Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
1988

Last week, some anonymous busybody sent me a chain letter, the latest of several I’ve received over the years. This one involved no money or whiskey, however, but simply wanted me to write to 20 people and tell them I love them. I love exactly 20 people but am too shy to write it all down in a letter so I tossed it out.

But not before I’d read some startling stuff. I was commanded to send the 20 letters out within 96 hours or risk bad luck. If I sent them out, I could expect good luck within four days. Bad luck, good luck, what was a fella to do?

To help me make up my mind, the letter provided me with both examples of the poor schmoes who didn’t send the letters and the lucky dogs who did. A Royal Air Force officer, for example, got right on it, mailed the documents and received $470,000. Pitiful Elliot Joe, on the other hand, lost $40,000 because he made an airplane out of the letter and flew it off his third-floor balcony.

Tyrone Willy lost his wife six days after failing to circulate the letters. Not knowing Mrs. Willy, I will assume this was bad luck. Constantine Dias sent out 20 letters in 1953 and won a lottery worth $2 million. Carlo Badditt, said he’d be darned if he’d send out any such letters and promptly lost his job. Realizing his error, he quickly did as he was ordered and a few days later got a better job.

Poor old Delan Fairchild didn’t get a second chance. He died nine days after failing to send the letters. No such tragedy befell an obedient chain-letter woman in California, on the other hand, who got a brand new car out of the deal.

After a while, I could see that the general trend of these examples seemed to indicate that it was better to send out the letters than to not send them out. And yet, I got stuck on the part about writing love letters to 20 people. Had I been instructed to tell five or six people I sorta like them, I might have gone ahead. As it was, I just couldn’t do it.

My just desserts started the next day when I was robbed of $20. I haven’t been robbed of anything in 20 years. Two days later, somebody (the fink) stole my sunglasses out of my car while I was in a store. Two days after that, I came up empty handed in a lottery I was sure I would win.

But that isn’t all. During the past week, the following misfortunes can be added to my list:

The cat threw up on the garage floor.

A family of ants moved into my kitchen.

A family of fleas moved onto the cat.

My new eavestrough sprung a leak. So did the cat.

I showed up for a dinner date at a fancy restaurant only to find it closed for the holiday. We ate at Burgers R Us.

The cat threw up on the basement floor.

I went to the beach and got sunburned from head to toe.

A whole loaf of bread I bought went mouldy five minutes after passing its freshness date.

God called and I wasn’t home. (Lightning struck my answering machine.)

The price of coffee went up a nickel at a doughnut shop I frequent.

Of course, I’ve had enough of all this and so has the cat, which is running out of places to throw up. Therefore, I’ve decided to play along, in my own way. So, to the first 20 people who read this column, I just want to say I love you. And so does my cat.

Pass it on.

Or else.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

When I look out my kitchen window in the evening, or even in the middle of the night when I sometimes get out of bed for a snack, I can see a light in the upstairs window of a neighbour’s house behind us and a few doors down. I don’t know why, but that light gives me comfort. The light shines through a green curtain, so it isn’t vivid; it’s nice and soft. I think it might be coming from a kitchen, maybe a light over a stove (this is an upstairs apartment in a house, the first floor is a business office.) I don’t know who lives there. I’ve never seen anyone in the window and don’t expect I ever will. Still, just knowing that light is there makes me feel good. All is right with the world.

In the winter, when I am watering the backyard skating rink at 2 a.m., I glance up at the light and feel warm, despite the cold.

Once in a while, sometimes on weekends, I look out my window to see the light is not on and strangely enough, I feel slightly ill at ease. I assume whoever lives there has gone away for the weekend.

I don’t know where this comes from, this need for this kind of comfort. Maybe it’s a leftover thing from my early days on the farm when houses seemed so far apart and a yard light or light from a window was nice to see. Or maybe it’s a caveman thing – the light from the fire would keep the predators away at night.

I just hope my neighbour doesn’t move out some day and is replaced by an energy-saving tenant who prefers to live in the dark.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

A couple of weeks ago someone posted a video on the Internet showing a guy cleaning the rusty rear bumper of his car with Coca Cola and elbow grease.

I have a perfectly good bicycle that I was going to get rid of because it has been left outside these past two winters and the chrome wheels were covered in rust. They were so bad, in fact, that there was no indication that the wheels had ever had any chrome on them at all. So out I went with a can of Coke and got to work with, first a cloth and then some fine grit sandpaper. I have since graduated to steel wool. I work at it for 15 minutes every day, rinse everything off, then quit.

