Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
1987

When the huge, steel garbage bin arrived on my front lawn, I couldn’t believe my good luck. This thing was so big, I’d have no trouble at all getting all the junk I had into it with room to spare. Lots of room. How can the company which delivered it, I wondered, afford to rent out such gigantic containers at such reasonable prices?

Relieved at the knowledge one bin would do me, I went up and down my street on a mission of goodwill inviting neighbours to throw in any trash they might have sitting around and getting in the way.
Everyone seemed genuinely and appropriately impressed with the offer.

“That’s awfully nice of you, Jim,” was an often-heard reaction to which I graciously replied, “Don’t mention it,” “What’s a neighbour for, anyway?” and “Well, I’ll sure never fill it up with the little bit of stuff I have.” And it occurred to me that being a nice guy is worth all the little bit of effort it takes.

The first day, a neighbour hauled a large pile of long grass and weeds out of his garden, across his yard and into the bin. I was glad to see someone accepting my offer. I gave him a happy wave.

Second day, neighbours across the road held a yard sale and threw into the bin all the items that didn’t sell – a lifejacket, fishing pole, table, wooden cabinet, shoes, an old mattress. Appreciation was expressed. I was just glad to help, I said. I flashed a broad and friendly grin.

It was a few days before I got around to putting anything of mine in the bin, but of course, there was still acres of room left when I did. After I finished putting a new roof on my house, I filled up the back one-third of the container with the old shingles. The amount of room left was ridiculous. I thought of taking out an ad in the newspaper, offering free space in my bin to anyone in the city.

Over the next couple of weeks, more and more neighbours started taking me up on my offer and they came from farther and farther down the street. Each day when I’d get home from work, there’d be a bit more refuse in the bin. An old window frame here. Some burned out fluorescent light bulbs there. Lengths of old eavestrough. Boxes. And lots of boards. Sometimes, overnight, almost like magic, more junk would appear in the bin, and I’d look out at it each morning like I was seeing the first snowfall on the lawn in late autumn. But, the morning after that, half of it would be gone again – taken away who knows when to who knows where by who knows whom.

If I ever felt like I really fit in a neighbourhood, it was around this time. I’d look out the window, see men, women and children heaving their litter over the walls and into the centre of the bin and I’d feel good all over. You can never overestimate the value of getting along with others. Do even one nice little thing for someone else, and you’ll be repaid ten-fold, somewhere down the line. Generosity, good will, glad heart. Do unto others. These are the things for me.

By Saturday, my bin overfloweth. There were tree limbs and tin cans, glass and grass, posts, pots and paint pails. There was cardboard and plywood, arborite and aspenite, stones, sticks and several snythetic substances. In fact, the only things not in there by this time were any more room and – all of my stuff.

You know, they really should make those garbage bins a lot bigger than they are.

It’s remarkable how fast they fill up.

My hope now is that the raiders of the front yard will come back again in the middle of some night and make off with more of the good junk.

If they don’t, I am looking at renting another bin.

The neighbours will be pleased.

A young man leaves Scotland to study in New York where he gets an apartment. His Ma calls a few weeks later to see how he’s doing. “Terrible,” he reports. “The guy in the apartment beside me screams all night long. And the guy in the apartment on the other side of me bangs his head against the wall all night.” Ma is concerned. “How do you cope with all this, Laddie?” she asks. “I just play my bagpipes to block out the noise,” says her clear-thinking boy.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

More cheery news. This just in. The average Canadian earns $38,010 a year. Meanwhile, the 100 highest-paid chief executive officers in Canada had already earned that amount by 9:46 a.m. on the second day of the new year.

“Minimum-wage workers would have barely rolled out of bed on New Year’s Day by the time the country’s top earners pocketed the $15,931 that will likely take the low-paid workers all of 2007 to make,” reported the Toronto Star this week.

The man who came up with these figures put them in these terms because he believes the average Canadian will be able to relate to them better than simply trying to compare their $38,010 to the $9 million the average top private-sector executive earns in a year. He’s onto something, for sure, but I think his comparisons are still out of reach of the comprehension abilities of most of us. In fact, if the rest of us were smart enough to figure this all out without the help of this guy, we’d probably be the ones making the $9 million.

I believe we need even better yardsticks with which to measure this discrepancy in earnings. Here are a few, courtesy of me and my calculator.

