Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2018

I said to someone I admire: “I like your friends. They are wonderful.”

“Do you really think so?” asked my friend.

“Of course I do,” I replied.

“How did I get so lucky,” she asked.

“You didn’t get lucky at all,” I told her.

My friend look puzzled.

“No luck involved,” I continued. “It is simple cause and effect at work.”

I could see my friend was tiring of my riddles.

“You have wonderful friends because you are wonderful. How could it be otherwise?”

And she is.

I don’t know a lot in this world but I do know that.

And it makes me feel better about myself to know she is my friend.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once owned a gnat named Pat.
It went for rides under my hat.
It scampered outside
And that’s where it died.
It got too close to the cat.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

This is where an addictive personality and desperation meet. I have been hooked for almost two weeks on a TV series. Five seasons have been filmed. The first three are available on Netflix. So I burned through those 30 plus episodes like newspapers in a fireplace. “MORE!!!!” came the scream from me into the ether in the middle of the night.

I went searching for seasons four and five. They are legally available through a number of sources, in Canada mostly on Super Channel. But my need for these remaining episodes of this program overwhelmed any sense of morality I have tried to encourage in myself over almost seven decades. If I could have found these shows burned onto an old videotape, I would have traded them for my car in a back alley from a mean-looking guy in a trenchcoat.

So I went searching the Internet and found them streamed there for free. But not on one website. It was like picking broken glass out of your rice krispies. This morning, I sit here with no more of my show to watch. But this is what I had to endure and was willing to put with.

On several of my bootleg shows, the sound was somehow slowed down, so that every character in the programs had very deep and drawly voices, even the women and kids. They all sounded like monsters in a horror flick. I got used to that.

Other shows appeared backwards. I knew this by realizing that any words printed such as store signs, etc., were backwards. Small price to pay.

And in a couple of others, the entire image was magnified so only about 80 per cent of the actual footage showed on my monitor. I had to imagine what I was missing on the outer edges of the picture.

In a couple of other shows, the audio and visual elements of the program were completely out of sync by about five or ten seconds. The characters would move their mouths in silence, and then later, when they might not even be still in the scene, their lines would be heard.

And in the final show I watched, a Christmas special, the image was blurry, for some reason. But I charged ahead, watching as though I had left my glasses on the highway for someone to run over.

The only thing I can compare this ordeal to is being so desperate for a chocolate bar and realizing all the ones in the off-the-beaten-path gas station have best-before dates long expired. You rifle through all the bad ones available to try to find the most recently out-of-date one. You hope, as you unwrap it carefully, that the chocolate hasn’t turned white, not that you would reject it if it had. This is an experience I have had.

So here I sit, filled and empty at the same time. There are still three shows left in the current season. They aren’t even available yet illegally. The next one airs tonight. Guess I will be forced once again into that back alley to look for my friend in the trenchcoat. Then I will spend the rest of my day wondering why bad guys love trenchcoats.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I am sure this is not true for every senior, but it seems to me that when people get old, some things in the world that everyone accepts almost without question begin to baffle them. They run to keep up, but can’t quite do it.

My Dad could take apart almost any farm machine you could find including a tractor and put it back together again. And yet, he never operated a “stereo” and was bewildered by the VCR. And cars even got beyond him before he left this world in 1984.

Things were a bit simpler with cars in his earlier days. One of the ones he owned needed painting so he bought some paint, grabbed a brush and painted it.

I’m still in the stage where I’m running to keep up but I can already feel myself falling behind. And among the things that remind that the future belongs to the next generation are drones. A woman was sunbathing topless on the balcony of her apartment last week when a drone hovered above her, probably shooting pictures and video. And a police force in the United States has been given the go-ahead to outfit its drones with tasers and guns.

Meanwhile a Canadian company has taken out a patent on its sky elevator, a free-standing pneumatic (think bicycle tire) tube that will stretch at least 20 kilometres into the sky and get tourists and astronauts close to outer space.

I doubt I will ever “pilot” a drone and I know I won’t be riding any elevators into space. I might, however, be able to sunbathe topless. If you need to photograph that from the sky, make sure your camera has a wide angle lens.

Borrowing a phrase from a ’70s TV sci-fi, people often say “beam me up Scotty” to indicate the world is getting too complicated for them and they’re ready to go to the next dimension. Now, they might actually be able to achieve their dream if they simply buy a ticket on the sky elevator.

By Jim Hagarty
2008

John Lennon had a lot of wonderful ideas about what a great place planet earth would be if we just didn’t have so many bad things in it. Things like hunger and poverty, sexism and racism, war and hate.

I could not agree more with the late great Beatle but I have begun to tone down my aspirations for humankind, given that it doesn’t look like we plan on changing very much; at least, we don’t appear in any hurry to sharpen up. I wonder if our goals have been too lofty and that is why we don’t seem to be making much progress.

Therefore, I would be happy if we could live in a world where, for example, fire departments didn’t have – and didn’t need – special extrication equipment popularly known as the “jaws of life”. It seems more than a bit ridiculous and a terrible, terrible shame that it is the job of some human beings in our society to go out on the roads to cut other human beings out of the mangled steel they’d been riding around in moments before. I think of my ancestors living out their days on their farms in Ireland and wonder how many times they would have ever had any need for the jaws of life. More food, maybe. Better shelter, perhaps. But the jaws of life?

