Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2015

So my wife Barb hid behind a wall and stuck her leg out as I ran by. The arsenic in the stew has had no effect on me so she has moved on to Plan B.

I fell like a mighty oak against a wooden chair. As I lay on the floor reading myself the Last Rites, our dog Toby rushed to the scene and knew exactly what to do. He stuck his tongue down my left ear and oddly, it seemed to help. Toby’s Wax Removal Service is available for rental. Just Google it.

Barb finally set down the life insurance policy and then came over to assess the damage. I was bleeding from several wounds on my head. One of them was new having been inflicted by the chair.

Barb said I might need staples to close the gash. She went to the shed and came back with the roof staple gun. I protested as I don’t want blood on my staple gun. So Barb decided to treat it.

She ran upstairs and came back with a bottle of cayenne pepper which she sprinkled liberally into the cut. I asked for another helping of her stew. She then fetched some turpentine, windshield washer fluid, loosening oil and rubbing alcohol and when I wouldn’t drink the mixture, she poured it all over my head.

More stew, I screamed.

Toby moved on to my right ear.

Barb sent our daughter Sarah to the shed for some duct tape. She came back with a roll of white heavy duty tape. They use that tape to make repairs on the space shuttle. Toby is my only friend. I would kiss him but he has a bad case of wax breath.

Help me!

By Jim Hagarty
2005

After five and a half decades of kickin’ around this old planet, I’ve learned a few things, though some people I know would vigorously dispute that claim. Many moons ago in my brief high school teaching career, I picked up a great line I heard somebody use about his students: “I’ve taught them everything I know and they still don’t know anything.” That suited me, which is why I went into journalism, a field where you don’t have to know anything about anything, except how to write knowledgeably about all the things you don’t know anything about. If you know absolutely nothing, they give you your own column.

But among the few things that l do know is this: Life has a great sense of humour and irony and a way of turning the tables on you when you get a little too judgmental.

Witness.

As you may know by now, I am no big fan of the current fad which has everybody walking and biking around with headphones on, listening to their favourite “tunes” streaming out of little music players either carried in their hand or tucked away somewhere on their person. I think it looks ridiculous and is ridiculous, not to mention dangerous. The other day I saw a headphone-wearing girl on a bike go blasting through a main intersection. She looked cool and modern and all, but my guess is she would not have been able to hear a car horn or someone yelling if a dangerous traffic situation developed. Around the same time, I saw a young man driving a car with headphones on. Hello! Isn’t that what car stereos are for? And is that safe?

Are we so starved for constant entertainment that we’ll put lives at risk to satisfy the craving?

Consequently, I’m at my curmudgeonly best these days when I drive back and forth to work and pass the many young and middle-age folk who gotta have their music 24/7.

The above is gripe Number 1.

Number 2 peeve is this.

A woman walked by me the other day and practically blew me off my feet with the gallon of perfume she must have dumped over her head before leaving her house that morning. My stomach almost flipped, my nostrils tried to squeeze themselves shut and I couldn’t get the taste of the scent out of my mouth for an hour. Why, oh why, do people do that, I wondered. Don’t they have any friends brave enough to clue them in?

This is far from the first time that’s happened.

Now here’s where an unexpected confluence of events conspired to knock me off my own pedestal.

Having been asked to play guitar to accompany the two singers at a recent wedding ceremony, I felt sort of pressed to learn the songs, all three of which I’d never heard. In fact, I didn’t sit down and listen to them till one week before the event and an hour or two before the three of us were to get together to practise. Feeling a bit panicky, I began carrying around a portable CD player and listening to the songs over and over. Wisely. I thought, I took the whole device (not having a CD player in my jalopy) out to the car to continue listening on my 10-mile trip to the singers’ place.

Wow! With those headphones pressed tight against my head, I was blown away by the quality of the sound. I wore the device all the way home in the car too.

On the day of the wedding, I did an extreme makeover – shower, shave and nose hair pluck – and dressed up in Old Faithful, the suit that’s seen me through many an occasion and gone in and out of style several times. A long look in the mirror produced a favourable assessment by myself, and I was ready to go. Well, almost ready.

I ducked back in the bathroom, fished around in a cabinet and came up with a tiny vial of men’s cologne that arrived under the tree many Christmases ago. Popping the cap, I dobbed a few fluid fingers of the stuff behind my ears (is that the way you do it?) and I was off.

Even with the windows down in my car, the self-administered noxious gas that threatened to rob me of my life’s breath was so overpowering, I was probably risking invasion by George Bush for harbouring a chemical weapon. Panicking, as I did not want to do for the wedding crowd what the woman in the mall had done to me, I wet a finger repeatedly with my tongue and tried to scrub off the offending odour.

Some people stayed away from me at the wedding, but I think it was my guitar playing that scared them off, not the fumes.

So, the lesson for this week, before I pass the basket and don’t be afraid to be generous, is that, as the old saying goes, we mock what we shall become. Right? And that such experiences were sent my way as lessons in humility and tolerance.