The results are astonishing. The rust is melting away. When everything is perfect, I am going to treat the wheels with car wax to keep the rust at bay.

I was telling a friend about this on Friday night as I sat with a bottle of Coke in one hand.

“And yet, you’re still drinking Coke,” she observed, and I realized I had forgotten the point the person who posted the video was trying to make.

“I am,” I answered. “But as far as I know, my stomach is completely rust free.” To be certain, I guess I should dine on some sandpaper and steel wool. Maybe swallow some car wax.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Another radio station in a city near me has caught the golden oldie bug. This week, the station turfed four of its long-time deejays as it prepares to move to a whole “new” format, spinning all “classic rock” tunes for our eternal enjoyment.

Or, as in my case, eternal annoyance.

Now, all the FM radio stations in this area will be cranking out “favourites” from the ’60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. John Lennon’s heirs will get a little richer and “fogies”, old and otherwise, will have to dig through their Frank Sinatra records if they ever want to hear him do it his way again.

As a child of the ’60s – I was 13 when the Beatles appeared for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show – I should be tickled, that yet another business interest has gotten down on its knees for us domineering “baby boomers” who apparently have no interest in living today but merely want to sit around watching instant replays of our past life. But I’m not happy at all because to be utterly frank with you (and is there any other way to be frank?), I’m sick and tired of Jim Croce singing about Bad Bad Leroy Brown and Don McLean wailing away at Bye Bye Miss American Pie. And shouldn’t that be Ms. Amercian Pie?

This, in a nutshell, is why I’m fed up. In my younger days, like a lot of teenagers back then and I suppose now, I took a radio with me wherever I went. I sang along with all the songs and knew a lot of them by heart. I had my favourite deejays and I liked everything about radio. I even went out and bought records of the songs I heard over the airwaves so I could listen to them whenever I wanted.

Back then, a popular song had a lifespan of anywhere from one to three months before it was replaced with a newer, fresher song either by the same group or some other one. There used to be great excitement when it was announced a band like the Beatles would release their newest single on a Monday. A lot of us would be talking about it at school on Tuesday. But even Beatles records had a best-before date and after you’d heard Hey Jude for the 400th time, you were ready to move on. And that was the great thing. We always knew the songs we hated, and there were lots of them, would eventually disappear, never to be heard again.

Little did we know that 30 years later, they would all be back, along with the remakes made of them which themselves are now golden oldies too, or that they’d be playing 24 hours a day on almost every station around, like “muzak” on the overhead speakers at the mall.

So, now I wake in the morning to, “We had it all. Just Like Bogey and Bacall,” which are lines from one of my all-time, most-despised songs. I hate it mostly because the singer refers repeatedly to his “layday”, a reference, I suppose, to the word, lady.

I know, I know. I’m just too darned prickly. But how else would you expect a curmudgeon in the making to be? I just wish I could turn on my radio and hear a new song now and then. They’re still being recorded and some of them I have had a chance to hear on television and elsewhere are pretty good. Without them, where will the golden oldies of tomorrow come from?

Please don’t tell me when I’m sitting in the lounge of the nursing home 40 years from now, I’ll still be listening to, “We had it all. Just like Bogey and Bacall.” And blowing another artery every time that guy gets to the part about his “layday.”

Jim Croce. John Lennon. Eivis Presley. Mama Cass. Janis Joplin. Buddy Holly. Jim Morrison. Otis Redding. All great singers. Some of them great writers.

And all of them dead.

Jim Croce used to sing about how he wished he could save time in a bottle. Well, he couldn’t but he has managed to save it on vinyl records and compact discs and radio stations have turned themselves into giant time machines.

Maybe that explains the surging popularity of country music which seems to be the only area of popular music which still gets support for new creations from radio stations. So far, they’ve pretty well resisted the mouldy oldies rage.

What’s happening with radio, both FM and AM, is eerie, almost bizzare. Imagine coming home to your TV every day to nothing but reruns of I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver and Bonanza. Might drive you a little buggy after a while. Or going to the library to find nothing there that’s been published since 1972.

