Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I have got a bad case of the iPoor Blues.

I was in a big, modern computer shop the other day and l didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well, actually, I did know enough to cry as I could not afford to buy all or any of the goodies displayed all around me.

Especially what I could not afford to buy was a sleek new iMac. It is a beauty. If it was a car, it would be a Corvette. Small, compact, all white. It has a flat monitor, as do most personal computers these days, but unlike most, it has no tower – the entire guts of the thing are somehow squished into the monitor itself. Even more perfect: it has a remote control. It would take up little room on my desktop and is the only thing standing between me and complete happiness. (That and the fact that my town does not have a caramel popcorn factory and Gordie Howe doesn’t live at the end of my street.)

However, the store wants $1,300 plus tax for it – about $1,500.
Seems a lot for a personal computer when you can buy brand new Dells and Acers for $500.

Still …

To me, this little episode, besides illustrating my ongoing addiction to toys, also shows how expectations have changed when it comes to modern electronics and the prices we are willing – or unwilling – to pay for them. Because sitting in my basement is the first computer I ever bought – also an Apple – for which I somehow had no trouble writing a cheque for $4,000. That was in 1994 and although Macs were more expensive even then than Windows-based PCs, all computers were much more expensive than today. It was just assumed that to get one, you’d have to be willing to part with a few thousand.

So, $4,000 then and $1,500 now. But, the difference in price gets even greater if you count in the disparity in computers.

My 1994 Mac has eight megabytes of RAM. The one I checked out this week has 512 megabytes. It is, by my calculations, 64 times as powerful. Its speed (as far as I can figure out these things) is 667 megahertz. My first rig runs at 66 megahertz. Ten times as fast.

But what hurts is the fact that the new iMac has a hard drive which contains a whoppin’ 160 gigabytes whereas my first Mac has 250 megabytes, half of what my son’s MP3 player, the size of a small cigarette lighter, has. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. If my math is right, the new hard drive is 640 times larger than the old one.

So, just to round out a few figures, it seems to me the new Mac is about 50 times the computer my old one is at just over 25 per cent of the cost.

Therefore (Einstein I am not) that would put the real price of the new computer, in relation to the old, at about $100.

Now, $100 I can afford. In fact, I’d be willing to double that, on a dare.

But I’ve got a feeling the good people at this big computer store, with their identity tags around their necks, would probably not see my reasoning and slip me a new Corvette, er, iMac, for $200.
So, I could go the other way, and tell you that in today’s terms, my old computer is worth about $200,000. And I am willing to part with it, for a very good price.

Say, $1,500?

Ah, the heady days of 1994. During a few subsequent shopping trips back then, I bought a laser printer (black and white, eight-by-ten-inch copies only) for $2,000. I just looked up a (probably superior) brand new Samsung laser printer on the Internet for about $100.

I bought a scanner for $600. Today, you can buy a better one for pocket change.

I guess what has me crying is the fact that I have computer equipment at home for which I paid about $8,000 and for which, assuming I was able to sell it, I could probably now get enough to buy me a couple of Happy Meals, which, given the preceding information, would not make me happy.

However, at least I do not have to agonize over having paid too much for a cellphone. My first, about 15 years ago, cost $100. But a friend, an “early adopter” who bought one of the original “car phones” years before, paid $4,000. Today, they give them away like popsicles. And they can do everything but scratch your back.

And speaking of back scratchers. The first one I ever bought …

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I am a fortunate person. I have so much. Including my own special toast-disposal service.

The service is conveniently located nestled between my ankles below my chair at the breakfast table. As I munch away on my flakes and toasted bread, the service idles patiently below me. Now and then, I break off an unwanted small sliver of toast and lower it carefully with my right hand in the direction of the floor beside my chair. When the toast bit reaches the level of about halfway between floor and chair, the toast disposalater sends out a jaw-like contraption complete with what can only be described as a set of teeth. These instruments clamp down tightly on the toast and sometimes on the fingers holding the toast. The toast then disappears under the chair, never to be seen again.

