Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2005

For a thousand reasons, my great-grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the 1850s, would be beyond shock if he could return to our world for a day and witness us all in action. Airplanes flying overhead, electric lights, automobiles, TVs, radios, computers. People talking to each other on little wireless hand-held devices that can perform a dozen functions including snapping pictures. Drive-through restaurants.

But I think the thing that might most leave him bewildered – as it is, at present, confusing his great-grandson – is the way people dress for winter these days. Keeping warm in winter in this part of the world a century and a half ago was a major preoccupation. It involved cutting down a lot of trees, starting a lot of fires, and most importantly, bundling up in lots of clothes, especially heavy duty underwear that covered not only the groinal area, but the full length of the arms and legs too.

City dweller that I now am, I admit that it’s been many a year since I’ve pulled on a pair of “long johns” but old habits die hard and I still bundle up pretty snugly whenever I go outside. This is why I nearly flipped when I was coming out of a store the other day – winter hat firmly pulled down, coat done up to my chin, heavy gloves on my hands – to see a young man strolling along in a T-shirt and light jacket, running shoes and – summer shorts. A guy walking along in sub-zero weather like he was on a beach is a sight that I thought I’d never see. And I don’t think great-grandpa could have handled it any better than I did.

The only reason I raise the subject is that this is the third time this winter I have witnessed such a thing. The first time was downtown a few weeks back when a man well past his teenage years went sauntering down the street in shorts as though he was cruisin’ the strip at a popular lakeside town in July. Another time, I saw a man in a muscle shirt and no coat, braving the winter chill like a penguin from the bottom of the globe.

I don’t know whether three such sightings constitute a fashion trend, but if it does, it will be one – like body piercings and tattoos – that I will be foregoing (and you are surprised to know this). As it is, it has to be a pretty hot day for me to wear a pair of legless pants outside. I am sure great-grandpa never once did even that. The black flies of the still-wooded part of Canada he lived in would have eaten him alive had he tried. In any case, I’m sure the morality of the times would have prevented him from doing so. Exposed skin was the devil’s workshop in the 1800s.

I’ve taken a quick poll around the newsroom where I work and I am not the only one to have seen scantily clad men braving winter. One, apparently, even ventures out in shorts and “flip-flops” on his sockless feet.

So many days I remember working outside on the farm in winter when the only thing that stood between me and death by hypothermia was flapping my arms around my shoulders and moving back and forth from foot to foot to keep the blood flowing.

Looking at it from a whole new perspective, I would have enjoyed standing beside a guy in flip-flops and shorts; I’m sure I would have felt absolutely boiling in comparison.

I read a thing in the paper yesterday about a thing that’s been in the news. I’d like to say a thing or two about that thing, I thought. Then I asked myself, do I know any thing, even one thing, about that thing? And here’s a funny thing, I couldn’t think of even one thing I know about that thing, even though I’ve thought a thing or two about that thing many times. Now and then, I have even thought I knew every thing there was to know about that thing and really wanted to tell the world a thing or two about the things I was thinking about that thing. But what would I accomplish by commenting on that thing, I thought. Not a blessed thing, I decided. Nothing. So, here’s the thing. I have decided not to say a thing about it. Instead, I think I will find some other thing to write about. Forgive me for even bringing this whole thing up. I should have known it was the wrong thing to do. Goodbye.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

From Al Bossence
thebayfieldbunch.com

The following announcements actually appeared in various church bulletins:

Don’t let worry kill you – let the church help.

Thursday night – Potluck supper. Prayer and medication to follow.

Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.

For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David Alan Belzer, the sin of Rev. and Mrs. Julius Belzer.

This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South and North ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends.

Tuesday at 4:00 PM there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk will please come early.

Wednesday the ladies liturgy will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing “Put me in my little bed” accompanied by the pastor.

Thursday at 5:00 PM there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club. All ladies wishing to be “Little Mothers” will meet with the Pastor in his study.

This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

The service will close with “Little Drops of Water.” One of the ladies will start quietly and the rest of the congregation will join in.

Next Sunday a special collection will be taken to defray the cost of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet will come forward and do so.

