Lifetime Sentences

Everyone wants to be remembered
By people that we leave behind
And we’d like them to remember us
With thoughts that are pleasant and kind.

We hope those we have offended
Forget the offence and forgive.
We want to be recalled as someone
Who knew how to live and let live.

We hope someone thinks our life mattered.
We hope they have stories to share
About how now and then we attempted
To be selfless and loving and fair.

We hope we made an impression
On a few that we met on the way
And that those who reflect on our passing
Have a fond word or two they can say.

• Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
1990

With so much turmoil dominating the news, it’s easy to miss other important stories taking place in the world.

One of those is the success Agriculture Canada scientists are having cloning cattle. After years of research, trial and error, they’re now close to perfecting a method of splitting cow embryos so they can reproduce in the lab almost any number of exactly identical cows they like. Already, three such cows and one bull have been cloned. And experts say there’s no reason this process shouldn’t work with other species of animals, including humans.

This development down the road of technological innovation, it seems to me, is a bit scary. How long will it be before a tyrant takes his fiercest, most able soldier and clones himself a million-man army of identical fighters? Or clones a couple hundred identical replicas of himself to take over leadership in the lands he conquers?

But there are other concerns.

In the United States, scientists have ventured even further in genetic manipulation than we have in Canada. According to Canadian Press: “Last month scientists in Texas announced they had produced genetically engineered calves by inserting genes from foreign species into fertilized eggs from cows. The foreign genes included one from humans. Researchers hope the additional genes will speed growth and make the cattle leaner.”

So, move over God, we’ve truly arrived at the time when we can produce designer animals. We can mix ’em up in a bowl like our favourite pies, pour them out on a tray, cook ’em and presto: instant horse, cow, dog, etc. We will be able to make them look like we want them to look, run as fast as we want them to run, even live as long as we want them to live by adding desirable genes from other animals.

What we may eventually get, by adding human genes to animals, for example, are cows that speak to their owners: “More hay over here, please!” Or cows that milk themselves.

And call themselves in from the fields.

But if we can add human genes and characteristics to animals so easily, the more frightening prospect is the certainty that soon we will be able to add non-human genes to humans. So, when we want to develop invincible high-speed runners, we’ll take a human embryo into the lab and throw in a little racehorse. When we want to raise the meanest, toughest professional wrestler around, we’ll toss a couple of pinches of gorilla into the bowl. (Watching some of them on TV, it’s open to question whether or not this has already been done.) On and on it could go. To develop long-distance swimmers, we’ll throw in some fish. For workers to develop that cold Antarctic continent, we’ll patch in some polar bear and penguin.

All this cloning and mingling of human and animal is bound to lead to many strange and frightening sights. Like pigs driving tractors and planting their own crops. And people with fins and gills who won’t need scuba gear to go take a look at the Titanic.

But now for the good news. Before your cute little Muffy’s born, the vet will bag up a few extra embryos for you which you can toss in the freezer. And when your precious little pet wanders out in front of that Mack truck, there’ll be no need to feel bad for long. You’ll just go back in the house, reach in your freezer and pop another Muffy into the microwave.

In fact, Muffy, probably part human anyway, may do the same for you when you go.

And some day in this crossbreeding future world, when someone angrily calls you a pig or a jackass, they might not be all that far off the truth.

Writers, of course, are leading the way as most of us already have some bull in us.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
How did it come to this? My role in life now has been reduced to Doorman to the Cats. Hours are brutal. Pay minimal. But the rewards … Oh ya, there are no rewards! I just let Mario into the kitchen from the garage. For his fourth time today and it isn’t even 10:30 a.m. And his brother Luigi, hearing the door close, realized he needed to go outside. He will scratch to be let back in in two minutes and 45 seconds. (He scratched while I was writing this. At more like two minutes 10 seconds.) Cat door, some of you will suggest. An option except for our fear that cat door will become skunk, raccoon and opossum door. No sweat, you say. There are doors now that are wired in a way that you put an electronic collar on the cat and only he can open that door. Some scientists who could have been looking for a cure for cancer were busy dreaming up this instead. During breaks from my doorman duties, I keep occupied providing a lap for my dog to stretch out on. It’s a living.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

Best Bike Ever

I know of a man named Mike
Who has the world’s greatest bike.
It’s yellow and green
And drives like a dream.
“You can ride it,” he said, “if you like.”

