Jim Hagarty

I recently read an article which stated that coffee is bad for your health.

If you drink too much of it, it will make you grumpy and keep you awake at night.

Given the hard time other addictive substances are having in our health-conscious world nowadays, I feel fairly safe in predicting that coffee is about to go down the drain as a popular national drink.

It had been perking right along, so to speak, missing out on the terrible roasting that alcohol and tobacco have been getting all these years.

And now, in an instant, its reputation has bean run right into the ground.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that before long:

• the government will discover coffee and tax it till it costs about $5 a cup;

• the big behind-the-barn thrill for kids won’t be their first taste of booze or drag on a cigarette but instead, their first sip of coffee;

• coffee will be sold at special government shops with a big sign announcing COFFEE STORE over the front door;

• a lawyer will try to beat his client’s murder rap by arguing the poor schmuck was buzzed out on coffee when he pulled the trigger and never would have done it otherwise;

• proof of age will have to be shown in coffee shops and no one will be allowed a second cup;

• coffee ads on TV won’t be able to show people actually drinking coffee;

• the warning “Coffee Makes You Grouchy” will be printed on the label of every jar;

• police roadside devices known as coffalyzers will be used to measure the caffeine level of every speeder to see if they stayed too long at the restaurant;

• coffee drinking in the workplace will be banned and special consultants will help workers find new ways to spend the hours they normally spent sipping;

• where coffee had once been thought of in society as a great social glue and openly portrayed in the media as a harmless, friendship-promoting beverage, movie, TV and theatre directors will avoid it like the plague and actors will only ever be shown drinking lemonade or ginger ale;

• coffee addicts will be reviled in the world, much as drinkers and smokers are now.

And oh, what a grind life will be then.

©1990 Jim Hagarty

One recent Saturday morning, on my car radio, I heard the great old Hank Williams Sr. tune, “Tear in My Beer.” Hank Williams Jr. sang along on the re-make of the song: “I’ve got a tear in my beer cause I’m cryin’ for you dear. You are on my lonely mind.”

What a great song! Terrific harmonies, catchy tune, clever lyrics. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all weekend.

Unfortunately, the song – what might be called nowadays, a novelty song – was way too true to be truly funny. Hank Williams Sr. drank many, many beers, tears or no tears, in his short life. He died on the back seat of his car on his way to a concert in 1953.

His son Hank was not even four years old when “Daddy”, as he still always refers to him, left this world. Following the family tradition, Hank Jr. went on to whoop it up pretty good too, till he finally straightened out and avoided his father’s fate.

Much has been written about the way our culture condones, even glorifies, the use of alcohol. And people do seem more educated about its downside these days.

But in the scheme of things, booze doesn’t warrant much serious discussion as one of society’s ills. Maybe there are just too many other things to worry about these days.

Such as the scourge of a drug commonly called meth. Then there are date-rape drugs. Young people are sniffing glue and gasoline. And one of the craziest fads of all: They are purposely choking each other – and sometimes even doing it on their own, fatally it has turned out in a few cases – in order to enjoy the “high” that comes from depriving the brain of oxygen for a brief while.

Yes, underage kids drinking beer around a campfire doesn’t seem quite so bad, I suppose, compared to some of the alternatives.

But statistics don’t lie and while a drug such as meth probably deserves the high profile it’s been given by the task force established to fight it in my home county in Canada, it is alcohol abuse that will cause the greatest number of tragedies in our midst in the foreseeable future: fires, drownings, traffic accidents, suicides, murders, family breakdowns and violence and child abuse.

It can be easily and surely predicted that this summer, when the kids get out on the roads of the countryside that surrounds my small city, several of them who are at this moment alive and happy and laughing with their friends and families, will not be here by fall.

A popular gym and history teacher I had in my high school days in the town of Mitchell, remarked wistfully towards the end of his career that the equivalent of one whole class of students he had taught had died in car accidents over the years. Yes, not all of them would have been caused by booze, but a good number were. I remember some of those accidents. I knew some of those kids.

Why don’t we have a task force on youth and liquor and the broken lives in our midst being caused by the combination of the two? Is it because so many of our homes have alcohol in our beer coolers, our wine racks, our liquor cabinets?

Not many of us have any meth lying around, and if we did it is doubtful we’d build a nice panelled room with bar and stools in our basement where we could serve it.

