Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2012

I saw a clip on TV from Thelma and Louise where the wild and crazy women are driving their car off a cliff. So, of course, that is what I did in a dream I had last night. I was driving down a mountain road (like I am on them every day here in flat old southern Ontario) and my whole family was in the car with me.

For some reason, our friends’ golden retriever Kirby was sitting on my lap. Kirby weighs about a hundred pounds so you can imagine how difficult it was to try to see around him while I was driving. Sure enough, off the road we went into a forest of evergreens hundreds of feet below. (Thirty years ago I was riding in a pickup truck along an actual mountain road in Western Canada used mostly by logging trucks and I looked over the edge at the evergreens below so that is where that came from.)

Anyway, the good news about dreams is the story lines don’t usually follow reality so in this case, we were all fine including the dog and there was hardly a scratch on the car which might be the strangest part of the whole adventure because there are lot of scratches on it now in real life.

By Jim Hagarty
2005

The news, they say, is so depressing. Maybe it is.

Or maybe you’re reading the wrong kind of news. After all, if a certain soup didn’t agree with you, would you condemn all soup, or switch to another kind? You’d switch, of course.

So put yourself on an alternative news diet, one that contains only the most tasty, easily digestible bits, which are guaranteed not to give you nightmares.

Witness one week’s worth of this better variety of news.

Police in Montclair, California, recently shot and wounded a man who allegedly took over a freight train with a bow and arrow. The man boarded the train Sunday night as it was stopped for a signal and threatened the engineer and conductor, who escaped with no arrows sticking out of them. The archer’s error, however, came when he cocked his bow and pointed the arrow at police. He was shot but not seriously hurt.

In this day of the suicide bomber, there’s something kind of Robin Hoodishly noble about a guy holding up a train with a bow and arrow.

Had the archer been in Lincoln, Nebraska that day, he wouldn’t have needed any weapons to get a good deal on gas at a station there. A manager’s mistake had customers filling up at 1955 prices. One guy filled his truck for $4; it usually costs him $72.

Meanwhile, a court in Amsterdam has banned a woman from any contact with her daughter’s school or teachers after she complained too much. The woman overloaded the school with an incessant stream of questions, comments and complaints and for causing an illegal hindrance, she will be barred from approaching the school or the school area for a year.

The woman’s complaints ranged from treatment of her daughter, to disagreements about curriculum, method of teaching and the safety of the school. Last year, she sent 50 e-mails and 20 letters to the school, and came nine times to visit. She also wrote 29 letters to the school board and others to the National Complaint Commission, the Labour Inspection Service, the Educational Inspection Service, the Queen’s representative and the media. In the future, she will be allowed to submit complaints to the school on a single page of paper once a month.

Maybe the city I live in could talk a judge into silencing some of its non-stop complainers (just drop the court order in my mailbox, your honour).

Meanwhile, a man in Boston has invented – and is mass producing – prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs. He first experimented 10 years ago on an unwitting Rottweiler (now that takes balls) and now has a thriving mail-order business, having sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness. For his work, he’s won a tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel award.

“Considering my parents thought I was an idiot when I was a kid, this is a great honour,” he said, showing hardly any sign of the idiocy with which he was diagnosed by his parents. Dog balls designers everywhere take heart.

And in Stockholm, a Swedish hunter spent two days in bed after being knocked unconscious by a Canada goose that landed on his head moments after his son shot it dead. The goose had been flying about 66 feet up in the air when it was shot by Carl Johan Ilback, who was hunting with his father, Ulf, along a stream in eastern Sweden in August. When the goose dropped from the sky, it hit Ulf Ilback in the head and knocked him out, he said.

“It wanted to extract its revenge, I assume,” the injured man said. “If it had gotten a better hit, it could have broken my neck.”

Sweden has temporarily closed its embassy in Canada in protest of the vengeful goose.

See? Things really aren’t that bad.

