Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2018

Four years ago at Christmas, I was given a GPS for my car. It’s a nice little jobbie which I have never used. I prefer the direction finder on my smartphone. So, after taking my gift out of the box and fooling around with it, I put it back in the box and set it on a high shelf in the garage.

There I found it yesterday when I was trying to tidy up out there. I brought the box in, charged up the clever little gizmo and hooked it up to my computer to update the maps. Then, realizing I have no use for this amazing hardware and not wanting to possess it any longer, I put it up for sale on the Internet. I think it cost about $80 or $90 new, so I decided to ask $40.

Two things happened. Within an hour or two, half a dozen people declared their wish to buy it. This had the effect of making me think I was charging too little for it and my greedy nature took over. But it was too late. I will have to live forever with the knowledge that I could have gotten another $20 for it.

The second odd thing that developed was a little feature of human nature I have noticed before many times in my life. Because so many people wanted this thing, I suddenly wanted it too. I have no use for it. I could use the 40 bucks. But it’s kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend and then seeing her walking down the street with someone else a week later. Suddenly, the enormity of your mistake becomes very clear to you in situations like that.

However, I soon won’t own my GPS and out of sight, maybe it will be out of mind someday too. And I will try to comfort myself with the notion that someone else is making good use of something that has sat on my shelf for four years.

But there is one fear that haunts me. The eventual buyer of the item, realizes he got it on the cheap, puts it back on the Internet for $60 and makes the $20 I should have had.

I will have to go lie down now.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

I was sitting at my desk this morning, quite placidly, reading the hair-raising news on the Internet. The phone rang at 10:50 a.m. It was the vet. I was supposed to have our dog Toby there for his annual checkup at 10:40. Sorry, I forgot. Rescheduled to 11:20.

Quick, try to convince Toby, at that early in the day, to go for his noon-hour walk. He knows when his noon-hour walk is. Took some pleading and trickery. Get his sweater on. Can’t find his booties. Walked him up the street to pee and poop. He did the former, not the latter. He knew something was up.

Got him in the car. He started crying. Cried all the way from my house to the vet clinic. Got him out of the car, still crying (both of us, by this time), and into the big building he knows and hates so well. Sat on my lap in the waiting room, crying. Finally taken to an examination room. Put him up on the table. He spent the next 10 minutes trying to get off the table. Wrestled with him like I might an angry cobra. Thought he might jump out the window.

Aw, finally, a vet. Short interview. Answer lots of questions. “The vet will be in soon,” she said. Rats. Thought she was the vet. Twenty minutes go by. More cobra wrestling. Finally, in comes the vet. More questions. Doggie’s teeth, ears and eyes checked and he gets a needle. He likes getting needles as much as I do. All clear given. Meet you at the front counter.

Go out there, let Toby run around. My bill is produced. Can I pay that in monthly instalments over the next five years? No instalment program available. Look down after paying to see a large dog poop nugget. Then another. Five in all. Fish out a doggie bag to pick up my poodle’s excrement. Lots of sorries all around. Sorry for missing my appointment, sorry for the dog poo, sorry for sobbing when presented with the bill.

Then I looked up to see a slide show playing on a computer screen. A bunch of nice pictures and “did you knows”. Did you know cats can crawl up in your engine to stay warm in winter? Check. Did you know dogs can get frostbite if left out too long in winter? Check. Did you know winter sidewalk salt can hurt their paws? Double check.

But the best one of all:

Did you know people who have pets live longer, have less stress and fewer heart attacks?

Nope. Didn’t know that one.

Went home. Fell into recliner exhausted. Toby ran around like a well-fed cobra, recently freed from captivity.

Looking forward to living longer.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
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 (as did, I am sure, many other teenage boys). 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. 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.

By Jim Hagarty
2005

Clutter and I have been involved in hand-to-junk combat for the past few months and for a while, I thought I was winning. But trip after trip of carrying things out of the house to throw away, recycle or donate, didn’t seem to be making the mountain of material objects any less arduous to climb. I was truly puzzled by this phenomenon; surely if you take things away from a pile, the pile must begin to shrink. Alas, no shrinkage was occurring. In fact, the exact opposite seemed to be true: the clutter was gaining on me at an alarming rate.

Then, a morning of meditation finally brought the truth to me. At the same time as I was obsessively lugging old stuff out the back door, the other three members of the household were busy hauling new stuff in the front. With the odds stacked against me like this, I fear I’ll be found dead someday beneath a heap of winter clothes, a bunch of boxes, foam and plastic bags from new purchases and a plethora of manufactured goods of dubious use. The needability of many of these items is borderline or below.

Still, I carry on, my arms full of belongings that were once held in great esteem but which have now been tripped over (literally) far too many times.

Every night I search the Internet for quality clutter-busting tips and have discovered a whole world out there of people who have suffered as I have from the weight of too many possessions. And of the thousands of words of advice I’ve read, comes this basic, number one rule:

Do you use this thing? If not, why do you possess it?

