Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
1986

There never was a more useful piece of apparel designed for the human body than the lowly rubber boot. It is to clothing what the potato is to food. It’s basic, plain and economical.

And like the majority of the people whose feet occupy the insides of them, rubber boots are agricultural and they make good sense.
You won’t find any stylized little metal cougars, crocodiles or polar bears glued to the outside of a pair of rubber boots to make them look rugged and macho. Nor are there any fancy bronze-coloured eyelets to hold black, designer laces. There’s no fancy stitching doing loops and curves around the back, down the sides and across the front. There’s not a trace of down or acrylic insulation on the inside. And best of all, rubber boots have nothing to do with jogging.

And, you don’t have to kill any animals to make them.

When you buy a pair of rubber boots, what you get is a pair of rubber boots. You’re not buying style and flair and flash. You’re buying something to keep your feet dry.

When you go into a store to buy a pair of rubber boots, you don’t announce that you’d like to see something in a rubber boot. You say: “Rubber boots, please. Size 8.” And over the counter will come several yards of shiny, black rubber shaped in the form of human feet and lower legs. The only concession to style will be two thin bands of red rubber around the tops and just above the soles.

The rubber boot is the most democratic piece of clothing around although the running shoe is gaining fast on it in that category. People of all ages and both sexes wear them. Fifty years before “unisex” clothing hit the market, farm wives and their husbands wore each other’s rubber boots and nobody thought a thing about it.

A boy’s first shave has long been accepted as the North American male’s rite of passage from childhood to manhood but it really happens long before he first scrapes that blade across his pubescent chin. A farm boy of two, three or four years old becomes a man after the big trip to the general store or the farm supply centre for his first pair of rubber boots. When he pulls them on for the first time and heads out to do the chores with his dad, he ages years in the minutes it takes them to walk from the house to the barn.

Rubber boots are perfect for walking across two-feet-deep creeks. In the event of a miscalculation regarding water depth, their owner need only sit down on the bank on the other side, remove the boots and dump the water – and occasional pollywog – back into the stream. They’ll be dry by morning.

It’s impossible to imagine one other form of footwear a person wouldn’t mind walking through a manure pile or mud hole in but with your rubber boots on, who cares? A quick swish with the hose and you could wear them into an operating room. In fact, years ago, a doctor-farmer in my area of the world was known to show up at the hospital for emergency operations with his rubber boots still on.

Of course, like all other good things in this world including grilled cheese sandwiches, chocolate ice cream and a night at the movies, rubber boots have their down side. They’re slippery when wet, wet and forevermore useless when punctured, cold in the winter and hot in the summer, uncomfortable when stones and straw get in them and murder when you drop rocks, boards or tools larger than hammers on the toes which are not made of steel.
And worst of all by far, is the rubber boot’s infuriating habit of pulling down your socks. There’s no known remedy for this problem. And, boots a teeny bit too small will quickly rub the skin off your heels that have been exposed by your falling socks.

There are two types of people in this world. Those in the first category are scandalized and duly offended when someone wears a pair of rubber boots in public, especially a pair that recently carried their owner through a barnyard.

The people in the second group – aren’t.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

When I was an editor of newspapers, I came in daily contact with many wonderful people. I also had to deal with a few who needed an attitude ajustment. In every encounter, with nice guys and power-drivers, I would be presented with a decision to say yes or no to a request. Usually for “coverage.” Publicity.

The nice ones presented their cases nicely, as you would expect. Some got an immediate yes, some got a promise of consideration, which they accepted.

The troublemakers came at me with a sense of urgency and entitlement. They would demand an immediate answer. That was my cue.

“OK,” I would say. “If you have to have an answer right away, then my answer is no.” They would start to backtrack. Too late. I loved it when they made my job easy.

I used to tell community groups seeking publicity to think very carefully about the person they were choosing to represent them to the media.

Journalists are only human.

By Jim Hagarty
2012

Twenty years ago my wife presented me with an electronic stud finder to help me hang heavy stuff on our walls. Twenty years later, our walls are full of more holes than a beehive, holes that lead into empty spaces, not studs. This is because the stud finder is a useless piece of crap. I could take a stick and go out in the back yard and discover an underground spring of water faster than I could find a stud with this silly thing.

And yet, I bring the darned device out every once in a while, pop a new battery in it and proceed to try to get it to find a stud behind some drywall. But it is apparent that it couldn’t find one if our walls were made of glass and the clearly visible studs were covered in labels stating “Stud Here.”

So, back in the bottom of the toolbox it goes and I start drilling holes into empty drywall like an ice fisherman, looking for a good spot. If I ever hit a stud, it has been completely by accident.

This week, I had to attach something to a wall and this time, no mistakes could be permitted. So, I drilled four huge holes you could stick your little finger into, into the wall in question, and came nowhere near any studs. I should be given a prize for being that successful at avoiding all studs.