Similarly, I long for a world where police departments don’t assign special weapons and and tactical (SWAT) teams; where it never occurred to a man, from one year to the next, that a real good plan would be to grab a shotgun and shoot his wife, kids, pets and a half a dozen neighbors, before maybe killing himself. Whatever happened to the good old days when a desperate soul turned himself into his pastor or his doctor and had no thoughts of trying to make the six o’clock news?

Take me straight to a world that has no need for a special telephone hotline for kids, a service which permits children to call total strangers and report mistreatment at the hands of their parents or other guardians. Who, I might ask, was the first parent who figured it out that a great way to keep that boy from disobeying parental commands would be to punch him, or kick him, or beat him with a belt or worse? Or send him to bed without supper and make him stay in his room till breakfast? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind a world with no need for a children’s aid society. Or child psychologists. Or a V-chip to attach to TVs so parents can stop violent programs from reaching their children.

And speaking of beatings, could I send a word or two out to all those husbands who have so little going for them that the best way they know how to express their feelings of anger and frustration to their wives is to make fists of their fingers and punch in the head, the ones they promised to “cherish.” A place without battered women’s shelters sounds like a good spot to me.

Twenty years ago, John Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no possessions, no greed, no hunger, and nothing to kill or die for. And now, here am I saying, how about a world with no pepper spray? No photo radar vans. No stun guns. No nicotine patches. No maximum security prisons. No detox centres. No abortion clinics. No psychiatric hospitals.

No offence intended, Mr. Lennon, but I’d like to imagine a world without voice mail or call waiting, safe sex or test-tube babies, hollow-point bullets and gene therapy, things that didn’t even exist when you did.

A ’60s song told us what the world needs now is love, sweet love. I’m sure it does. Failing that, could we at least have a break from all this lunacy? From robots that dismantle bombs? Human rights groups that shoot people? Kids packing guns? Crazed fans that assassinate rock stars?

Imagine that.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

Being a genius is not all fun and games and accolades. My mind is constantly working, looking for solutions to the world’s ills.

This week I was sitting in a drivethrough lineup while a family of 12 ordered their meals for the week, when inspiration struck. It strikes me a lot. I have many scars to prove it.

Environmentalists are very concerned about drivethrough restaurants. At any given time on any given day, hundreds of thousands of cars, vans and trucks are sitting in lineups, their engines idling, mufflers spewing crap into the atmosphere. There have been campaigns here and there to ban drivethroughs but the idea of armed insurrections by the villagers if ever a thing was done does not appeal to municipal officials.

Here is what needs to happen. I offer this at no charge to the world. Some clever people will figure out to “monetize” my brainwave. Install moving driveways at every drivethrough, fancy conveyer belts that would stream all the vehicles in and out of the establishments. Once on the platform, engines could be shut off until the vehicles exit at the other end.

The Inventors’ Hall of Fame, here I come.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

God gave me a brain and the thing I like most to do with it is think. I have been told I think too much. I wonder if that is possible.

I am close to finishing watching a wonderful TV series (in my view, in any case) entitled When Calls the Heart. And I have been thinking about why I have found this show so appealing. After some thought, I have come to the conclusion that the reason I like it so much is because there are three central themes running through it that resonate with me.

The first theme is the notion that we are exactly where we are meant to be at any given moment in our lives, though the reason we are in that place may only become clear to us in time. There is a purpose to everything.

The second theme, as far as I can see, is the belief in second chances. When I was a young man, I fell seriously ill. And I felt I had made a complete mess of my life in the 24 years I had lived it. But I was given a second chance and I was somehow able to take it. That is the only reason I am here to write these words today.

The other theme of When Calls the Heart revolves around the power of love. I am alive because of that power, and more than just existing, I am fulfilled and content. The power of love is so awesome as to be almost frightening. There is no greater power in the universe. I was overwhelmed by it in my hour of need, by stranger as well as friend, and I was put back together again.

There is nothing that can resist the restorative magic of love. Unconditional love will always bring the wilted flower back to life. Love works on all beings, human and non-human. No tidal wave, no hurricane, no earthquake is stronger than love. Everyone wants it and everyone deserves it, no matter the state to which they might have fallen.

Love is infused in every inanimate object around us, from a fine kitchen cupboard or table, to a carefully designed and constructed bridge, to a wonderful piece of music or intriguing novel, and to a simple TV show such as When Calls the Heart which reminds one grateful viewer that God is love, that love conquers all, and that love is the only reason any one of us was ever presented with the gift of life.

My heart has been calling all my life. Others have heard that call and answered it. The only two words that matter to me these days are, “Thank you.”

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P.S.
In my little sermon above on the power of love (the Pope called me to express his thanks and asked if he could use it in his next Papal Bull and I thought that maybe bull is the right word to describe my homily so I told him to go ahead), I wrote, “Everyone deserves love.” That isn’t quite right. Any love that goes only to the deserving is not love at all. There are conditions attached to it. What fuels the power of love and makes it such an awesome force in the universe is that it is available to the “undeserving” as well. What I should have written was, “Love without limit is available to every living creature, no qualifications considered.” Not easy to do, but that is The Assignment. The word “lovable” is a suspicious one. By using it, we imply there are those who are “unlovable”, in other words, lost causes. People can be, and often are, impossible to like. But if we know of anyone who is unlovable, we are doing it wrong. And if we can’t actively love someone, a person we think of as an enemy perhaps, the very least we can do is not add to his burdens by expressing our disdain. In silence, there is also love.