Except, of course, for that karma-loving goose in Sweden.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

In Canada, we have a homegrown store called Canadian Tire, an enterprise so successful it has grown into a chain, with outlets in every city and many small towns. I have shopped there since I was a teenager. Here is what I have bought over the past fifty years: Ice skates, hockey sticks and equipment, cat litter, cat food, an electric toothbrush, furnace filters, plastic storage bins, recycling boxes, garbage cans, light bulbs, portable heaters, Christmas trees, belts to hold up my pants, electric drills and jigsaws, handsaws, toolboxes, batteries, vacuum cleaners, plumbing supplies, kitchen pots and pans, water softener salt, windshield washer fluid, chocolate bars, garbage bags, paper towels, toilet paper, Christmas lights, gas barbecues, hand-held water sprayers, cordless phones, car polish, spark plugs, engine oil, lamps and other such items too numerous to mention even if I could remember them all.

Oddly enough, perhaps, in all that time, I have never bought a tire from Canadian Tire. I probably never will.

By Jim Hagarty
1995

I had fallen almost hopelessly behind in the major project for the computer course I was taking and was staring utter defeat in the face. I’ve never liked getting into staring contests with defeat, utter or otherwise, preferring instead to turn my back on it and run the other way. But this time it had gotten me and was not only staring back, but had a smirk on its face.

So, as a lifelong believer in the power of grabbing a hard job by the throat and shaking it till it turns blue, I decided what was required was a heroic, last-ditch effort. This took the form of 18 uninterrupted hours on the computer during the weekend before my 14 classmates and I were to hand in our completed, 11-page documents to the desktop-publishing teacher.

As computer users in my course went, I was definitely the runt of the litter, barely able to decide, when I stumbled into the room that first night, how to turn on that smart little box that looks like a TV. Though I’d tried my best at the course every week and had had lots of help from teacher and classmates alike, I had fallen so far behind by the second last class that I was too embarrassed to ask questions anymore, knowing if I did, the true depth and breadth of my ignorance would be laid out like a seven-course supper for all to see.

For a fleeting moment, a sensible solution presented itself, which involved sneaking out of the classroom, running to my car and driving to Hog’s Hollow, Tennessee, there to start a new life. But then, there’s that defeat thing …

So, 18 straight hours in front of a whirring, beeping screen, clawing my way through hundreds of “points” and “clicks”, was an inevitability. Just as E. Ness pursued A. Capone, I would have that certificate or burn out a transistor or two trying.

At the end of the ordeal, 11 almost-perfect pages came zooming out of the printer and my faith in the power of going at a thing as if you were possessed was strengthened. Where there had been more mistakes than on a Canadian politician’s expense claim form, there appeared now to be only three and a few moments of the teacher’s time during that last class would clear them up.

So, Wednesday night came and where I’d been a hyper, wild-eyed participant in the first five weeks of the course, I walked into this one with all the confidence of Fred Astaire looking for a dance partner. What I saw took me back. Many, if not most of my course mates were obviously in varying degrees of computer panic, pushing keys and tapping on their “mouses” with crazed looks on their faces. With only a couple of hours to complete, print and hand in their documents, it had occurred to a lot of them their time was running out.

Life’s so full of irony, is it not? Where I had been the trembling one, I was suddenly a calm blue sky above a raging sea. A few changes here and there to my document and a few minutes by the printer and the teacher would be sticking gold stars all over me.

So, I relaxed. I’m not sure, but I might have even leaned back in my chair and put my hands behind my head. If I whistled a tune from a Broadway musical, I don’t remember. I do recall sympathetically offering to help my neighbour, who was struggling.

But you know, success sometimes has a way of flickering out like a firefly on a hot summer night, leaving only the suggestion of its presence. Five minutes before I was to print off my document, I watched in horror as a momentary power failure shut down all the computers in the classroom. This little “glitsch” didn’t seem to affect any of the other machines and I thought it hadn’t bothered mine but when I printed out my work, it looked like something my cat might have created if she’d run back and forth across my keyboard for an hour or two. With only a half hour now to redo my 18-hour weekend assault, I pounded away as would a doctor trying to revive a patient in cardiac arrest.

There are two things I’ll remember about the experience. The first is the other trainees as they handed in their projects, bid the teacher farewell and glanced at me with understanding and apparent sympathy as I flailed the keyboard.

The other is the look on the teacher’s face as I tried to explain why this once-perfect document now looked worse than a doctor’s prescription. In any case, I had some time to think about it all, sitting as I was all alone in the classroom.

And after the “mouse” had been pried from my fingers and I was pointed towards the door, I thought about composing my next document – a friendly letter to the hydro company on the subject of power interruptions and the havoc they can bring to a humble man’s life.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I love my town.

