Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Sometimes I feel like I am living in a woolen mill. Or a knitting mill, if there is such a thing. Manufacturing of clothing seems to go on in my home from early morning till late at night. The family motto is, “If I’m sitting, I’m knitting.”

I have never knit anything but my eyebrows, on occasion, when I witness all the feverish apparel making going on around me. It started, of course, with my wife and before she could even hold a knife and fork, my daughter.

I do contribute to the enterprise in one important way, however. When I leave the house, many of the garments that protect me from frostbite and public nudity charges rolled off the line at the factory I live in. Some days, I look like a very colourful sheep as I stroll down the street in my finery. I make no comment on how stylishly dressed I am on any given day but I will attest to the fact that I am usually very warm. Every year I get invitations to speak at the Sheep Marketing Board conventions as well as meetings of the Wool Producers of America. I always decline the offers.

But to be honest. I feel baaaaaad about it. A bit sheepish, in fact. But if your drawers were as full of as many toques and mittens as mine, you might also grow weary from being a model of fine citizensheep. Not to mention the shear envy being outfitted in yarn from head to foot can bring out in my jealous friends and acquaintances.

By Jim Hagarty
1987

It was Saturday night on the Labour Day long weekend and I’d laboured outside all day until long after dark. I showered, changed my clothes and was ready for a nice, relaxing 11 p.m. supper out.

When, however, I opened my wallet, I discovered in there only four, unshiny pennies. Not one of my happiest discoveries.

So, I grabbed my money-machine card, jumped on my bike (my car has gone in for perpetual repair) and pedalled the half mile or so to my bank. For the first time since I’ve been using the handy services of the 24-hour cash-dispensing machine, a sign said the apparatus was closed. When, I wondered, can a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week service find the time to be closed?

So, there I was on the first day of a nice, warm, holiday weekend. My car locked up in the repair shop. My stash locked up in the bank. My stomach locked up in knots of famine. And a big four cents burning a hole in my pocket.

“I’ve had more fun than this,” I muttered to myself as I biked off in frustration into the dark and hungry night.

On the way back home, my brain searched my mind for solutions. It was too late to bug anyone for a loan and it’s hard to find any businesses in the city willing to cash a cheque at that time of night. My kitchen cupboards would make Mother Hubbard’s look like a supermarket shelf on opening day. I’d taken back my summer’s supply of pop bottles a few days before. A yard sale was out of the question.

And then I remembered it. The shiny, plastic card that arrived in the mail almost a year before. The first and only credit card I’ve ever had. The one I hoped I’d never have to use.

There isn’t much a person won’t do to keep from starving. I jumped off the bike, broke into the house, dug through my closets and came up with my meal ticket.

As I stood in line in the restaurant, beads of sweat broke out on my forehead. A hush had fallen over the diners, most of whom were glaring my way with accusing looks which suggested they knew I carried in my pocket nothing but four cents and a piece of plastic.

“Table for one?” enquired the smiling hostess as she walked my way.

“Yes, please,” I answered. And in a low voice, I added: “But could I speak to you alone, for a moment?”

Fifty condemning eyes followed us as the hostess and I huddled off to one side.

“Can I pay for my meal with this?” I whispered as I produced the shiny card.

“You most certainly can,” she said. But I was not convinced. And I wouldn’t be until she traded a plate of food for a plastic card and I walked out of the place a free man.

The meal came but I was not relaxed.

“I’m using a credit card to pay for this I told the waitress.” She nodded, smiled nervously and then hurried away.

When I’d sopped up the last drip of gravy with the bun and polished off the last drop of milk, I called for my bill. She brought it face down on a little tray like they do in all those fancy places and, wielding my card, I said, “Put it on this.”
As I expected they would, the waitress and the hostess held a conference near the cash register, looking at me, then at the card, then at me again. I knew, as I’d known all along, that behind the door to the kitchen was a big man named Bruno who was waiting to lumber over to my table, haul me by the shoulders out of my seat and enquire as to what type of wise person I thought I was. Anyway.

Instead the waitress started walking back to my table, to tell me, I was sure, about the some sort of mix up there seemed to be and my heart leapt into my throat.

“Sign here, please,” she said.

“Where?” I asked, and added: “I’ve never used one of these before.”

“I understand,” she said, sympathetically.

It wasn’t until I was a full two blocks away from the restaurant that I began to believe I’d pulled it off.

