Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I sing and play guitar and sometimes I get asked why I don’t perform in public more often. The short answer is that the offers have dried up since Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson died. But there is a longer answer and if you can stand to sit through it, here it is.

When I agree to play somewhere other than the elaborate stage I have set up in my bedroom where the acoustics are awesome and the imaginary audience is all-adoring, the body that would need to accompany me on such a gig raises a major objection.

“You drag me out to that concert, Jim, and I will SEE YOU IN HELL.”

Rare has been the occasion when Body did not make good on its promise. And the sequence of steps by which my general and alarming decline is made manifest are predictable and awful. To begin with, though I left my teenage years behind a full 44 years ago, Body is still somehow able to work up a good pimple just in time for a show. As it did this week in the days leading up to a few songs I played at an event on Saturday. At the beginning of the week, I started to feel a pain on the side of my nose and I thought to myself, “No way. It couldn’t be.” But it could be and was. When I looked in the mirror on Saturday morning, there it was in all its glory. Blossomed and white like a beautiful puffball mushroom on the edge of a forest on a nice summer’s day. My first “whitehead” since last time I played.

When you’re 63 and still able to work up a pimple that would cause a baby to fill its Pampers if he saw it, you are probably owed some sort of rebate from God, but there it was. So you heat up a sewing pin and lance it and hope it doesn’t ooze too badly all day. (I am an expert at this, having lanced dozens of them before first dates in high school and beyond.) My cat has a pimple behind his ear. Why couldn’t I just have one there for once?

Then comes the shaving. I can shave my face a thousand times and draw nary a drop of blood but on the day of a public performance, Marie Antoinette and I have a lot in common, though I don’t manage to lose my head over it. Saturday morning, fully aware of what was almost certain to happen, I took out my “safety” razor and started scraping away. Soon, one gusher appeared and then another beside it. Two nice and lovely slices on my cheek that at least, with the blood they emitted, distracted somewhat from the pimple on my nose, about two inches away.

Finally, at the concert, shaking like a popcorn maker, and about an hour before I was to appear, guitar in hand, came another phase in this fun-filled adventure. My bowels, which, strangely, had not been heard from much all week, decided that now would be a perfect time to cripple with pain the expanse of muscle and skin enclosing them. I rushed to the, thankfully unoccupied, stall in the washroom. Emerging from there, feeling better, my bladder soon announced that from then until the end of the show, it would be filling up and in need of emptying faster than a farmer’s bathtub on Saturday night.

Minutes before showtime, my hands began to sweat. The palms of a person’s hands are not supposed to sweat, but here they were, moistening up like a mama’s eyes at her firstborn child’s piano recital.

“And now we would like to welcome to the stage, Jim Hagarty.”

Guitar in slippery hand, feet shuffling to stool on stage, vibrating butt on seat. Fingers begin to shake faster than Elvis’s hips. Audience seated, big smiles on faces. If these people were teenage girls, they’d be screaming their heads off about now. And then, saving its best for last, Body sends out Brain to finish me off. Three seconds before I open my mouth, Brain completely erases the memory from my hard drive. Song is gone. Lyrics gone. Tune gone. Trembling hands unable to form chords on guitar as the memory of all that is gone too.

And yet, somehow, a few minutes later, I hear applause.

Maybe I imagined it. My imagination rarely stops working.

During my performance on Saturday, I said between songs, I haven’t done this in 30 years but I believe that every 30 years a fella should get up and sing a song. And I do believe that.

Catch my next show when I do my encore at 93. Should be fun to see what Body has in store for me by then.

In Passing

Whenever someone
That I’ve known
Disappears from view,
I regret our
Recent conversations
Were so few.
And wish I had not
Let the bonds
Of friendship
Slip away.
I wonder if someone
Will think of me
That way some day.

And when I see
An old friend’s
Photo in the news,
The memory of our
Time together
Leaves me with the blues.
It seemed inevitable
That we would drift apart,
And still the separation
Leaves an ache
Upon the heart.

Someone wiser
Than I am
Has quite a
Different view.
She’s grateful for
The time she had
With everyone
She knew.
And she insists
In looking not
So much at what is gone,
But what they had
And how her
Precious memories
Linger on.

Maybe I’ll learn to
Be that way,
In time,
But I don’t know.
I doubt I ever will be
Very good at
Letting go.

• Jim Hagarty

As we grow from boy to man,
And when we’re still in school,
We are given opportunities
To be kind or be cruel.

To stand up for a bullied kid
Or join the taunting crowd.
To keep our hurtful words inside
Or shout them right out loud.

A lad can be forgiven
If he sometimes plays the fool
And steals some cheap attention
By doing something cruel.

But if that boy has any heart
He will begin to soften.
He might still be a jerk sometimes,
But thankfully, not often.

And gradually he makes the choice
His elders hoped he would,
To reject abject selfishness
And try to do some good.

A classmate goes the other way
And choosing to resent,
He glorifies his hatred
And becomes president.

• Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
Non Financial Writer
2014

I’ve been reading a lot about Warren Buffett lately and am part way through his biography now. What an interesting man. At his peak, he was worth about $60 billion but he gave half that away and will donate most of the other half before he dies.

What I find hilarious is the number of newspaper finance experts who like to put old Warren down. The headline on one of those recent stories read, Why I broke up with Warren Buffett. It is funny because, as far as I know, none of these newspaper guys is a billionaire. I worked for newspapers for many years and there is no journalist anywhere that I know if who can even count to a billion.

Still, apparently, Buffett doesn’t know much. His big failure was his rejection of tech stocks when the tech boom hit. But when the boom went bust, he survived just fine. His reasoning? There used to be 3,000 car companies in the U.S. Now there are three. Good luck picking the right three out of 3,000. He always went with good companies with good track records that he knew would last.