Desperate, I got the stud finder and gave it one more shot. Turning it on, I soon saw that it was as useless as ever. The green light should obviously indicate a stud, a red light, no stud. Nope, nope, nope.

I was just about to throw that freakin’ thing through the window when I noticed some writing on the back. The words there were instructions on how to use it. And this is how low I had sunk – I read them for the first time.

The green light only indicates the device is on. The red light comes on when one side of the stud is found and goes off when it leaves the other side. As simple as sneezing in a pepper factory. Applying these directions, I discovered that the thing works perfectly.

Imagine that! And all these years, those stupid directions were hiding in plain sight unlike all those darned studs it has never found.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I was saying to my wife just the other night that nowadays there is a museum for every darn thing but not a one that I have ever heard of to celebrate the male genitalia. Why not, I wondered.

And right on cue comes the news that there is such a museum, in a small town in Iceland of all places. It is called the Phallological Museum and it displays everything from gigantic whale penises and bull scrotums to speck-sized field mouse testicles. And recently, the museum put its first human member on display.

There is also part of a sperm whale penis that is as thick as a tree trunk and as tall as a man. The entire penis is not on display but if it was, it would be about five metres long, or about as big as my garage.

I probably will never make it to Iceland but it is tempting to go there just to see the 276 specimens from all of Iceland’s 46 mammals, along with a few foreign contributions. After all, it is the world’s biggest and only penis museum.

On display are the penises of whales, dolphins, walruses, redfish, goats, polar bears and rats, just to mention a few. The walls are decorated with massive dried penises, while several dried bull and reindeer organs have been transformed into whips and walking sticks.

Fifteen silver-coloured casts of different-sized human penises also stand in a glass case below a picture of Iceland’s 2008 silver medal-winning handball team, the members of which were willing models for the casts. In fact, men from around the world are lining up to donate their penises to the museum when they are done with them.

Foreign visitors to Iceland are flocking to the museum. Uninformed about cultural norms and practices in Iceland as I am, I am intrigued to discover that local people go to the museum as well. A nice Friday night, after-work activity to give the mind a rest.

There is just no easy way to get myself out of this story so I guess I will just have to get up from the computer and run away. So many terrible puns to be written, so little time. And even less courage.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Insanity has been defined as doing the same things over and over and expecting different results each time. This can be the only explanation as to why I once again found myself on Sunday climbing up the many steps to the platform from where crazy people were willingly placing their bodies in long, twisted plastic tubes filled with rushing water which promised to hurtle them at (literally) breakneck speeds to a little pool of water hundreds of feet away.

Two years ago, I allowed myself to be talked into plunging feet-first down a similar tube of torture, except that one was not fully enclosed and it did not curve, but was designed instead to get it over with quickly, for those who want their horror served straight up with no twists and turns. Sort of like bungee jumping without the bungee. During that nightmare, I found myself screaming for the first time in many years as I dropped out of the sky to the thimbleful of water that was below. Incapable, in the midst of the near-death experience, of remembering to keep my legs raised in the air when l hit the thimble, the water, instead, hit me with all the force of a sledgehammer to the groin. As a man I knew was in the habit of saying (sarcastically) on several occasions every day: “Good times.”

So, how could I possibly find myself ascending those dreaded steps again with a heart almost as heavy as those poor French citizens who climbed the stairs to the guillotine so long ago? It happened on Sunday the way it happened two years ago: pressure from my progeny who, as with most kids these days, are not in the habit of being disappointed. What a man won’t do to solidify his reputation as a great dad.

When my son and I had made it almost to the front of the line at the top of the steps, some poor schmoe had realized the serious error he had made a few feet into his watery plunge and this unfortunate soul, who would have fit right in at the Reign of Terror, let out a prolonged blood-curdling howl that would have put a smile on Alfred Hitchcock’s puffy face. This was not a confidence builder.

To be honest, I still can’t believe I did this. Again. I wanted to back out at the last minute, but once you’re in the tube, your fate is sealed. Any idea I had that a curved tube would deliver a slower ride than my straight-down plunge of two years back, was quickly squashed. Now I know why the tube was fully enclosed. Had it not been, I would still be in orbit somewhere over southern Ontario.

I can’t describe the feeling except to report that the screaming I did two years ago resembled a soft whisper compared to my yells of fear and despair on Sunday. Along the way, my left arm decided to try to get away from the rest of my body and thus it was that I hit the puddle below in a pitiful, contorted form. The pool, it seems, was deeper than I thought and so disoriented was I that I could not find my way to the surface.

“This is it,” was all I could think. Suicide by water slide. Eventually, I did re-emerge and, waiting for me there were three family members who apparently had inhaled copious quantities of laughing gas while I was water slide fodder as they seemed incapable of restraining their joy at the sight of my suffering.

“But Dad,” said one of them. “You’ve got to admit it was fun.”