The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They can be seen in the church basement Saturday.

A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

To those of you who think that newspapers are only full of bad news, I would direct your attention to the recent article which detailed the efforts by scientists to reduce the methane gas emanating from the millions of cows on the planet.

Yes, you felt despair over war, homelessness, poverty, crime and terrorism but you were only seeing half the picture. Stack up those things against the work being done to lessen the bad air coming out of various openings on cattle and I think you’ll agree the picture doesn’t look so dim.

In a research barn in Ottawa, runs the Canadian Press news report, a cow named Betsy is being feverishly experimented on with the aim of cutting down on her contributions to the greenhouse gases causing environmental damage to our planet. On her left side has been implanted a plastic porthole through which scientists are able to work on her main stomach, a body part that regularly churns out 600 litres of gas a day. By genetically altering the feed she eats, they’re hoping to make her digestive system work better. Plus it’s cool to be able to look through a window and see the inside of a cow.

The bad news is, it’s going to take at least five more years to get this system working, so the burps and flatulence from the world’s cattle herds will probably have warmed up this planet to an average skin-blistering 45-degrees Celsius by then and none of us will care how smelly the cow’s belly can be.

Of course, as usual, the scientists haven’t bothered to place a quick call to a certain rural editor in Stratford, Ontario, who spent his formative years working in large wooden enclosures where dozens of gas-producing cattle were kept and who often wondered about ways of making them less windy (the cows, that is, not the barns.) Many years before scientists started tossing around the idea that diet had something to do with it, the editor in question had already figured that out.

“It’s all that bran,” he realized one day after dumping yet another load of grain in their feeder. With no way to measure exactly, the young farmer nevertheless estimated each cattle beast was chomping down the equivalent of about 60 bran muffins a day not to mention the 25 large cans of corn niblets and, if a forkful of hay can be compared to a salad, about 10 or 12 caesars before sunrise. You eat all that, day and see how many parties you get invited to.

This problem is compounded by the fact that, after the cow has chomped down all this stuff, she then finds a nice quiet place under a tree to sit for the next six hours, regurgitating it all back up from her stomach into her mouth and chewing it all over again.

The editor says, save the $100 million in tax (or whatever the research is costing), cut back on the muffins to one a day and institute the following menu for all cows everywhere:

Breakfast: cheese pancakes.
Lunch: cheese soufflé.
Supper: macaroni and cheese.
Bedtime snack: biscuits and cheese.

And when the cow flatus dilemma is finally solved, as it surely will be, let us then turn our attention to even bigger problems, like getting birds to stop dropping their droppings and fish to hold their water in the water.

The rural editor, if asked, has ideas for remedying those environmental hazards, too.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

I have the world’s oldest dumbphone. Seriously. The first words ever spoken into it were, “Watson, come here. I need you.” Consequently, I have never been able to access voice mail on the darned thing. And lately, people have been leaving me voice messages. I would like to hear them.

Two months ago, I phoned Virgin Mobile and asked how I could do that, because the phone was not co-operating. A polite woman told me how to do it and I thanked her. Except her instructions didn’t work. So today, I decided to phone Virgin and get this fixed once and for all. So I did. Within the space of half an hour, I made five phone calls to the company and spoke to five different people. They all gave me the same instructions which I tried and which didn’t work.

It was kind of funny because each person who helped me was so confident that it would work. Finally, I reached a very helpful woman – support person number 6 – who seemed to really know the answer. She said she would reprogram my phone from her end and she led me through about five steps on the way to achieving that. She even stayed on the line while I tried the newly programmed phone but still no messages.

Let me look up the manual for your phone, she said. And the line went quiet as she did that. A couple of minutes later, I got the good old dial tone. She hung up on me. I know that she did because she asked for my cellphone number and I gave it to her. If she had been cut off accidentally, she would have called me back. I was thinking of making a joke about Virgin and getting screwed but I won’t do that (too late?). It was a Friday afternoon and she wanted to go home. I understand.

But my father always said the only way to punish a business is to not do business with them so it might be time to take a little fatherly advice.