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Thanks Internet guru.

The push was on to simplify.

Another useful suggestion was to not try too hard to get a fair buck for everything. Just get rid of it, the sooner the better. It is amazing what wonders one little stake on your lawn bearing a hand-scrawled sign labelled “FREE” can achieve toward the goal of declutterization. There is almost nothing, it seems, that won’t become instantly irresistible at the amazing, once-only, bargain-basement price of zilch. Nuts, bolts, wire, curtains, windows, picture frames, you name it.

By mistake, I put in the give away box a pair of old eyeglasses that I intended to donate to my optometrist to take on her next mission to Guatemala. She won’t be taking them, however; amazingly to me, someone fished them out of the box and took them home. Here’s what puzzles me. The glasses were bifocals. To be of any use to you, your vision needs would have to match not only the regular prescription but the bi-focal one too.

I don’t care. They’re gone. Just 2,346 items left to go.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

Every time I went to the malls many years ago, in the 1970s and ’80s, I headed straight for Radio Shack and spent a half hour there drooling over all the techno goodies on the shelves. Sony Trinitron TVs, Panasonic VCRs, wonderful stereos. I rarely bought anything, just did a lot of looking.

This week, a flyer came in my mailbox from Radio Shack, since renamed The Source, and I looked it over with extreme intensity. Two things jumped out at me. I do not know what the function is of at least one-third of the items in the flyer. Little gizmos that have no meaning for me at all. But the bigger realization was that probably 95 per cent of all the items in the flyer (and in the store itself) were not even invented when I was wandering around that shop 35 years ago.

Yes, I was using a computer at work back then but it was a primitive one that would have not appeared out of place in Fred Flinstone’s stone house. But absolutely everything else – flat screen this, smartphone that, and Google the other thing, has come along in the past few decades. But the changes came about slowly as to be hardly noticeable.

One thing still haunts me though. Where did all the stuff that filled the Radio Shack stores back then go? Quietly discontinued, not re-stocked, currently unavailable, no longer sold due to low customer demand.

But that’s okay. I was at a Ford dealership a while back and I noticed there was not even one new Model T on the lot.

Times change.

By Jim Hagarty
2008

This is why I love newspapers. In the Toronto Sun on Monday there was a story and photo about rare and endangered reptiles. Aside from the potential tragedy in losing these creatures to the hostile world we’ve created, the details were fascinating, especially about a giant salamander. Called an olm, the creature was wandering the earth before Tyrannosaurus Rex showed up. Now that’s a survivor! Imagine outliving the dinosaurs. It’s a shame it appears as though they might not outlive the human race. Given our penchant for self-destruction, on the other hand, they might yet be around to someday reminisce about the time when people inhabited the earth.

Besides being old, the olm is blind and very big. But what caught my eye most about the creature is the fact that it can go years without food. I have known bachelors who achieved almost the same amazing feat but it is nevertheless incredible that there is a creature on earth which only needs a meal once every decade. This guy is well on his way to being the perfect housepet, with a feature such as that.

However, the newspaper story did not detail how much the salamander eats when he finally sits down to a meal after the 10 years are up. My guess is a seven-course meal would not do the trick. I’d be throwin’ a few pies his way too, maybe a gallon or three of cider.

Following all that, I would not want to be around to witness the belch from a creature who had just finished eating his first solid meal in 3,652 days. Nor experience any of his other bodily functions.

Also endangered (sadly) is a purple frog the size of a pin which lives four metres down in the earth. I would say it’s a toss-up which creature devours more – an animal which can go 10 years without food or another which eats often but is only the size of a pin to begin with.

Here are the eight other most endangered amphibians in need of help to survive: The limbless Sagalla caecillian, South African ghost frogs, lungless Mexican salamanders, the Malagasy rainbow frog, Chile’s Darwin frog and the Betic midwife toad whose male carries fertilized eggs on its hind legs.

We humans are such an arrogant group we think we’ve got this survival thing down pat. But along with the salamander, they say there is a chipmunk which was also around when the dinosaurs roamed the planet. What stories these two old fellas could tell … Sally and Chip.

Add to that the reality that scientists are still discovering creatures – birds, fish and mammals – which they didn’t know existed and are rediscovering some that they thought had died out.

Even the most sober of newspapers can’t resist the weird and wonderful and I hope they never do give up their priceless “oddities in the news.”

By Jim Hagarty
2012
When I was a younger man, I would often concentrate my mind on the frailties of the human character (after dealing with people who pissed me off) and allow those judgments to affect my happiness. Lately, that’s been changing. These days, I am constantly impressed with just how nice most of the people I meet really are and I feel a connection to them I rarely did in years gone by. And even the ones who might appear a bit jerky, probably aren’t that way all the time. After all, I am no Mary Poppins myself.