You wish.

Yesterday, I saw a woman jogging with great big headphones on.

Commmmmaaaaawwwwwnnnnn!!!!!

By Jim Hagarty
2005

Last week, an old 19th century barn on a farm my parents sold almost 30 years ago now, was removed by its current owner, the structure having outlived its usefulness. My father did the same to a barn on another farm he owned, when that one too, had had its day.

When I heard the news about this latest barn coming down, I felt an immediate surge of sadness and regret. Over the years since we moved away in 1979, I have often driven by the farm and looked in at the barn, fully intending to ask the owner if I could take one more walk through it. But, life travelling at the speed of light, as it does, I never got around to it.

To someone not raised on a farm, an old barn wouldn’t represent much more than a quaint collection of weathered gray boards (ideal for rec rooms), field stones and roof steel. But to me, each of the barns on our three farms had its own personality and now contains its own assortment of memories, good and bad.

The barn that came down last week was located, not on our home farm, but directly across the road from it. It was a lonely old building; by the time I became aware of it, as a kid, it had already lost the house and other outbuildings that once graced the farmyard in its earlier, more glorious time. And while it was never the best-looking barn around, it did its job.

But I always had mixed feelings about it. For one thing, it had no electricity, and if a teenage boy dawdled too long at his chores, he might find himself forking down the hay in the coming darkness, which was not a pleasant experience for someone with too vivid an imagination. I confess here and now that some evenings, the cattle might have gotten a bit less than their required feed entitlement.

The barn’s upstairs floor was dotted with the requisite holes for tossing down straw and hay, and while it seemed my brothers and I knew the place like the back of our hands, we took turns falling down those holes. My brother survived a trip down one of them while playing hide-and-seek with friends, going the extra mile not to be found. I was not quite so lucky, breaking my arm during one descent into the cattle feeder below and spending the next long while sporting a cast. The upside, however, was the instant celebrity status the cast conferred upon me at our one-room school.

Another time, I fell through a straw hole into the middle of the stable, spooking the cattle, which then stampeded out. My dad watched in dismay from the feeder, knowing he couldn’t reach me, but the cattle somehow all went around or jumped over me, leaving me alive to tell the tale.

Outside was a 40-foot-high concrete silo and though nervous of heights (to this day), I somehow managed to climb up the outside rungs to the top now and then for a magnificent – if brief and shaky – view of the surrounding area.

My father told me a tale of his own that happened to him in that barn. One day, in the wooden granary upstairs, he discovered a rat and trapped it in a corner by jamming a shovel on its tail. The rat, he said, squealed as loudly as a pig and, hair rising on the back of his neck, my dad looked up to see other rats’ heads poking through holes in the granary walls, as they were coming to the rescue of the captured one. Having lived all his life around animals, Dad was no coward, but that day, he fled the scene.

I remember, too, the many good times filling the barn during haying season and the harvest (our term for taking in the grain and straw). And likewise, the early fall corn harvest, when the air was cooling off, and the hundreds of loads of corn we drew through the bunker silo next to this barn. Most memorable was the day two retired farmers hired for the job managed somehow, in an open 40-acre field, to crash their tractors head on, a feat they had a lot of trouble living down.

Then there were winter evenings when I practically cried as I almost froze, helping my dad loosen up the corn in the silo so the cattle could munch on it. All the time, I looked at our old brick house across the road, smoke rising from the chimney, lights streaming out across the snow, and never wanted to be somewhere so badly.

One day, when my younger brother was home alone, a storm came up, and he saw lightning strike a lightning rod on the barn’s roof. Not much damage to the roof, but a heck of a fright for a boy.

Tragically, long after we sold the farm and moved away, and the barn became vacant, it was used successfully by someone intent on self destruction who randomly chose it as the place to end her days. If barn walls could talk, they surely would laugh and cry.

I knew only a few things that took place in that old building. My dad could have told about many more. And still more stories could be related by the farmer and his family who put up the barn in the first place so long ago. It was far more than a bunch of boards, steel and stones. All barns are.

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The current owner of the barn carefully recycled the entire thing. All of the wood was used for flooring. The hardwood beams had the nails removed and were cut down into floor boards. The barn siding was planed down, also for flooring, as were the roof boards. The concrete silo was rebuilt for use elsewhere. Only a few bits and pieces and straw were burned in a final cleanup of the site. The barn was built in 1875, the silo in 1952.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
Like a lot of things these days, road rage just ain’t what it used to be. A man on a freeway in Florida cut off a woman while changing lanes so she shrugged her shoulders as if to say WTF? That was his cue, of course, to start chasing her and her carload of kids. Chased her, then pulled out a gun and pointed it at her kids. She dodged him. So he grabbed an assault rifle, a perfectly logical response to the situation, but before he could mow down anybody, he shot himself in the leg and crashed his car. I believe what this calls for, to prevent further injuries like this, is the installation of assault rifles on the hoods of cars in Florida. Road ragers are people too and have the right to not shoot off their legs when pursuing mommies and kiddies with murder in their heart. It’s in the Constitution.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

Ten years ago I bought a great little flip phone. It is still in use and works well. However, from the day I got it, I couldn’t figure out how to get voice mail messages that were left for me. So, I got right on that, in my usual style, waiting two years to go back to the store and explain to a salesperson there that I couldn’t get my messages. She told me how to do it and my eyes glazed over as she talked. Realizing she was talking to a fence post, she went to her computer and printed off a detailed sheet of instructions on how to get my messages. I say detailed because it was a pretty complicated affair to bring up my voice mail.