But not until the day they make food out of plastic will I be comfortable paying for it with plastic.

Credit card or no credit card, when you’re out of cash, you’re broke.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
I wish I wasn’t so far behind the times. I love the new ways, but my time has passed. I wish stuff like the following had been going on when I was younger. A Venezuelan comic book fan has had his nose removed so he can look like his favourite Marvel character, Red Skull, Captain America’s Arch Rival. Obviously there can only be one Red Skull so I propose that this guy be named Numm Skull, his first cousin. In addition to his tattooed eyeballs and lack of nose, the comic fan intends to have his skin dyed red and more facial implants added. Forget Red Skull. Numm Skull is my hero. Oh, if I could only have something removed to look like my favourite comic book hero, Wonder Woman. Yes, that’s right. I know what you’re thinking. I would have my eyebrows plucked.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Whoever said, “I may not have had a great childhood but it sure has been a long one,” would have smiled with self-satisfaction to see me roaring around a go-kart track Saturday night. I’ve seen the recent picture of an 81-year-old Paul Newman grinning at the cameras from behind the wheel of his super-duper race car. I’m pretty sure I looked nothing like that in my tiny machine with the lawnmower engine in back. More precisely, I looked like a chunky old fellow riding a lawnmower.

No one insisted I join the two 10-year-old boys I’d brought with me to the track but after seeing the excited looks on their faces as they spun around the circuit their second or third time, I impulsively plopped down some cash and climbed into a kart of my own. I use the term “climbed” loosely, as something along the lines of “squeezed” might have better described things. Go-kart makers across America, it appears, discriminate against those for whom cookies, pop and chips are dietary staples.

No, my motivation for strapping on a helmet had nothing to do with the need to be seen, or to please the boys or to satisfy some macho yearning. Instead, it was some voice from the past that called to me to grab the opportunity to recapture a simple joy which I hadn’t felt in more than 40 years. Why should the boys have all the fun? And man were they having fun.

But a lot changes over the four decades since you last go-karted. First comes a driver’s licence, then Dad’s car, then a long list of your own vehicles, speedy and slow as they might have been. You drive trucks, vans and tractors, even a small sports car. An (original) Volkswagen Beetle. You drive a lot of stick-shift (four-speed and five-speed) manual transmissions. You even drive tiny cars on the wrong side of the roads across the British Isles. You even speed along on raceways such as the Autobahn in Germany, the world’s first four-lane expressway. You drive through the Rockies in a Pontiac Acadian (with questionable brakes) and across a large suspension bridge out east.

So, sadly, a hundred feet down the go-kart track it occurs to you that the thrill is gone. The object, from then on, is to finish the five laps without embarrassing yourself and to walk away unbruised. The latter goal is harder to achieve than the first as the track, in places, is bumpy and the kart is so low-slung that various anatomical features appear to be practically dragging along the asphalt. You mentally calculate, as your blubber meets the road, that it’s a good thing your family roster has been completed and no more lineup additions are contemplated as you consider the body parts that might be missing when this jostling journey ends.

The embarrassment factor is also not an easy thing to avoid as two lightweight 10-year-olds make it their business to pass the old guy who’s creeping around the hairpin curves with all the dash and flash of a long-ago farmer on an old flywheel-started John Deere tractor. The first time the boys fly by you, you shake your fist at them and are determined to return the favour. But for some reason they were given vehicles with twice the horsepower of yours and the indignity is yours to enjoy more than once.

The young man at the finish line could have waved you in after one lap and you’d have been glad to return to the spectators’ area but with five more circuits to go (he threw in an extra one, somehow thinking you were having a joyous experience) you are forced to endure another 15 minutes of having all the molecules in your body noisily and seemingly permanently rearranged.

Nostalgia, I am somehow still here to testify, just isn’t what it used to be.

By Jim Hagarty
2013
This weekend has been “treasure days” in my town. We put stuff on the curb and people can take it for free. And we can drive around and pick up other people’s stuff at the same price. That is how I ended up, a few years ago, with a perfectly good pop fridge. Apparently, rusty bicycles have been elevated to treasures this year as I managed to get rid of three of them on Saturday. There was more rust on them than on the Titanic and none of the six tires would hold any air. The first two I stood up on their own on the grassy boulevard and they were gone in 15 minutes. The other wouldn’t stand on its own so I propped it against a nearby tree, thinking people would know it was up for grabs. But apparently they didn’t. So, I got two garden stakes, drove them into the boulevard with a sledgehammer and stood the bike up between them. It was gone in 10 minutes. And so was a huge headache for me. Yippee!