And how many of us sit around the pubs, having serious discussions about today’s terrible drug problems, when one of the most dangerous of all is sitting on the table before us?

There is a clever expression that alcoholism doesn’t come in bottles; it comes in people. Unfortunately, several people in our midst today will be lying in the ground before summer’s end. And some of them won’t have even touched a drop but still will be killed by alcohol – and the drunk who veered over the line, who set the house on fire or threw the fatal punch.

We should study ways of combating meth, by all means. But let’s not forget the devil we know – only too well.

©2007 Jim Hagarty

A gigantic bumble bee flew through an open window into the newsroom where I work Tuesday morning.

Why I mention it is this bee was not the kind of bee you and I are used to running away from. It looked more like a prehistoric bee, a predecessor of the modern one, a sort of mammoth bumble, if you will.

I’m sure it lifted weights in its spare time and when it flew by me at eye level – mine, not its – I distinctly heard it rumble, as if an engine was propelling it through the air.

It turned, looked at me, and said in a very deep, husky voice: “Buzz.”

The last time I saw a winged creature that big it was chasing a mouse along a furrow in a freshly plowed field.

Panic was slow in developing among the half dozen occupants of the chairs in the room, in much the same way people will stand in dazed fascination and watch a tomado’s approach until it’s almost too late to find shelter.

But, after a few swoops, loops and direct dives, the bee had stirred up most of us beyond the everyday levels of fear and worry into terror.

Not the terror of the child who, luckily, can run, scream, cry and hide but the subdued terror of the adult who must pretend to some other feeling, such as concern, “Oh, don’t kill it!”, irritation, “Why do things like this always happen when I’m really busy?”, indifference, “Hasn’t that bee found its way out yet?” and bravado, “Here, let me get it!”

And, of course, in situations such as this, someone must always say, as someone did this time, too: “If you just leave it alone, I’m sure it won’t bother you.”

That bit of deluded human philosophy differs sharply from a favourite saying the bumble bees apparently use: “Bother everybody, especially those who leave you alone.”

I have never gone out of my way to bother bumble bees. I may not like them much, but I do concede they have a right to do whatever it is they were put here to do. I wish them well and hope they’re happy.

They, on the other hand, aren’t the live-and-let-live types. It hasn’t been a good day if they haven’t spread a little misery around.

Like the day one attached itself to the side of my head as I was riding my bike. The day I sat on an old couch behind the house to find out that I was not sitting on a couch at all but on a fancy upholstered beehive with springs, two arms and three cushions.

Then there was the day I sat down on the lawn to enjoy a bottle of pop and put my hand on a bumble bee lounging in the grass.

Back in the office, work soon ceased and the chase began. Rolled up newspapers, phone books and desk-top calendars were brandished and slashed about but the bee deftly missed every attack, like the hero in a video game.

It landed on the handle of a window and summoning more courage than I knew I had, I reached over, opened the window and the bee flew out. But before I could close it again, another bee flew in, bigger and meaner than the first one and I thought, “I can’t believe it. Tag team bees!”

Bee B made Bee A look like a baby bee (say that three times quickly), like a condor next to a canary. This one had come to take prisoners.

It had tattoos and battle scars on its body and a patch over one eye. We might get it but it would take two or three of us down with it.

After much shouting and running about, which I watched from the doorway of an adjoining room, a young male reporter yelled, “Stand back!” and lunging into battle like a medieval knight of old, captured the terrorist bee in a coffee cup.

The bee was given a hurried escort to the front door where, in a flourish of compassion and kindness, it was set free. Last anyone saw of it, it looked a little jumpy and was heading full speed for a restaurant across the street, an obvious victim of coffee nerves.

God must have had fun making the bumble bee, thinking about how it would keep the human race on its toes.

“What the heck’s that?” I’m sure Adam said to Eve, when he saw the first one. “I don’t know,” I bet she replied. “But I’m sure if you just leave it alone it won’t bother you.”

That was the first time Adam shouldn’t have listened to Eve.

©1987 Jim Hagarty

I hope this doesn’t happen to you.

I lost my ABM card on a Friday night in November and didn’t replace it right away. The following Wednesday, I was going through my e-mail and nearly fainted.