Life is today. In the name of Graceland, Woodstock and Abbey Road, let’s get on with it. And give that poor guy and his “layday” a well-deserved rest.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I never thought this would happen, I guess, but as I grow older, though I try to keep up, I’m feeling more and more like a stranger in a world that’s subtly changing before my eyes. Maybe this is a natural preparation for the day when I won’t be part of the world at all.

Nothing brings this home to me more than the modern bicycle, and even more powerfully, the modern bicyclist, about whom I have commented before. I am at a loss to know why today’s bicycle manufacturers go to the trouble and expense of including handlebars on their vehicles as they seem about as necessary these days as you know what on a bull. Male riders, especially, like to trundle on down the sidewalks of our fair city, with their hands on their hips or, on colder days, in their pockets. I guess I can see why they would want to do this beyond the looking cool factor but I just don’t understand how they do it.

In my day, it seems to me it practically took a circus acrobat to ride “look ma, no hands!” on an ordinary bicycle. I haven’t done a lot of research on this, or even any, but I’m guessing it was harder to ride a bike with your hands in your pockets 50 years ago because the country roads where I lived were all gravel. Hit a stone the wrong way and you’d be doing a face plant at 20 miles an hour.

I also wonder whether or not the big, fat, wide wheels and tires on a lot of bikes today are better at keeping them upright with no guidance on their handlebars than the rounded tires on our bikes did when I was a kid.

I was 31 when I got my first new bike. I bought it at a place called the Bicycle Hospedal, appropriately named because the thing was so anorexic it looked as though it could have benefitted from some intravenous feeding. It was a “racing bike” and it cost $212. (I forget dates, names, appointments, but I never forget what “major” purchases cost me).

I had to contort myself into a pretzel to ride the blasted thing as the turned-down handlebars were located somewhere just above the front axle. Pretty much the only thing I could see while riding it was the pavement, though if I cranked my neck back at an almost inhuman angle, I might be able to see the bumpers of the cars ahead of me or even, sometimes, the horizon.

The tires on my skinny, little bike weren’t much more than glorified rubber bands with a breath of air pumped in them and every small bump in the road reverberated up into my spine like an electric shock treatment administered from the wrong end of the body. And, of course, sitting on the seat of this thing was like planting my tender rear on a hard, tiny door knob and riding that down the bumpy thoroughfares.

So, you can see why I just can’t understand how all these no-hands riders are doing it, because I sure couldn’t, and can’t.

Perhaps you are getting the picture that I didn’t like my new bike very well, and you’d be right. Years later, after tripping over it in the shed 600 times, I decided to cut my losses, took it to an auction barn and came home with a tidy $7 in my pocket. This year, I replaced it with a used “touring” bike, the type of velocipede (as a humour writer I know likes to call it) I should have been on in the first place.

All of this blather is a prelude to what I am now going to share. The other day I saw a teenager riding his bike down the street with, of course, no part of his anatomy touching his handlebars. Nothing new. What was new, for me, in any case, was the fact that he was playing some sort of hand-held game player – whether Game Boy, PSP or whatever, I could not tell as he rode along the sidewalk on the busiest street in town.

This bizarre display also goes to another of my pet peeves: multitasking. What’s next? Watching TV while biking down the street, doing your homework on a laptop, emailing Mom, photographing the people being passed, including the grumpy, old guy scratching his head at a sight he thought he’d never see?

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I’ve lost interest in hockey and probably couldn’t even make the cut in the beer belly league now. Same with baseball. Never was big on soccer, tennis, bowling.

But there is one sport I am thinking of taking up and it’s one I think I might even be good at. That is the sport of shin-kicking and over the weekend, a Vancouver man was crowned world champion at the Cotswold Olimpicks in Chipping Camden, England. I’ve always been good at kicking and am usually mad enough to want to hurt somebody’s shins. And here’s the clincher: I have been to Chipping Camden. If that isn’t a sign for me to take up this cool activity, I don’t know what is.

The sport is 400 years old. It involves kicking your opponent’s shins as you try to throw him to the ground. That must hurt, you say? Maybe, but participants do get to shove hay down the legs of their pants for protection. Growing up on the farm, it seemed at haying time I always had hay in my pants. The sport was waiting for me.

I’m a bit disappointed the shin-kickers have gone soft over the past 200 years though. They used to cap the toes of their boots with metal but that is against the rules now. Today’s shin-kickers might be wimps but with some practice, I think I could take ’em.

Yes, wind me up and I would gladly kick the shin out of all of them.