By Jim Hagarty
1986

Anyone who passes cars recklessly and at great speed on Highway 8 between Mitchell and Stratford is begging for an early appointment with a judge or an undertaker.

There are a lot of roads around with far more hills than this stretch, but for some reason, the old Huron Road is just busy enough and rolling enough along those 12 miles of pavement to make it a very frustrating piece of highway for a man or a woman in a hurry.

And if you can name me 10 people left in this world today who aren’t in a hurry, you’re either counting five of them twice or you live in a place which doesn’t yet have (a) an automatic car wash (b) a 24-hour donut shop (c) a bank with an instant teller or (d) all of the above.

Trying to shave five minutes off the normal 22-minute trip from Mitchell to Stratford is about as easy as getting a cat to fetch a stick. The highway is, at times, a very busy truck route between Highway 401 and Goderich and to further reduce your chances of achieving a successful speedy flight from the birthplace of Howie Morenz to the home of the Festival Theatre, police cars dot the landscape along the route. Actually, they try their best to hide behind the landscape, their favourite spot being the east side of St. John’s Lutheran Church at Seebach’s Hill.

Anyway, this meandering is my little preamble to a story I’m happy to relate happened to me a few weeks back.

For years, I have ground my teeth and cursed the skies while driving the Mitchell-Stratford road, angered to distraction at the pilots who fly up behind me like cougars gaining on an antelope just as I head east out of Mitchell and then sit there on my back bumper for the next 10 miles or so, finally passing me in a Star Wars-like flourish. For years, I’ve looked imploringly around for a policeman in a cruiser who would just once give me the satisfaction of seeing my pursuers caught and punished. For years, the men in blue have let me down.

Until that fine Sunday afternoon three weeks ago. I was putt-putting along the road at my usual, speed-limit obeying 80 kilometres an hour when a young man came bursting over the hill like a shotgun blast and then parked his shiny, chromey, flashy, speedy bumper on my little red car’s rear end. We danced so entwined for the next several miles – me speeding up and slowing down, trying to shake him off like I might a pesky bug on my arm – and he hanging on like a dog to a tasty bone.

Finally, this important young man who just had to get to Stratford RIGHT NOW on a sunny, Sunday afternoon to waste his time doing who knows what, shot past me quicker than a kid fleeing a bumble bee and disappeared out of sight over a hill.

I eventually composed my frizzled nerves and was gradually forgetting all about the mad astronaut in the dyno-charged, super-turboed, doubled-cammed, white-hot speed machine, when I came down over a rise on the other side of Sebringville to see what I have long wanted to see: an OPP cruiser, lights flashing, had my pursuer pulled over to the side of the road and was about to administer a little Perth County justice.

This is what I did. I drove by, gave a happy, sideways glance, and wandered on into Stratford and home.

This is what I wish I’d did: I wish I’d pulled over behind the cruiser, got out, approached the policeman, shook his hand vigorously, looked in the driver’s window of the car which had chased me, laughed heartily, climbed aboard his hood, did a jig, turned a cartwheel – and left.

I wonder what Tiger Dunlop would say if you could tell him about the circus that performs its death-defying acts daily in 1986 on the route he helped carve out of the bush from Galt to Goderich in 1827. He’d think you were lying to him. Wouldn’t he?

Sure he would.

By Jim Hagarty
2011
My Dad told this story about a one-room schoolteacher who died in our rural area many years ago. He was a very tall man and the “undertakers” back then had a heck of a time fitting him in his coffin. They bent his legs as much as they could and finally managed to get him situated, with the bottom half of the casket closed and the top half, open. At the wake, everyone was gathered around discussing events when something very strange happened. In those days, embalming was a rarely performed exercise, apparently, and so the corpse had not been disturbed before being placed in the coffin. During the wake, rigor mortis set in and the large man’s legs straightened out. When they did, having no place else to go, the upper half of his body had to push out somewhere. And so Peter sat straight up. This had the effect of eliciting a few screams and many stifled chuckles. I don’t know what course of action the undertakers followed after that but I have a feeling that was not a high point in their careers. Having been a teacher, I guess it was only natural for Peter to want to command everyone’s attention. And he sure did during his final class. He sure did.