The matter was urgent and getting worse. And there before me, the golden arches and that little room inside that spells relief. I parked and bolted from my car. Ran like a wild man on a mission. Emerging with a smile of gratitude and even joy (got Christmas music on the radio so the word joy just sprang to mind) I decided to reward myself and the restaurant by buying a burger and milk with some cash I had stuffed in my pocket. I sat down and enjoyed my meal.

Finished I walked out to the very crowded parking lot to see one car sitting there with the driver’s door open and no one inside. “What the …” was all I got out before I recognized the car with the door open and then I promptly and appropriately finished that sentence with the eff word followed by a question mark.

It had finally happened after all these years of carefully locking my doors. Someone had broken in in broad daylight. I approached the car carefully in case a terrorist group had dropped a grenade inside. Everything was just as I had left it when I hit the eject button including my wallet which was sitting on the passenger seat. I checked it right away. I think there was more cash in it than when I jumped out of the vehicle. My imagination or my Christmas miracle? Hard to say.

Priorities change. Thirty years ago a girlfriend and I broke up. I was devastated for two months. Today I accidentally threw a fast-food coffee cup in a dumpster without peeling off the free coffee sticker. It’s like 30 years ago all over again. I am thinking, for the first time in my life, of going dumpster diving.

I am trying to think of a downside to this drastic action. Nothing is coming to me.

By Jim Hagarty
1988

A bowling-crazy friend asked me out bowling, so I went. Unfairly, I guess, I decided not to tell her about my hotshot ability in the sport. This way, I’d get to enjoy the shocked look on her face when I burned up the alley and the scoresheet.

I rented a pair of shoes when we got to the lanes but felt a little unsettled as I watched her sit down and put on the flashy bowling shoes she owns. Her name and address is professionally printed on the bottom of each shoe. Who but a real pro would buy her own shoes and have them monogrammed, I thought.

Throwing a few practice balls, I felt my form returning, and my apprehension subside. Each ball rolled quickly and straight to the trembling pins at the other end of the building and I smiled in satisfaction at the sound of them crashing together as they fell.

I also chuckled to myself as I watched my opponent stumble slowly forward with each ball and dump it on the floor in front of her as if she was dropping it down a well. The ball would sit there for a second, trying to decide in which direction to head, and then start off slowly wobbling down the alley like a drunkard down a sidewalk, working hard to keep from ending up in a gutter. Now and then, a pin would totter and teeter from the impact of the hardly moving ball, and finally fall over gently, almost silently, on its side on the floor.

“Nice shot,” I’d say. And then add to myself: “Heh, heh, heh!” In fairness, I reminded myself that my friend had just recently had a baby, but it was she who had instigated this match, not I. If she wasn’t up for it, she shouldn’t have challenged me.

The first game unfolded as it should, though I wasn’t all that pleased with my performance. I managed only a 174 but at least it was better than the 145 points the drunken balls tossed by my friend had managed to tip over. The second game would be a different story.

At the beginning of Game 2, I noticed my friend squinting as she filled out the scoresheet and fumbling with her fingers to take each ball from the ball rack. Acting, in short, as if she was only partially sighted.

“I lost a contact lens the other day,” she explained when she noticed I had noticed, “and I split the other one. So, I can’t see too much.”

“How much can you see?” I asked.

“Well,” she smiled, shyly. “I can’t see the pins.”

“What do you mean you can’t see the pins?” I demanded. “How do you knock them down?”

“See that little black arrow set into the floor at the foul line?” she asked me. “I just aim for it and hope the ball goes down the middle.”

In her second game, the ball went down the middle quite a bit. Mine on the other hand, avoided the pins as if it was a child and they were a swarm of bees. She could hear herself getting strikes and spares. I could see myself rolling down the gutters.

She beat me 183 to 152.

The competition turned ugly. Sighted or unsighted, new mother or not, the sporting lust for victory had overtaken all thoughts of compassion. Where I had wanted to win, now I had to win.

Game 3, the deciding match, was a nerve-wracking event. I fired a strike. She wobbled a strike. I blasted a spare. She wobbled a spare.

Gleefully, she beat me 192 to 169.

I could hear her laughing.

At least she couldn’t see me crying.