By Jim Hagarty
1989

My sister told me all her two oldest daughters needed from me for Christmas were dolls. So I got them dolls. Female dolls identical in every respect except one had blond hair and one black, and one wore a blue polka dot dress, the other pink. The name on the outside of the two identical boxes they came in was Sandy.

On Christmas Eve, I gave the girls’ baby sister a stuffed toy bird in a plastic cage and then presented my nieces with their dolls. Knowing they couldn’t read the name Sandy on the boxes and not wanting both dolls to have the same name, I told the girls they’d have to think up their own names for the dolls.

With little hesitation, my older niece Erin announced: “I’m going to call my dolly, Tiffany.” Such a feminine name from such a feminine girl could have been predicted. Her four other dolls are called Jacqueline, Emily, Suzie and Heather.

All that was left to be decided was what her sister Stephanie, a little more rough and tumble type, would name hers.

“And what’re you going to call your dolly, Stephanie?” I asked her as she gazed in satisfaction at her new little plastic friend. She opened her mouth, about to announce her decision. But before she could speak, my sister’s neighbour, who was visiting, piped up in jest: “Call it Wilfred.”

“I’m gonna call my dolly Wilfred,” echoed Stephanie, with all the conviction of one who had been thinking about this for a very long time.

So the two girls set about playing with their dolls, each in her own way. Erin primped Tiffany’s dress and fussed with her hair, bent her movable arms and legs and helped her walk daintily across the top of the coffee table as if she was in a fashion show. Stephanie and Wilfred, on the other hand, found less dignified fun to get involved in.

“Can you open this cage, Uncle Jim?” asked Stephanie, as she handed me her younger sister’s Christmas present.

I removed the plastic bottom of the cage and handed it, with toy bird still inside, back to Stephanie. The bird, a big, colourful replica of a tucan, was soon yanked from its perch and tossed onto the floor and in went Wilfred, the little blond doll with the blue dress. With the cage bottom firmly back in place, Wilfred looked out from behind the plastic bars as her new owner hauled her around the room showing her off.

A few minutes later, I was called on again to open the cage and Wilfred was set free, this time to take up a new role as an airplane. For the next while, the doll, held firmly in the hand of one of Stephanie’s outstretched arms, flew around the room like a jumbo jet, making zooming noises and swooping deftly over furniture and under lamps to make perfect landings on the same coffee table that Tiffany had been stylishly strolling along just moments before.

Each time I’ve talked to my sister since Christmas, I’ve asked if Wilfred is still Wilfred, thinking that maybe by now my niece had chosen a more suitable name like Dawn, Daphne or Donna. But Wilfred it is and Wilfred it will be, I’ll bet, until long after the doll’s arms and legs have fallen off and been lost.

And I’m not surprised or disappointed. After all, Wilfred is a heck of an improvement over the names Stephanie gave her two other dolls.

She called them Spookums The Waving Baby and Skeleton Bum.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I have broken a few laws in my lifetime, I will freely admit. Gotten away it with a few times, taken my lumps on a couple of other occasions.

But the law that states you cannot have 51 lumps in your pants when you cross the border from the U.S. into Canada, I have always abided by and always will because I don’t have time to spend 10 years in prison. I could do seven or eight, but not 10.

A Windsor man, however, is not as morally upstanding as I and so he was recently caught trying to smuggle 51 turtles, hidden in his sweatpants, across the border into the U.S. Most of those creatures were taped to the legs of this man who was returning home from the International Genius Convention in Detroit (I couldn’t make it this year) but others were hidden in his crotch. Forget giving the guy 10 years in jail as punishment. I think walking around with a bunch of turtles hidden in your crotch should be considered punishment enough. I sometimes stick turtles in my crotch and walk around just for fun but I would never try to smuggle them into another country and to be honest, turtle crotching is just a shell game. But if you decide to try it anyway, I would advise you to stay away from the snapping turtles. Those guys have no souls but plenty of nasty teeth.

Believe it or not turtle smuggling is a growing crime worldwide. Some of the motivation for this comes from the fact that some of these reptiles will sell for more than $800. That’s another thing I wouldn’t do. The most I will spend on a turtle is $650. Any more than that and you’re just being ridiculous, in my opinion.

My real concern, of course, is for the mental health of those poor turtles. One moment, they’re just poking along looking for a hare to torment and the next, they’re stuffed down some guy’s sweatpants, about as cruel a fate as I can imagine.

By Jim Hagarty
1987

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 shock 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 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.

“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 Elmira 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?