Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
1993

Day after day, down my street, they fly. Cars, trucks and motorcycles heading for the east end of the city, the shopping malls and the fast-food restaurants. Their drivers in a big, big hurry. In such a big hurry they have to use my street as a bypass for the busy main street. When time is that great an enemy for you, you have to make use of every advantage you can get to beat it. The only time in years gone by when vehicles would be driven that fast in residential areas was when volunteer firefighters were heading to the firehall, or doctors were making an emergency house call but now, panic-level driving, at least where I live, is becoming an everyday occurrence. Gotta get that package of woodscrews or that light bulb or that box of fries RIGHT NOW! It’s as if life itself has become one big emergency and we’re all on the way to the scene.

On and on they speed, down a street lined with homes where young children and old folks live and where pet cats, dogs and other animals try to cross from one side to the other unharmed. One day last week, on my way to work, I drove past a poor rabbit which had lost a fight with one such vehicle and was sprawled dead on the pavement.

In the summer, the freeway running by my door is at its most aggravating as I spend a lot of time outside working on the yards. Sometimes I yell at the drivers as they pass, even shake my fist in the air. “Slow down, ya creep,” I have been known to shout, but they never do, though I fully expect some big lunk one day to back up, get out of his car and discuss with me the finer points of motor-vehicle safety.

And so the parade of speeding sports cars, pick-up trucks and motorbikes, some of them with blaring stereos and faulty mufflers, goes on, their drivers oblivious to the danger, the noise pollution and the upset they’re causing.

Tuesday afternoon, during a short-lived sudden heat wave, I spent an hour soaking up the sun and sweeping up the winter dirt from my driveway. The odd car sped by like Batman to the rescue but things were relatively peaceful.

And then I heard it. A steady “clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop,” an unfamiliar sound, to say the least, on my street. Looking up, I saw what could have been a mirage. If it had disappeared as fast as it appeared, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Two big, happy horses hauling a white milk wagon were making their way along and I stopped to watch as they passed. The driver in the motorless Avon Dairies van smiled, waved and called “hello” as he manoeuvred his team along. I stood, leaning on my broom, watching the old-fashioned rig and feeling more than a little nostalgic for a time when speed was not such a highly valued prize in our society.

If they’re going this quickly now, how fast will drivers be moving down my street a hundred years from now?

Will the people who live at my place then look back on these days and tell their kids, “I remember when cars used to go past here at only 80 kilometres an hour.”?

Actually, you know, it occurs to me that there were some things about the good old days that really were good.

Like horses.

And the time to enjoy them.

(Bob Marran has revived his father’s doorstep milk-delivery business in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, using horse-drawn carts to bring the product to his customers. Avon Dairies used the same method from 1930 to 1967.)

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I have officially embarked on The Flashlight Years, the period in a man’s life when artificial beams of light are his only hope for survival. Without them, he cannot expect to find the potato chips in the cupboard and without potato chips, of course, he will eventually perish. Without light he is apt to dab the wrong ointment on the wrong wound and put his underwear on backwards. Not even necessarily his own underwear.

I don’t know if girls and women have the same kind of relationship that boys and men have with flashlights but I suspect they don’t. The ones I know seem to have the ability to snatch a flea off a black cat in a dark room in the middle of the night but maybe some of them are light challenged too. With males, there is a lifelong fascination with the idea that when you press a button, a light beams its way out of a little cylinder. If childbirth is a mystery to the female, a flashlight is perhaps the male’s equivalent, minus the baby shower.

I have loved flashlights since I was a boy and have been surrounded by them all my life but strangely, I have hardly ever bought any of them. They just show up. Like the heavenly gifts they are.

And this Christmas, not just one but two flashlights ended up under our tree with my name on them. The bigger one was thought out in a lab somewhere by the smartest person in the world. It uses LED (Light for Every Dude) and has several intense magnets strategically placed on it, allowing me to attach it to practically anything. I have carried this thing with me day and night since I opened my gift and seemingly can’t even find a spoon in the cutlery drawer without it now.

But the smaller package that was wrapped and stuffed in my Christmas stocking held the best surprise of all. A flashlight that attaches to the peak of my caps, allowing me to feel like a coal miner 24/7. It has three LED bulbs on it but here’s the best part. I can make them flash.

A man walking his neighbourhood at night with a cap flashlight blinking is a wealthy man indeed, although his ability to sneak up on people, assuming he might want to do this, is somewhat impaired.

But let’s face it, he has the world by the tail (and if that tail has a flea on it, he’ll spot it right away.)

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.