Assuming you are an average wage earner, these CEOs are making 236 times more each year than you are. Put a different way, the guys in the penthouses, driving the Maseratis and flying the Lear Jets are getting a weekly paycheque that is 23,678 per cent higher than yours. You are earning $21 an hour. They are making $4,945 in that same hour. In fact, it takes them about 15 seconds to earn what you make in 60 minutes.

Go ahead, get mad. But in the time it takes you to say, “These guys are making way too much money,” each of them just pulled in $5.50. You really can’t Win. Even if you just say, “Darn it all!”, they still earned over $3 in the time it took you to get that out. Write a letter to somebody about it if you like, but keep in mind that the half hour it takes you to compose it and mail it will have seen another $2,472.50 flow into the pockets of the ones you are writing to complain about. Make a quick call to your member of Parliament. Another $1,000 gone. An angry email. Goodbye $500.

Now, that you’re feeling really good about things, let’s look through the other end of the binoculars. You are 30 years old, making the average Canadian wage of $38,010. At that rate, you will have to work until you are 266 years old to make the $9 million that our top CEOs earn in one year. Over a 35-year career, at that rate, they’ll earn $315 million. You’ll work till the year 2866 to bring in the same.

But cheer up. Some Canadian provinces are doing away with the mandatory retirement age of 65, so you’ll be able to work away happily into your third century – even longer.

Now here’s the topper. If you get caught with your fingers in the company cookie jar or screw up so badly on the job you leave your boss no choice but to walk you to the door, you will get a severance package amounting to zero to take with you on your way home to break the good news to your family. The CEOs will do a little better than you. They don’t usually set one foot inside a boardroom without their exit from the company already having been planned for and planned for very well. A few weeks back, when Hydro One CEO Tom Parkinson. resigned his job amidst criticisms of his salary – $116 million – and his questionable spending habits, he was “bought out” by the government (a.k.a. you and I) for $3 million. Perhaps this is a reach, but I’m guessing it’s a little easier, with a $3 million cheque sticking out of your back pocket, to look into the faces of your disappointed wife and kids, who may be unhappy that Daddy got the boot.

But cheer up. Tom will soon get even a higher-paying job with a larger “golden handshake” package ready. These guys float around in a stratosphere that, while not heavily populated, is impervious to entry by the average schmoe.

However, I am in danger of being hypocritical here, as I once scaled the wage heights my friends could only dream of one day ascending. I was 16 and helping build a bridge for the Conestoga Expressway in Kitchener. I was pulling down an impressive $1.65 an hour when my poor high school friends were running around catching birds in the Monkton chick hatchery for $1. By summer’s end, I had a raise to $2 for my 50-hour weeks. Just imagine: $100 for five, 10-hour, back-breaking days. At least I wasn’t covered in chickenshit at the end of every day.

That was the last time, I’m pretty sure, that I ever earned double what my friends were pulling down. I gotta say, it felt pretty good to among the “filthy rich” for once.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

I had been disappointed in the quality of my night dreams lately. For some months, actually. It seemed like a long time since I had had one of those amazing, pleasurable dreams that would leave me in a good mood all the next day. The kind that make you go right back to sleep again in the hope of recapturing the storyline, but, of course, you never can. All I was getting were a series of strange, sometimes alarming circumstances involving people I knew 30 or 40 years ago. Or some calamity or other like a tornado or flood.

But then, one night last week, it happened. For some reason, a beautiful recording artist who is also a movie star was sitting there on my couch beside me. (I cannot reveal her name because the last thing I need are the paparazzi at my door – not to mention the police.) This star, the very last person you would expect to be sitting on my couch with me, turned to me and said, “Will you take me out on a date?” Well, apparently that blew my mind so completely that I woke up before I had a chance to scream, “Yes!” So I got up, had a sip of orange juice, and dove back under the covers, hoping to press play and carry on with this wonderful turn of events. Alas, however, she was gone. As was my couch. And me.

And she has stayed gone. But, my normal dreams are back. Last night, I dreamed I was looking out the window into my backyard when I saw a big black bear squeeze under the fence, stand up by the treehouse and stare directly into my eyes. The singer/movie star stared at me too, but seemed nowhere near as menacing. The good news is, before I woke up, the bear squirmed back under the fence somehow (the fence boards are about two inches off the ground) and was gone.

But not gone the way my movie star is gone. The bear will return, of that I am sure. I think it is because I am deathly afraid of bears. Apparently not, however, of movie stars.

Oh well. Time for an afternoon nap.

On the couch.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

The brain is a funny thing. Everybody has one (I think) but the mind that goes with it can sometimes be missing or defective.