The yard sale went well, except for the “early birds” who flew into my garage 20 minutes before the event was to begin and rifled through a whole bunch of things that weren’t for sale, asking me impatiently how much I wanted for each not-for-sale item. But they left a dollar behind for a tiny picture frame so I came close to forgiving them.

I’ve done some hard labour in my days for some very low wages but this was by far the toughest $62 I ever have earned. Between cleaning things up, putting pricetags on them, hauling everything out to the driveway and then sitting in the cold for five hours haggling with strangers who wanted our stuff and being slightly wounded by those who didn’t, it was a tough go. Still, before morning’s end, half our surplus inventory of goods was riding off down the street in somebody else’s trunk so we declared ourselves the winners.

That is, until one transaction that occurred late in the event.

For 15 years, my wife and I have had three white plastic lawnchairs that we inherited and that I had gradually come to loathe. They attracted dirt like kids in a playground and it seemed we were constantly scrubbing them down. Since then, we’ve accumulated various, more trendy green chairs that, while probably just as dirty, don’t seem to be, so we happily sit in them.

“I’ll sure be glad to see the last of these,” I muttered to my wife as I got them ready to sell.

Except that nobody wanted them. The yard shoppers didn’t even glance at them. However, with 10 minutes left in the sale, my next-door neighbour wandered over, looked at the chairs, and asked me what we wanted for them.

“Fifty cents each,” I replied, hopefully.

Strangely, the look on my neighbour’s face was one of someone who has just found a Stradivarius violin selling for $50 in a small shop in Italy. He could hardly believe his luck. He gave me two dollars, and when I tried to return his change, he said, “Keep it!” That’s the sort of thing Stradivarius discoverers say. It was at this moment I began to suspect that I’d let go of something I shouldn’t have, or, at the least, had sold it too cheaply.

And I was soon to also realize that, far from being out of my sight forever, the chairs would now taunt me every summer from the back sundeck of my neighbour’s home where he happily set them up three minutes after buying them.

The next day, he had a party, and I watched as people made good use of the chairs we couldn’t stand and suddenly I realized that the biggest thing I wanted in my life at that moment was to have my lawnchairs back. And I started to wonder how I could possibly arrange to make that happen. I am ashamed to report that a midnight theft occurred to me as an option.

In the two weeks since then, on my nightly walks around town, I have seen white lawnchairs, identical to ours, on every second porch I pass. These white plastic lawnchairs, it seems, are the only ones a homeowner with any sense would be caught dead in.

And when I get back from my walks, I sometimes sit on a green plastic chair, which suddenly has the appeal of an old tree stump, and look over at the nice white chairs on my neighbour’s deck. They shine in the sunlight, glow in the moonlight – true patio treasures that I let slip through my fingers.

All for the sake of a buck and a half.

And yes, those are the sad strains of a forlorn Stradivarius we are both hearing the background right now.

©2004 Jim Hagarty

So Barb hid behind a wall and stuck her leg out as I ran by. The arsenic in the stew had no effect on me so she has moved on to Plan B. I fell like a mighty oak against a wooden chair. As I lay on the floor reading myself the Last Rites, our dog Toby rushed to the scene and knew exactly what to do. He stuck his tongue down my left ear and oddly, it seemed to help. Toby’s Wax Removal Service is available for rental. Just Google it.

Barb finally set down the life insurance policy and then came over to assess the damage. I was bleeding from several wounds on my head. One of them was new having been inflicted by the chair. Barb said I might need staples to close the gash. She went to the shed and came back with the roof staple gun. I protested as I don’t want blood on my staple gun.

So Barb decided to treat it. She ran upstairs and came back with a bottle of cayenne pepper which she sprinkled liberally into the cut. I asked for another helping of her stew. She then fetched some turpentine, windshield washer fluid, WD-40 and rubbing alcohol and when I wouldn’t drink the mixture, she poured it all over my head. More stew, I screamed. Toby moved on to my right ear.

Barb sent our daughter Sarah to the shed for some duct tape. She came back with a roll of white Gorilla tape. They use that tape to make repairs on the space shuttle. Toby is my only friend. I would kiss him but he has a bad case of wax breath.

Help me!

©2015 Jim Hagarty