Seven withdrawals from my bank account in the space of 49 minutes totalling $992.81, withdrawals I didn’t recognize. At 9:28 a.m., $75.42; at 9:35 a.m., $29.78; at 9:47 a.m., $114.46; at 9:59 a.m., $400.00 (the thief must have used it at an ABM); at 9:59 a.m., $77.51; at 9:59 a.m., $56.63; at 10:17, $239.01 (the thief must have taken a break for a coffee.)

I looked at my account balance. It was near empty. I flipped out.

Jumped in my car and raced to the bank. Ran in like what was left of my hair was on fire and told a teller I’d been robbed. She couldn’t help me as I needed to show some identity. I didn’t have any identity as I had not only lost my debit card but a day or two later, my wallet as well.

I rushed home and tore the house apart. Found the wallet. Rushed back.

A woman calmly took me into her office and assured me, first of all, that if there had been money taken by a thief, I would be fully reimbursed. And that the bank has insurance for this sort of thing.

So, we called up my account on her computer screen. No sign whatsoever of any irregular activity. No unusual debits.

And she explained that on Mondays, a whole lot of debits that were made on the weekend will show up on the account in a short space of time.

“Are you sure you weren’t looking at an earlier period?” the banker asked me.

“I’m sure,” I answered, completely baffled. She gave me a new bank card and wished me well.

I went home and called up my email screen again. Uh oh. I had been looking at debits from July 13, five months earlier.

Maybe it’s time to clean out my inbox. There are 49,912 messages dating back to 2006 in it. Who knows what other crises might develop if I look at the wrong messages from sometime in the past eight years.

On the other hand, it would be kind of neat to get to 50,000 emails.

One conclusion: The people at my bank earn their pay.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

One day in 1848, a man named John left his home in Ireland, climbed into an overcrowded passenger ship and headed for America.

One hundred and forty one years later, one day in 1989, I left my home in Canada, climbed into a passenger car, drove onto an overcrowded freeway and headed for Toronto.

John was full of fear, wondering if he’d ever reach his destination alive. And longing, wondering if he’d ever see his home again.

I was full of fear and longing, wondering the same.

Throughout his passage across the Atlantic, John was surrounded by a sea of strangers’ sad faces, many of them hostile and scowling and wishing each other ill.

I saw the same looks on many of the sad faces of the drivers in the other vehicles also travelling on the eight-lane highway that day. Some even made threatening gestures at me. And mouthed angry obscenities from the safety of their vehicles.

As the ship that carried him was tossed around on the open ocean like a rubber toy in a bathtub, John tried not to think of how he was surrounded by an endless sea of deep water and how he would surely lose his life if the vessel ever sprung a leak and sank.

And as I bounced along the highway at 120 kilometres an hour, I tried not to think of how I was surrounded by an endless sea of speeding vehicles and how I would surely lose my life if a tire on my car ever sprung a leak and blew apart.

He thought of the many people who had died attempting to make the same trip he was making.

I thought of the same thing.

Sometimes the endless movement of the ship and the unfamiliar smells from the seawater turned John’s stomach almost sick.

And as I approached Toronto, the constant bouncing of my car on the uneven roadway and the unfamiliar smell of smog from the thousands of vehicles and smoke stacks there, turned my stomach almost sick.

As storms sent waves to buffet his ship from every side, John asked God to get him safely to where he was going.

And as hundreds of speeding cars and trucks darted back and forth in waves in front, behind and on both sides of my car, I asked God to help me make it, too.

Finally, John’s heart swelled with joy as he saw the high cliffs and banks of his new land in the distance.

I too was happy as I saw the high towers and banks of downtown Toronto loom up in front of me.

His mind raced with excitement and the terrors of his trip were already forgotten as John stepped from his ship to the shore.

And as I parked my car and stepped from it to the pavement of Dundas Street and University Avenue, I too felt exhilarated to have made it. The agony of my journey was dismissed from my mind.

John never again set foot on a ship. He lived to be 87 years old and died of natural causes in 1917.

I, on the other hand, unlike my great-grandfather John, was back on the road the next day.

©1989 Jim Hagarty

I am amazed at the startling disconnect between the modern male and female country music songwriter.

So many of the men are writing songs about the purty women that obviously exist only in their dreams. Sexy, sultry women in halter tops and tight cutoff bluejeans who can do it all – drive a truck, rope a calf, rock a baby and wear a gown at a ball like no woman ever has since the ancient days of fairy tales.

And love their men. Boy can they love their men.

However, many of the women songwriters are telling a different story. They are completely fed up with the men in their lives.

Fair enough, but instead of just walking away from these brain-dead bozos, they want to see these idiots suffer.

I heard one of these songs again today and it made the hair stand up on my head (well, it would have if there was any there to stand up). The song was clever and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but wow. Just wow.

It seems as though, if I have this straight, the singer’s man hadn’t yet cheated on her, but she has big plans if he ever does. To be blunt, she intends to murder him. And she is fairly graphic in the song.

She is willing to die to exact her revenge. She doesn’t spell out how her consequent doom will happen – whether by death penalty or her own hand. But at one point, she sings that someone should tell the gravedigger that he will need to dig two graves – one for her and one, obviously, for her dirty, cheating rat of a partner.

In another recurring line, and this is the last one in the song, she tells her man that if his ring feels a little too tight, they can read her her last rites.

Now, I can follow this woman’s logic up to a point, but then she loses me. If I have her view of the everyday marital relationship right, any man who agrees to be her partner better commit to being her lover exclusively, or die for his failure to do that.

Not only that, she is willing to give up her own life upon finding out that she has been teamed up with someone she considers despicable.

And this is where I get lost in all this.

I hope I never have to face a situation where I feel I need to kill somebody. I don’t know what that circumstance would be but losing the affection of a wife would not be one.

Similarly, I have a very short list of reasons why I would want to kill myself but finding out there is a third party in my marriage would not be on that list. I live in a free country and my wife, as are all the people around me, is free to make her own choices.

I believe this singer should have made it clear to her man before they were married that if he ever cheated on her, she would take him out and that she was so serious about it, she wouldn’t mind hitting the exit with him.

Maybe I am supposed to chuckle at all this, and I will admit the song is pretty well written and performed, but it would be a little less disturbing to me if this woman’s message isn’t one that is playing out in homes all over the world every day, although it is usually the men who are the killers.

If this is what things have come to, then the best survival strategy any thinking human being could ever adopt is to stay forever single.

Dream about all the purty women and eye candy men if you want but stay the heck away from the altar. Seems like for some, it’s a dangerous, dangerous place to venture.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

The big thing today is to search out who you really are. To find yourself. To become aware of your own identity.

And I, for one, can see the value in all this if only because other people seem to have such a hard time figuring out who I am.

When I was a kid growing up in a large family, my mother would often mistake me for one of her other many children and after trying out a couple of names on me, would finally say in frustration, “Well, whoever you are, go out and get the mail!”

All these years later, the mistaken identity problem has persisted, maybe worsened and I am disturbed to think I may go down in history as The Man Who Was Never Himself.

One day I was walking down a hall in a hospital after visiting there, when a very dignified-looking, middle-aged man who I was soon to learn was a psychiatrist, came up to me and started discussing the diagnosis he’d arrived at for a patient he was treating.

I was just about to suggest electroshock treatments, drug therapy and counselling for the poor, afflicted patient when the doctor paused and began blushing at the realization that he had no idea who I was. He mumbled something about mistaking me for an intern and rushed away in a state of befuddlement.

Several years ago, I received a letter from a woman who, in an emotional account, described how I’d ruined her life and spent a lot of her money along the way. She resolved to live with the shattered life, her letter said, but wouldn’t mind her money back, though it would be little consolation to her considering the diminished state of happiness I’d left her in.

I wrote back, explained truthfully that some other Hagarty, who was unrelated to me and whose whereabouts I did not know, was more probably the one who had done the ruining. (I had met the man a few times – he had a different first name than me – and life ruining seemed to me to fall within the range of activities he was capable of performing.)

I never heard from the poor woman again.

One day I tried unsuccessfully to make a cash withdrawal from my bank and the explanation was offered that my account was overdrawn. “Impossible,” I said, and for once, in a bank, I was right. My weekly paycheques, which were deposited automatically by computer, were ending up in someone else’s account in a bank in another city.

Fortunately, the money was returned without hassle.

One Saturday morning a month ago, I picked up the phone to hear a woman sing and say the following: “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Good morning, darling. How are you today?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said, resisting the urge to call her Honey Pie.

“Oh no,” the unfortunate woman said, in horror. “Have I got the wrong number?”

“Yes you do,” I said. “But my birthday’s in January if you want to call me then.” She apologized and hung up. I hope she and darling had a happy birthday.

A couple of months ago, a man came into the office, shook my hand and said, “Keeping your one foot in the furrow, I see.”

“I guess so,” I sighed, in tired resignation. He obviously had me confused with freelance journalist Bob Trotter who writes the farm column One Foot in the Furrow for this newspaper every Saturday.

People so often congratulate me on things I wrote in Bob’s column that I don’t even bother to set them straight any more.

“I really enjoy your column,” a reader said one day when she was in the newsroom. “I especially liked the one where you were chasing that bat all over your house one night.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I think you’re talking about Helen Barker’s column, On My Mind.”

“Yes, maybe you’re right,” she said. “Well, I liked it anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said again and wondered why I was thanking someone for complimenting me on something somebody else wrote.

But the topper happened two weeks ago when a woman I do not know came up to me in a store and started chatting. “I’m fine, thank you,” I said in response to one of her enquiries.

“I see your kids uptown now and then,” she said. “They’re looking great.”

Now, what was I to do? As a single man with no children, the news of my offspring hanging around uptown came as shock. But, I didn’t want to shatter and embarrass the woman.

“Yeah, they’re fine,” I said. Luckily, she didn’t ask me their ages.

I am going to buy a burial plot, erect a tombstone and have all the pertinent information inscribed on it except the date of my demise, as so many forward-thinking people are doing nowadays. That way, the chances of error at the end will be reduced.

Because I don’t want to find myself answering to St. Peter and his boss for the excesses of someone whose life had been more flamboyant than mine.

And, if I end up underneath someone else’s stone, how will my kids know where to bring the flowers they bought uptown?

©1987 Jim Hagarty

After general elections in Canada, at every level from municipal to national, thousands of people who ran for councils and school boards and parliament have to cope with either their win, or their loss.

Winning, it is supposed, will be the easier thing to handle, though the victors, especially the newcomers, probably don’t fully appreciate what it is that is about to hit them, and maybe it’s best that they don’t.

Helping make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens will take a lot of hard work and will, in many cases, leave them a lot less popular than before they put their names forward for election.

They can look forward to agonizing over choices they’ll have to make, criticism from every quarter and even the loss of “friends” who don’t like what they do or say now that they’re a big shot.

And all of this is only to describe some of their better days ahead.

Some of the new politicians can even expect to see their business revenues take a hit as people stay out of their stores or stop using their services because they’re mad that the person they used to patronize voted against putting a sidewalk on their side of the street – or that they did vote to put one there.

So the winners will sometimes feel like they actually lost the elections.

Looking on at what sometimes befalls those who come out on top at the polls, some of the losers will begin to think of themselves as the winners.

But not for a while.

If the winners have longterm problems ahead (which many of them will rightly come to see as challenges and opportunities), the losers, at least in the short term, will have their bruised egos to try to heal.

It isn’t much fun to lose at any time, but in most contests, losing depends entirely on your abilities and whether or not you can use them to better an opponent. Whether it’s golf, hockey, chess or checkers, you have a very good chance of controlling the outcome of the match.

In politics, on the other hand, your chance of success is based on so many factors, most of them out of your control, and all of them having to do with whether or not your neighbours believe you would be a good candidate to sit around a table making decisions about their everyday lives.

Finding out that most of the people in the community don’t want you making fancy speeches and voting on stop signs and sidewalks, recreation centres and new schools, is a bit of a letdown, not to mention a humbling experience.

I can’t say I can sympathize with those who didn’t get elected Monday from any vast experience I’ve had as a candidate myself, save for one instance, which I will get to.

But for 30 years, I’ve been witness to dozens and dozens of people who’ve been left out in the cold by their fellow citizens on election nights. Some of the losers take their drubbing gracefully, even with humour. Some are philosophical, if a bit sad.

And others become angry and self-pitying (proving the voters were right not to elect them).

But those who feel the loss most deeply, it seems to me, are people who are voted out of office. Having held the job, then losing it, feels like getting fired – only 10 times worse as it was, in many cases, thousands of your fellow humans who gave you the pink slip.

Depending on the circumstances, losing office can be so devastating for some, it can have serious effects on their lives, ranging from divorce to even death. Within a year of resigning his presidency, former U.S. President Richard Nixon almost died of a blood clot. Some people blamed it on the depression he suffered after being banished from his “territory.”