Take David Scofield, 50, of Akron, Ohio, for example. He liked to spend time impersonating a police officer. No big deal. Who hasn’t done that? I often arrest people for fun on weekends and even issue speeding tickets (after I chase them for 10 miles to make sure they speed up.)

In any case, poor old David found a way to screw it up for the rest of us. He got caught this week when he tried to pull over a real officer. Akron police say a man driving a Ford Crown Victoria with a spotlight and made to look like a police car tried to block the path of a real Akron officer on his way to work Monday night. He had a rifle, shotgun, handguns, a bullet-proof vest, a silencer and ammunition in his car.

Police say Scofield is a firearms dealer from Lancaster. He was arrested on misdemeanor charges of impersonating a police officer, carrying concealed weapons and obstructing official business. He was in the Summit County Jail where records didn’t say if he had an attorney. However, if I could venture a guess, I think David’s next gig will be impersonating an attorney.

After that, he’ll be a jailbird, no impersonation required. His best impersonation so far is that of a total world-record shattering idiot on steroids but something tells me he did not have to practise for that role in front of a mirror.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

If I nod off in the middle of this, just tuck me in, turn off the light and shut the door. I’ll be fine in the morning. You see, I have been suffering my annual bout of over-awareness in a month that has been asking an awful lot of someone with such a short attention span. Fortunately, May is Mental Health Month, so my chances for recovery are looking better than if this had happened, say, in July.

The first week of this month, of course, was Education Week in Ontario. I just learned about it the other day and while it was nice to see a special week set aside for education, it seems to me I’ve endured about 2,875 Education Weeks in my life so far, as I am not able to remember a week that went by when I didn’t learn something whether I wanted to or not.

May 6 was International No Diet Day. Again, a bit redundant, unless you call a bad diet, a diet. Last week was National Emergency Preparedness Week but I have got to be honest with you: I was not prepared for it. National Road Safety Week started on Tuesday but I am having trouble seeing the point. I have never yet seen a road that wasn’t safe – but I have seen a lot of unsafe drivers hurtling along on top of them. Monday was International Day of Families, a day actually decreed by the United Nations as a way to recognize the importance of families. And while they are supremely important, it is fitting that a day devoted to families falls within a month devoted to mental health. Take that however you like.

I got some “rotten news” last week (that was the clever headline on top of the press release) when I was notified that May 7-13 is International Compost Awareness Week. I almost broke down when I learned about it. Just about came apart, in fact. (Should be a Bad Puns Day). The reality is, most of the time, it is not too hard to be aware of my composters as they tend to send up a very aromatic signal that they’re there. I know, I know: If they smell, you’re doin’ it wrong, but I’m long past the fun of turning the piles, adding layers of leaves, sprinkling in some soil, tossing in a handful of earthworms. Now if I can just convince the many mice who have built apartments and streets in my composters that I have not purposely accumulated organic material to satisfy their needs for habitation, I will count myself lucky.

Last week was Nursing Week across Canada and I’m glad it was. Some of my favourite people in the world have been nurses including the ones who helped me arrive on the scene. But I admit to a bit of jealousy mixed in with all this gratitude. When will somebody institute a Journalism Week? A week to mark the importance of reporters? National Editors’ Day. Columnists’ Month in Ontario. C’mon!!!!

This is not a good thing for me to dwell on as it tends to get me going but fortunately, May is Blood Pressure Month. And Saturday was World Hypertension Day, so l hope that’ll calm the nerves. I might head out in a canoe for a little natural sedation but of course next week is National Safe Boating Awareness Week so I’d have to spend my time making sure I didn’t end up doing handstands on the bottom of the creek.

The Canadian Landmine Foundation will be launching the Peacekeepers Day Yard Sale campaign this weekend, leading up to Peacekeepers Day on Aug. 9. Some of the yard sales I’ve been to could use a peacekeeper or two to separate those thrifty shoppers tussling over that awesome green velvet Elvis.

Maybe what we really need is a Don’t Be Cruel Day.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
I heard about this great flower shop in the country this summer so I dropped in. I saw a colourful bouquet for $10 and a nice, green vase (all vases should be green) for $8. I took my treasures to the woman at the till and she said, “That will be $18.” I asked her why there was no sales tax. There is, she said, but we just work backwards, calculate 13 per cent of all our sales and send it in. We hire students and this is easier than training them to do all the calculating at the cash register. How simple. I like it. I wish more places did it.