It is a very convenient service I have lucked into and it can also be depended on to remove many other table items such as cereal flakes, shreddies,and krispies. The device can also be used to remove other food items such as bits of noodles, meat, potatoes and pancakes.

It is sort of a mobile waste-disposal contraption which, unlike the stationary ones installed in sinks, requires some upkeep and care. It is necessary, for example, to attach it to a leash and take it out of doors several times a day to capture the waste products that the waste disposer itself generates, ironically.

Also, unlike most waste gobblers, the one I use needs more than table scraps and must be topped up several times daily with store-bought nuggets of meat and cereal kept under the kitchen sink in order to keep it in peak running order. It is also necessary to sit the device on your lap while watching TV at night and it is even recommended that it be taken to bed with you.

It is an unusual contraption, to say the least, but almost human-like in many ways. So uncanny is the resemblence that many times, owners of such machines are tempted to give them a name. Mine, for example, is named Tobe which is short for Total Breakfast Eater.

By Jim Hagarty
1986

After the Second World War, there began a wave of emigration from Europe of people looking for a better life in Canada. But for a while, it was not really much of an improvement on the life they had left behind. Some were sorry they came. Others stuck it out, hoping for better days. In most cases, better days came and success stories abound today of people from among those emigrants who have done extremely well in this New World country.

But they did not do it on their own and I think it’s fair to say that had Canadians not opened their hearts to refugees from the war-torn European continent, a great many of whom were being forced to live under an entirely new and strange political system, their chances for success would not have been so great.

Farmers in Perth County in Ontario where I grew up did their share to help in the years from 1945 to 1950. Perhaps some of them felt this was one way of contributing to the war effort since in many cases, they had been exempted from active military duty because they were needed on the land. In any case, European men went to work as hired hands on the Perth farms that sponsored them – one-year, church-arranged contracts were drawn up between immigrant and farmer – and thereby they got their new start here.

One of the things my father always seemed to feel best about in his life was the help he and my mother were able to be to the several immigrant men they hired on at their farm in Logan Township. He always spoke of them with great fondness and respect and though he had never experienced anything in his life comparable to the horrors of war and the uncertainty of leaving a homeland, he seemed to be able to feel their pain. He often told of the day he walked out on the front porch after dinner to find his hired man sitting on the steps, face buried in his hands, sobbing for his family back home.

One man my father hired was from Poland. He picked him up at the train station in Stratford and by the time they reached Bornholm, a half hour drive away, though neither man could speak the other’s language, they were communicating by one means or another. Tony Bogdan worked hard alongside my dad on the farm and remained a lifelong friend after he left. His name was often mentioned in our house.

Another man, Elmer Samaruutel, was from Estonia and he too became more than just a short-term labourer on our farm. From time to time in the years that followed his stay with us – in 1949 he left for a job in Toronto where he still lives today – he would drop in to renew his friendship with my parents.

And every year after they moved on, we would get Christmas cards from Tony and Elmer. They did not forget their good fortune in coming to a county where most hands were outstretched in goodwill. Some hands weren’t – some bosses looked on their hired men as sources of cheap help and little else. My father once rescued an immigrant worker from such a hard-hearted farmer and took him home to work on our farm. The farmer had refused to pay the man, making up some reason he thought justified his not giving the man his wages. Dad had an argument with the ignorant farmer then told the immigrant to get his things, he was coming with him.

Through the early ’50s, my parents hired other immigrants, some from the Netherlands. They too became more than farm labourers. Most were friends, some were like family. All were grateful. For my parents, their reward was watching these men go on to own successful farms of their own, to raise their own families and to take their places in the affairs of the community. In a twist of fate, after my parents sold their farm and moved to town, one of those immigrants bought their land and returned to the farmhouse where he had lived as a teenager after coming from Holland.