The other thing is Buffett is upfront about his net worth, about his successes and about his losses. None of the finance writers I have ever read say a word about their own net worth or experiences in the stock market or business world. Following them is kind of like taking flying lessons from people who have never been off the ground,

By Jim Hagarty

One year ago today, lifetimesentences.com was sprung on an unsuspecting world. After months of being urged by my daughter and a friend who has been blogging for more than 10 years, I gave in and took the plunge. I found a good video on YouTube from a blogger who blogs about how to set up blogs. He was actually pretty helpful and at minimal cost, I was up and running about 24 hours later.

I started off with a bang and ignored my blogging friend’s caution to take it easy or I might burn out. Me? Ha! Nonsense. I was heading for the moon Alice. Pow, right in the kisser!

After about six months of contributing several stories, poems, photos and songs every day, I walked over onto the dark side of the moon and burned out. So there was a lull. This fall, my productivity slowed down and I began letting things slide. First I missed a day or two where I didn’t post at all and soon I was comfortable with letting a whole week slide without contributing anything. Amazingly, it seems, I didn’t lose the number of viewers I thought I might.

But I began to find my footing again around Christmas time and by mid-winter I was back to a pretty good rate of production, though not matching my outburst during the first six months.

So I have settled into a bit of a routine and while I am trying my best at the moment, I would like to step it up a bit as time goes by. I have learned a few things along the way, with still lots to learn. It is a pretty great pastime and though my stats counter quit for a month a while back before I noticed it and got it going again, I believe I have had about 50,000 page views over the past 12 months. I am pleased with that. I am not sure how many individual readers that represents but I am guessing the blog is attracting almost 100 people a day. More from the United States than Canada where I live and some from several other countries around the world including Great Britain, Australia and even Russia.

Thanks for tagging along these past 365 days. I appreciate your interest. The endeavour is evolving and this next year I might experiment with a few changes to the design and content. I am going to have to call a meeting with myself and sit down to decide where I want to take this.

I hope good things only lie ahead.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I grew up on what was called a “mixed farm” although almost all of the varied things that were raised and grown were gone by the time I came along as my parents had switched to beef cattle solely. But even though they were gone, we would play in the empty henhouse where the chickens had been. There were unused beehives sitting beside the garage. I know we used to have geese as my Dad was attacked by one when he was five years old. We had once had pigs, cows, and beef cattle along with the geese and the chickens. No goats or sheep that I know of. Workhorses, of course, were a feature and very important part of the operation.

And in a 10-acre field west of the house there was a large orchard, all the trees in neat rows, though the fruit was never taken care of in my day and was often scabby. There were lots of apple trees of many varieties from red apples (maybe macs?) to yellow harvest apples and these huge “cooking” apples that were terrible to eat – very pulpy – but good for making pies and cider. The darned things were half way between a very large apple and a small pumpkin.

There were also some plum and pear trees in the orchard though the season was usually too short for the fruit on those trees to ripen. The branches of the trees hung low and when a friend brought his pony around one day and I got on it to ride a horse for the first time, the little dickens headed straight for the fruit trees at a fair clip knowing the branches would scrape me off its back, which they did.

My favourite fruit tree of all was a cherry tree located near the road. I remember the red cherries would be ripe by the last day of school in June and I would climb up there and fight the birds – and sometimes my siblings – for them. The birds were easier to chase away than the siblings. Even when the cherries were gone I would sit up in the tree and watch people come and go on the road. I always thought they couldn’t see me so that was kind of thrilling and mysterious.

All of these things were features of the way my grandparents farmed and they gradually went out of use when their day passed along with the mixed farm. One thing that did remain was a massive vegetable garden. That was a great place to go with a salt shaker. I’d pick tomatoes, wet them with my tongue, cover them with salt and eat them. Heaven.

The mixed farm is long gone almost everywhere now (I assume so, anyway, though I might be out of touch) but can still be found in Mennonite Country north of Stratford. It isn’t just their clothing and horses and buggies that harken back to a much earlier, simpler, quieter time.

Not easier, but slower.

When I was a kid in the sixties in Canada, it was not uncommon to see a Vauxhall drive by. They always seemed to be an odd little car, by American standards in any case. It was an English car, built for the North American market as well as the British Isles. In fact, there were a number of English cars that were popular in Canada at that time. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that Canada was (and still is) tied to Britain. Today, as I was driving by a parking lot in Stratford, my eye caught this unique vehicle and I had to pull over and take photos of it. It is a 1961 Vauxhall Cresta and it is in perfect shape.

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By Jim Hagarty
2012

My best friend and I were well familiar with the ditches along the almost two miles or so from our farms to the crossroads of Bornholm northwest of Stratford when we were growing up. On a warm summer’s day, he would walk on one side of the road, I on the other, and we’d scour the ditches for bottles that we could cash in at the store or the nearby gas station for pop and potato chips. A regular-sized eight-ounce or 10-ounce pop bottle would net us two cents while a large 28-ounce bottle would put five cents in our pockets.

Because motorists in those days would throw everything but the kitchen sink in the ditches as they drove along, we hardly ever ran out of a supply of refillable glass bottles to turn in. It didn’t take many to pay for our booty. I remember small bags of chips that cost a nickel, and pop that you could buy for seven or eight cents for a small bottle to 10 cents for a bigger one.

Our treasure trove took a little bit of a hit one summer, however, when a man in the village started walking the ditches too. We weren’t too happy with this trespasser but we couldn’t do much about him. Our hauls began to dwindle and eventually, so did our interest in fishing the ditches for funds to pay for our habits.

I believe it was a short time after our ditch-digging days ended that we discovered the miracle of girls. We soon found that they were the only worthwhile subject of discussion and would be that for many years to follow.