I sensed the woman was a bit miffed with me for having a clump of sod where my brain should have been, but I was glad she gave me the instructions and I took them and went home where I got right on it, in my usual style. Two more years passed and I dug out the instructions to finally get my voice mail after all that time. I left the sheet of paper on my desk, confident it would be there on whatever day I actually took up the challenge of figuring things out.

However, by this time, we had adopted a couple of cats, one of them, an incurable chewer. Someday I will detail a list of paper items this little jerk has chewed up. It is a long one. I would print you out a list but he’d probably eat that. And he not only tears the papers apart, he swallows about 50 per cent of what he chews.

Guess what was one of the first things on his menu when we brought him home? I found my cellphone instructions in tatters on the basement floor. Top forensic scientists would not have been able to piece things back well enough for the details to have been read.

Now, I am easily intimidated and if someone gives me the evil eye, I tend to avoid them. So, in the six years that have passed since then, I have gone without voice messages because I know that saleswoman remembers me and will throw a fit if I go back and ask her to explain this to me one more time. In reality, I am sure she doesn’t even work there any more, but when did reality ever get in the way of a down and decent fear?

My wife has the phone now as I have inherited another one. Saturday, she asked me how to get voice mail messages. I explained the dilemma. I left her a message to see if she could retrieve it. The screen told her she had a message waiting and that if she wanted to listen to it, press one. She did, and there I was, yakking over her phone and into her ear.

Somewhere along the line, probably five years ago, the phone company simplified the voice mail system and now, not even a password is needed.

For sale, reasonable price: One paper-hungry cat with ink-stained innards. Just call my wife on her cell and leave her a message. She’ll get back to you, in her usual style which is – right away.

By Jim Hagarty
2008

It is what it is.

That’s a popular expression these days.

But what is it?

As it is being used by increasing numbers of people, including too many in the media, it seems to indicate a situation simply has to be accepted because “it is what it is.” That puts me in mind of an old Popeye saying that went something like, “I am what I am and that’s all what I am.” But at least you knew what Popeye was getting at. If you didn’t like him, buzz off. He wasn’t going to change to suit you.

But “it is what it is”?

Hmmm!

I have always liked Popeye but I’m not sure I’d like to use the happy little mutterer as a grammatical model.

I love the English language and for 32 years have made my living using it. Maybe that’s why I get cranky at people who prefer to communicate through popular but sometimes nonsensical phrases than to “do the heavy lifting” (yuck) of thinking up precise ways to express themselves. So-called creative writers, especially, who can’t be bothered thinking up their own expressions but instead spend their time stringing together a lot of clichés are especially irksome.

Someone once, on a particularly hectic day, asked me how things were going. I am not Ernest Hemingway, but I was teaching a journalism class at the time and didn’t want to set a bad example. So, instead of saying, “I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger” (an expression I’ve actually always loved), I replied, “I feel like a frog trying to hop across a highway.” Later I added, “Highway 401”. Still later, “at rush hour.” It didn’t take that much work to come up with something of my own. Not an award winner, but all mine.

“Sucks to be you”, was kind of cute, but is fading away. “Get a clue!” Similarly drifting off. (Offshoot: He couldn’t buy a clue.)

It’s hard to believe but there seems to be just as much Valley girl speak around as ever, including statements spoken as questions: “So I was walking down the street? And this guy comes up to me? He asks me for the time?”

Double yuck.

“No brainer” has had its day as far as I’m concerned, as have “brain fart”, “senior’s moment”, “healthy scratch.”

But one of the worst word offenders that I can think of is “literally”, used literally millions of times a day all around the world. It once meant that I was talking about something that actually happened or was actually true rather than a figure of speech – literally rather than figuratively. Today it is just used to impress others with how honest the speaker is being which brings me to “honestly.” When someone precedes a comment with this word, it makes you wonder if anything he or she says that isn’t preceded by it is spoken “dishonestly”. It is a substitute for “in my opinion” or “as for me”, but it is unnecessary. And with some people, every time they precede a comment with it, I brace myself for something that might not be all that honest.

As a popular hockey commentator in Canada often says, “You young kids out there, listen up!” (Another terrible one.) Think for yourselves! Don’t run with the pack! And don’t ever think a thing “is what it is.”

An original thinker can always change it.

Honestly.