I’m not sure why Dad was so interested in helping new citizens. He was not a world traveller with a traveller’s view of the world. He was not a do-gooder or meddler looking for pats on the back or rewards in heaven. Maybe he just needed the help. Or maybe he sensed it hadn’t been easy either for our family when they came here from Ireland in the midst of the Famine a hundred years earlier. In any case, a million dollars could never have brought him more pleasure than the yearly Christmas cards from two of the men who remembered.

And as it turned out, Perth County needed every immigrant it took in back then. The county really got more than it gave. They and their sons and daughters are now the lifeblood of our agriculture and our rural communities.

Funny how that works.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

A woman down the street from me has an identical twin sister who often visits. I can tell them apart, mostly because one of them wears glasses and has a different hairstyle than the other. They are the most wonderful people and friendly as can be but I have to say, they are just daring everybody to get them mixed up. Yesterday I walked by their place to discover that they both drive identical SUVs. And I mean identical. Model, year, colour, everything. Twins are often known for wearing matching clothing, but driving the same cars?

By Jim Hagarty
2012

The definition of irony.

I worked for a company for six years. Every January the boss called me into the office, told me I was doing a good job and gave me a raise. I never once asked for a raise but never turned one down either.

One day, the boss called me into the office and offered me a buyout I could not refuse. In fact, I was told I could not refuse it.

When I asked why I was being let go, this was the answer: “You are making too much money.”

By Jim Hagarty
2012

You may not know that I am an amateur inventor but I have been dreaming up contraptions all my adult life and now I have come up with something that I think will push my status up to a whole new level. For those directionally challenged people, such as myself, who have trouble finding their way from their bedrooms to their bathrooms in the middle of the night, I have come up with the practically perfect device.

It is a little electronic thingy that is worn around the wrist. It is satellite-driven and I am calling it the GPISS.

I am now taking orders.

By Jim Hagarty
2004

I’m worn out today as I was busy on the Internet last night spending $455 for three teaspoons of water from a cup Elvis Presley drank from during one of his final performances in 1977. My family thought we might have used that money for a new TV or digital camera but they do not have their priorities straight. The guy I bought the water from – a trustworthy fellow if there ever was one – was at that concert and watched the King drink from that very cup. He took the cup home and put it in his freezer, water and all, only now agreeing to part with it to help guys like me keep the wonderful memories alive.

And it was me who paid out $2,500 for a Britney Spears book report and another $800 for a Jimi Hendrix Junior High School Yearbook from 1961. My wife suggested that money might go towards a new front door and bay window but any time you can get a Britney Spears book report for such a reasonable price, you simply have to jump at the chance. A true appreciator of valuable cultural artifacts knows that.

I also was the one who had the good sense to anonymously bid $650,000 for the guitar George Harrison used for several tracks on one of the Beatles later albums (I admit I had to take out a mortgage for this one). George, it seems, gave that guitar to a friend whose brother stuck it under his bed where it stayed for 30 years. If I had a Beatles’ guitar under my bed, I think I might have remembered that, but no matter. The important thing is it’s lying under my bed now and I can pull it out and plunk away on it any time I please.

I agree this was a lot of money to spend for an old guitar – the people I live with had suggested a new car, cottage and camper van – but they will be glad some day for my foresight.

A good day’s shopping wouldn’t be complete without spending $54,000 for never-before-heard original tapes of a John Lennon interview by a reporter for the Washington Star newspaper from 1975.

And I am afraid I couldn’t help myself. I just had to have those three ringside photographs of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier from their 1971 fight, taken by Frank Sinatra, and so I spent $14,500 to get them and I did.

Sure I expect my house insurance rate to increase by a few thousand dollars now and I will live in eternal fear of my treasures being stolen, lost or accidentally destroyed – hopefully somebody won’t drink the Elvis water by mistake – but when you have vision, and a friendly banker, you just have to go for it now and then.

My funds are getting low but if anyone knows how I could get a hold of one of Madonna’s hair curlers, I’d appreciate a call.