As for me, the memory is an old one, but still fresh if I want it to be. It was 35 years ago, and I was running for student council at university. I have no idea why I ran.

But I do remember standing in a lounge, delivering what might have been one of the best student council speeches ever written.

It was so good, and I left such an impression with my fellow students, that I came in dead last out of a long list of contenders. I don’t remember whether or not I even voted for myself.

I do remember, however, not smiling for at least a week afterwards.

My only consolation, and one that I didn’t benefit from until many years later, was the fact that one of the candidates I lost to went on to become the deputy prime minister of Canada.

So, you know, pretty tough competition.

But dead last?

Really?

©2006 Jim Hagarty

All day long, while we shingled the roof, I watched from above as a backyard full of happy little kids flew back and forth, back and forth on the sturdy-looking swing set erected there.

And I envied them. It had been far too many years since I’d been on a swing.

A person should never get that old, I thought, that he cannot enjoy the things of youth. And yet, I’d let a decade slip by, maybe two, without going for a good, fast ride on a swing.

What could I possibly have been so busy doing all that time that caused me to walk by every swing set I saw without ever once climbing on one? Obviously, I’d been too preoccupied with other things and as the saying goes, if you’re too busy, you’re too busy.

When the work was finished in the late afternoon, we roofers gathered on the lawn for a bountiful supper. Wives, children and friends joined in as we sat on lawn chairs enjoying a drink and the end of a good day’s work.

Conversation was spirited and everyone was in a good mood. We could have made a good TV commercial for something.

During a lull in the talk, I got up and jauntily walked over to the swing set, admiring the workmanship that had gone into constructing such a solid apparatus. It was a far cry from the ropes and board hanging from an evergreen tree limb down by the shed on the farm where I grew up.

This set was built with pressure-treated four-inch-by-four-inch posts at each end, connected at the top by a solid stretch of durable pipe with heavy chain holding strong-looking blue plastic seats that fit the shape of each body that sat in them.

Swings have come a long way in the past 30 years, I thought.

I walked around to the centre swing and climbed aboard. The plastic seat enveloped itself around my hips and held me snugly.

What an improvement from the flat, hard board seats of years gone by which were worn so smooth over time they often threw their passengers flying.

A couple of strong pulls on the chains and I was off and soon I had an audience. With each completion of the ever-growing arc, I flew higher and felt stronger.

Whatever they say about never forgetting how to ride a bike goes double for a swing. I sensed the same old exhilaration of years before – the tickle in the stomach, the lightness in the head, the power in the arms and legs.

Oh, the joy of a simple pleasure rediscovered!

I’m not sure at what exact moment I realized the seat had separated from one of its chains. But I know it happened when I had reached the very highest point in the arc I had created.

Like a dying star shooting its way across the silent heavens, I flew into the damp evening air. I paused momentarily in my flight for one last, serene look at the sky and then fell to the ground.

Flat on my back.

As I lay in the wet grass breathing my last, reaction from the spectators was mixed. It ranged from mild laughter to loud laughter.

Among the comments I could hear from my position on the ground were several regarding the inevitability of an average swing giving way under the stress of trying to carry a person of my weight.

One sentiment I could tell immediately was missing from the range of feelings coming from the audience was sympathy.

Regaining some composure, I slinked into the house and applied a bandage to a wounded index finger. The swing was repaired moments after the accident and was soon back in use with no further incidents.

I spent the rest of the evening quietly in a lawnchair, away from the rest of the crowd. An untrained onlooker might have concluded I was sulking but, in fact, I was absorbed in thought.

As I sat by myself, I pondered how a man should act his age. And how it will be 10, maybe 20 years, before I get on a swing again.

Or maybe it will be never.

©1987 Jim Hagarty

I am on a Warren Buffett tear. I’m halfway through his biography called Snowball and I look up his most famous quotes on the Internet.

He is a “good guy” and if he’d never made a nickel in his life let alone $60 billion and counting, he would still be fascinating to me.

He is a modern-day Mark Twain and people flock to his company’s annual meeting to hear him speak. His yearly newsletter is treated like a new Sermon on the Mount.

So forgive me, if in the next while, I throw around a few of his quotes about life.

In one of those musings, he talks about how he sits and thinks every evening. Just thinks. Reads a bit, then sets everything aside and thinks.

And he says it’s a practice that has gone out of style.

I “think” he’s right.

©2014 Jim Hagarty