screws and the proper tools to install them.

You remember that when you get home, you have 24,000 screws to clean up off the floor.

You become emotional. A tear forms in the corner of your eye. A big tear.

About yay big.

©1993 Jim Hagarty

Roger works in Tavistock.

And I work in Stratford.

That’s not exactly half a world away.

So, when one of us wants to make a business telephone call to the other, how hard can it be to get through?

We both live in small towns. How busy can either one of us be?

But recently, the two of us spent a day and a half trying to chase each other down through Ma Bell’s 10 miles of lines from here to there.

He called me first. I wasn’t in.

I called him back. He wasn’t in.

He returned my return call. I’d gone home for the day.

The next morning, I placed a return call to his return call to my return call to his original call. He was out of the office.

An hour later, he called me back. When I got back from my coffee break, there was a note taped to my computer: “Roger called. Please return his call.”

In the time it took us to reach each other by phone, I could have driven to Tavistock, painted Roger’s house, and been home for the 10 o’clock news.

But, that is life in these technological times.

Finally, in the afternoon of the second day, I got through to Roger’s office when he was actually there.

“Do you mind if I put you on hold?” asked his secretary. “He’s on another line.”

“No problem,” I said, just grateful that, at long last, I was about to talk to the man who had called me, about what I still did not know.

As I sat there on hold, a secretary in the office I work in dropped a note on my desk in front of me: “There’s a call waiting for you when you’re through there.”

Someone was on hold, waiting for me, who was on hold, waiting for Roger.

To me, nothing illustrates what a comedy modern life has become better than the next note I received a few minutes later from the secretary in our office.

“Are you going to be on there very long? Roger’s holding for you.”

“No,” I said to her. “I should be free soon.” And I went back to waiting.

Then, like it did for the man who stayed up all night to see the sun rise, it finally dawned on me.

I was sitting on hold, waiting to talk to Roger who was on another line. Roger was sitting on hold, waiting to talk to me, who was on another line.

It was like an episode from The Twilight Zone.

Or should that be, The Twilight Phone?

©1991 Jim Hagarty

Seven, maybe eight years ago, when I was teaching journalism at a community college, or trying to, the program coordinator talked me into interviewing prospective new students to the program. Each instructor on staff would grab a classroom or office and sit down one by one with high school grads thinking about a career in newspapers, magazines or public relations and with the occasional adult looking to retrain to take a new direction in life. The interviewing exercise quickly became routine but it was serious enough work. You did not want to recommend someone for acceptance into the program who would be unsuited for it and waste a couple of years of her life – not to mention a lot of money – as a result.

The screening process required, among other things such as skills tests, that each applicant bring in a sample of his writing so we could at least see whether or not there was evidence of any spark that could be used to light a flame later on. Each prospective student dutifully handed over a few pages of typed material, nicely printed out and often packaged in various plastic cover formats to make them more appealing.

One such writing sample I accepted from an adult applicant, however, was not so neatly packaged. In fact, the woman’s stories – all handwritten – were contained between the red covers of a small booklet about seven inches wide and eight inches long. I briefly looked over the stories written on the lined paper within, and it occurred to me that I should photocopy them for future reference. Instead, the woman said I could hang on to the book, which I did.

Six years ago this summer, I left the college but before I did, I pitched a lot of the material I had gathered along the way – student assignments and records and other papers that obviously would not be of much use to me in the non-teaching roles that lie ahead. Not being too skilled at divesting myself of remnants of past occupations, however, I’m afraid a lot of textbooks, papers, cards and notes from students as well as copies of student newspapers, came home with me.

As did the little red book handed me that day a couple years before by a woman I never saw again and who did not take her application to journalism any farther than that initial contact.

Six years, and several stops and starts at a total purge later, my pile of teaching flotsam and jetsam was gradually getting smaller, though the little red book survived every firm resolve to move on.

In fact, I can truthfully guess that some part of my brain probably never stopped thinking about that woman’s booklet, containing her precious writings, from the time she put it in my hand, onward. I needed, somehow, to get that book back to its owner. She was waiting by her mailbox every day, hoping for its return.

Insensitively, I had hung onto it, even though, before I left the college, I referred to her application, scribbled down her address on a scrap of paper and tucked it inside the front cover.

Last week, I finally somehow found the courage to sever the last of the ties and empty my desk drawers, filing cabinet and shelves of everything associated with teaching.

Everything, that is, except the little red book.

I brought it to work last Friday, and placed a call to the owner of the object of my eight-year guilt trip. Would she even still be living at that address? Or living, period?

The phone rang. A woman answered. I asked her her name and was assured I had the right person. I re-introduced myself, and she obviously had a hard time putting the puzzle together. But finally, when I mentioned the little red booklet that contained her innermost thoughts and feelings, she paused and then slowly remembered it.

This is the part, I anticipated, where she would rejoice at the prospect of welcoming a long-lost friend home, something she could pass on to her kids and grandkids.

“So, what would you like me to do with it?” I asked.

“Hmmm,” she said, as I waited for some sort of emotional response. Tears, mild weeping, maybe a little whimpering. Possibly an expression of joy.

“You can just toss it.”

“What?” I replied. “Are you sure you don’t want it back?”

“Yeah, just pitch it.”

Which, I immediately did, after the phone conversation ended. At the end of the day, however, I fished it back out of the recycling box on a hunch I might make a newspaper column out of it.

Eight years of worrying about that little red book had to pay off somehow, beyond the lesson learned about the ultimate futility of doing other people’s thinking for them.

So, I have my column.

And I still haven’t thrown the damned thing out.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

(This was written at a time when email was still relatively new.)

1. What the heck is email?

2. Well I guess I’m going to have to get onto this email stuff.

3. Wow! Email is fantastic. How did I ever live without it?

4. Yes, dear, I’m still up. I just have to send a few more emails. I know it’s 2 a.m. I’ll come to bed in a little while.

5. Hey Charlie. Guess how many emails I had waiting for me when I fired up my computer today. Go ahead, guess. Come on, guess! Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. I had 22 messages in my inbox this morning. Twenty-two. I couldn’t believe it.

6. Hey Charlie, listen to this joke I got in an email last night. It’s a dandy.

7. Hi everyone. Ran across this great story the other day about a little girl and her bunny rabbit. It brought a tear to my eye. Thought I’d share it in an email with you all. Hope you like it. I have another one I’ll send tomorrow.

8. Sorry dear, I can’t cut the lawn this morning. I’ve got too many emails to reply to.

9. Darn, I haven’t answered those emails I got last weekend. I’d better get at it.

10. I wish people would stop sending me so much darned junk by emails. How do they find the time to send all that?

11. Dear Friends: Sorry I haven’t been replying to your emails lately, but I’ve been very, very busy.

12. Why the heck did I ever get email?

©2003 Jim Hagarty