“No I don’t. I don’t have to admit that at all. And if I live to be 110 (unlikely if more waterslides are in my future), I never will.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I long for the days when stores weren’t open at night. Or early in the morning. Or 24 hours a day.

On Thursday, I was wandering around a grocery store at 7:30 in the morning looking for a loaf of bread. Later that day, at almost 9 p.m., when I should have been snuggling in my onesie with the dog on my lap watching some ridiculous TV show, I was instead the designated senior out shopping for milk and eggs with my old man discount.

I finally got through the checkout, and as I placed my booty in the basket, the egg carton peeked open, revealing brown eggs. I thought, rightly, that we always get white eggs.

So I went back to the woman at the checkout who wasn’t pleased. “Give me your receipt,” she said. I fumbled through my overladen pockets and produced the already crumpled receipt. She checked it over, then wondered aloud how we were going to do this.

“What if I just give you the cash for the brown eggs and then you can use that to buy the white eggs,” she suggested. “Aren’t they the same price?” I wondered. No, the brown are more expensive. The chickens have to be in a fowl mood to poop out the brown ones, I guess.

So, the clerk gave me $3.50 in cash and then trundled off huffily to get the white eggs. But, before I could be on my way, she produced a form I had to fill out, to prove I am not some sort of serial egg exchanger, I guess. I had to fill in my full name, address and phone number (in case the egg inspector or one of the chickens needed to call, I guess.)

So after the paperwork was done, I gave the woman some coins for the white eggs, and departed, leaving her less happy than when I arrived.

I don’t get in a bad mood very often these days but when I do, I am like a car driving off a cliff. I go down, face first, very quickly. I was a raving lunatic by the time I arrived home.

So these were the bookends of my day. Early in the store for bread, late in the store for eggs and milk.

They say life was simpler in the old days. It was. You sat down, made a list, drove to town, bought all your stuff and drove home. Went in the house and never came out again. What would have been the point? NOTHING WAS OPEN!

Even the goddamned chickens were sleeping. (See, I’m still mad.)

By Jim Hagarty
1986

It’s Thursday night. I’m sitting in my living room at a little computer, listening to elevator music on the stereo and writing this column. One of my cats has parked it on the hot-air register. The other’s crouching two feet away from the first one, waiting his turn to catch some warm air. I’ve got 47 hot-air registers in the house and both cats want to sit on only one of them. At the same time.

I’ve been looking around at snowblowers, thinking I might buy one. I saw a neat one yesterday. It has a cruising speed of 400 kilometres an hour, a wing span of 50 feet and an on-board computer. It doesn’t blow the snow – it launches it back into the orbit it fell out of.

Great big, oversized, flouncy sweatshirts are the rage. Tuesday night I spent $33.12 and bought one. A bright white one. I put it on the next morning to wear to work and took a horrified glance in the mirror. I looked like I should be hustling down the hall of a hospital, a bedpan in my hand, heading for the patient in Room 402. So, I took the shirt back. Exchanged it for a yellow one. It makes me look like a giant Easter egg.

I made a cash withdrawal from my bank’s automatic teller on Saturday. On the computer printout that came out of the machine at the end of the transaction, the words “not available” were printed where the account balance should have been. What does that mean? Was somebody at that very moment sitting around counting my money? If my bank doesn’t know how much money stands between me and destitution, how’m I supposed to know?

To the young girl who keeps phoning me at supper time asking to speak to Marsha: No one lives here by that name. Sorry. If I run into Marsha, I’ll have her call you.

Power of suggestion: I wrote out a cheque to a hardware store called Forest Hardware and got talking to the owner of the store as I wrote. I handed him the cheque. He handed it back. I had signed it, James Hardware.

Gordon Lightfoot isn’t going to record any more albums. I may as well sell my stereo. My brother brought home his first album 23 years ago, gave it to me and said, “You need to listen to this guy.” I did need to listen to him. I’ve been hooked on his music ever since. He’s the best poet that ever wandered into a recording studio.

I was driving east on the main street of my city, coming up to a red light. I stopped. A woman I didn’t recognize started walking toward my car, smiling broadly and looking for all the world as if she was going to get in the car with me. I unlocked the passenger door – good things like this don’t happen every day. The woman opened the door and still smiling happily, chirped, “Hello.” She then turned a sickly white as she realized she had no idea who I was. Three seconds after she said “Hello,” she said, “Goodbye,” closed the door and walked briskly away. If she’s searching for a long-lost friend, she ought to put an ad in the paper. It would save her the trouble of looking in every car in town.

Speaking of mistaken identity, a letter came to the newsroom here for me recently, addressed to Linda Hagarty. I put it in a file with the one I got the week before, sent to Tom Hagarty. Best of all was the one I got from a woman I’ve never heard of demanding I pay her back the money I owe her. It wasn’t bad enough I broke her heart, she wrote, but I didn’t have to take her money too.

But it’s all okay because according to this other letter I just got, I’m about to win the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes.