Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2016

We all carry around an image of ourselves in our heads concerning what kind of person we are. In my case, I generally think of myself as a nice guy and pretty much present myself to the world as that. I have darker thoughts about myself and my failings, but I give myself the benefit of the doubt when I go out in public.

Today, I was standing in line at the vet clinic, waiting to pick up some dog food I had on order. There was a middle-age woman at the counter in front of me, talking to the vet assistant behind it. Talking and talking. She would not quit. It wasn’t as though she was talking about the weather; I think the discussion was 100 per cent pet related. But she just wouldn’t stop. Finally, the woman behind the counter signalled for another woman to come out to the front to help me. By that point, I was getting agitated.

Finally getting served sort of cheered me up and I forgot about the gabby woman who had finally left. Forgot about her till I headed for the door. She was standing on the porch outside the clinic and she said, “Excuse me, could you give me a ride downtown? I missed my bus and I would have to wait 20 minutes for the next one.” Instantly, the thought entered my head that she could walk downtown in 15 minutes, but I reluctantly agreed to her request.

I had a car, so off the bat I was privileged, although we all make our choices. And I was heading downtown so it was not as though I was being asked to go 10 miles out of my way. Still I was aggravated at having to share the small cabin space in my tiny car with a woman I had so recently taken a dislike to.

I huffed and puffed and moved the stuff off the passenger seat so she could sit. If she knew I was upset, she didn’t show it. We talked poodles all the way downtown. My answers were short and unfriendly. Finally, she pointed to a good spot to let her out. I pulled over and she disembarked.

“Thanks,” she said. “No problem,” I replied.

But the mask had slipped a bit.

It does now and then.

I happens to the nicest of us, I guess.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. It can induce inactivity and bring a person almost to a complete halt. We are afraid to do anything because it won’t be perfect.

The cause of perfectionism is fear and it has its roots in early childhood. We fear a loss of approval from others, in effect, a withdrawal of love. The fear of being unloved and of being abandoned is every human’s primal fear from the time we are separated from our mothers and brought into the world. We strive all our lives to prevent rejection and abandonment. We can be 95 years old and still crave acceptance.

But why do we push ourselves to not just do well but to be perfect, to accomplish our tasks perfectly? It’s hard to say for sure, but part of the answer lies in our upbringing. Sure, you agree, someone raised in a hostile atmosphere would naturally be afraid of rejection. But most of us are not nurtured in that kind of atmosphere. In fact, today’s parents strive to be loving and supportive at every stage of their children’s lives.

But here is the message those good parents may be sending, unintentionally: We love you more when you achieve great things. That is why we make such a fuss. Parents lavish praise on their kids for their accomplishments, a seemingly natural thing to do, but the message kids often take from that is that failure to achieve significantly will result in loss of love, even if they’ve rarely seen this acted out by anyone. Their logic tells them this is so. Do well and everyone cheers. Do poorly and while there may be no boos, there will probably be a lot of silence.

The kids feel they have to keep the hits coming.

Their parents, other family members and society at large including the kids’ teachers, didn’t really want to send that message. They only wanted the young ones to feel good about themselves but in some ways, they may have only heightened the pressure on them and contributed to their fear and self-rejection.

Somehow, the message needs to be sent that there is no achievement that could increase a parent’s love for her child nor is there a failure that could decrease it. Perhaps the only solution for someone who is a perfectionist, is for that person to practise a few times at doing some things less than perfectly. Strive, purposely, for imperfection once in a while. They might be surprised to find that the world did not stop turning because their effort was judged to be sub par on any particular project.

And they will no doubt discover that in the face of their failure, they were loved as much as they ever were.

Maybe it is time we began to challenge our children’s fear of failure by allowing them the freedom to fail now and then.

Of course, we want perfection in our complicated world. Our engineers and architects need to know what they are doing so the bridges we drive over don’t fall down. Our doctors need to be perfectionists when they are in the operating room. Perfection is an admirable goal if the intent is to complete a task well for its own sake and not to prevent alienation from our loved ones and the world.

There is needless and endless pressure on young people today to achieve and to find their paths. They need to pause and look up from their anxiety for a moment. We need to encourage them to do that.

“There’s a time to be still and let the river carry you where it will.” From the song, Let There Be Love.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a man named John
Who ran around with nothing on.
I thought it was rude
To see him all nude.
So I gave him some clothes he could don.

By Jim Hagarty
1992

Recently, the issue of whether or not men should be allowed to parade their bare beer bellies around town, came up for discussion and the controversy has been ballooning out of control ever since.

Please, allow me to inject a little perspective into the debate.
First of all, it took men a couple of hundred years of concerted political pressure to win the right to get those bellies out there where everybody can have a good look at them. (As powerful as King Henry VIII was, he was not at liberty to let that big gut out of its confines. For that matter, neither was the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.)

If we are going to turn back the clock and force men back into covering up, we are going to have to be prepared to accept some of the other niceties of those ages, like spitunes, bleedings and beheadings. Seen in this light, the unrobed beer belly is a true sign of social enlightenment. (Seen in another light, it might be a sign that its owner has been drinking too much beer, but that’s another subject.)

Secondly, this idea that a great big, floppy, spongy belly is to be considered somewhat of a human eyesore, just doesn’t make sense. Exactly what part of the belly is to be found repulsive? The fact that it’s big? Bigness isn’t despised when it shows up in other men’s parts such as the shoulders or biceps. Do we object to it being floppy? If it was a pillow, we’d think it was great. As for spongy, what’s the problem? Serve up a cake that flexible and Betty Crocker would be breaking down your door to get at your recipe.

No, it’s obvious, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, therefore, there can be no test to determine that a large, unclothed, male belly in a public place doesn’t belong there.

Thirdly, though it may seem to be a bit of a leap in logic, the bare beer belly is, in many ways, modern society’s last defence against the tyranny of youth and beauty that is always waiting around the corner to jump us. This week, it’s beer bellies. Next week, it will be knobby knees. Then freckles. Double chins. Bald heads. Soon, teams of Ugly Police will be enforced to cover up those parts of the male deemed to be repulsive.

So, in many ways, man’s struggle to bare his bloated belly is the struggle of free people everywhere. “Let my belly go!” should be our cry.

And lastly, and I want you to think about this carefully, if men are determined to shed some clothes on hot summer days, and the law allows it, is it not possible that the shirt could be the lesser of several evils. Imagine, for a moment, a situation where those men with the bellies decide one day that the shirt will stay but other garments just have to go. Is this a scene we want to contemplate?

Therefore, I see any criticism of the male right to expose yards of hairy, sweaty, bouncy, belly flesh on hot days as an attack on vital freedoms. And that is why I am proposing we march bare bellied through the streets this weekend. And I invite women everywhere to shed their tops and join us, as a sign of solidarity.

So, if you happen to see groups of women parading down the street this weekend with their shirts off, you’ll know my call for action has not gone unheard.

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(Background: Around the time I wrote this column in 1992, a young Canadian woman walked topless down a street in her city on a hot summer day. She did this purposely, knowing the result. She was arrested and charged. She had her day in court. She won, thereby giving women the right to be topless in public without harassment from the law. For a month or two after the decision, women here and there went topless in public, in part because they could, and in some cases, as a lark. But this is a right that is rarely exercised in Canada, even on public beaches. As elsewhere, there are a few “topless” and even nude beaches, however.)

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

My limerick skills run low.
I am out of ideas, you know.
I have had enough
Of writing this stuff.
These little poems might have to go.

This is a popular cut from the CD Wood, Wire, Glass and Soul by Canadian blues artist/songwriter Stevie T.

Fly On 2015 by Stevie T.

(If this track doesn’t play on this main page, click on the song title and go to the actual page itself.)

By Jim Hagarty
For years I have been driving by a local auto dismantler and I always look over at a 1949 Packard sitting there, rusting away, by the side of the road, the driver’s side window missing or wound down, leaving the interior open to the elements, winter and summer. I actually didn’t know it was a Packard until I dropped into the business today and asked the owner if I could take pictures of it. It was a classy car in its day. It has a vinyl covering on its roof. When I was a kid, the best cars had vinyl roofs. It also has “suicide doors”, the back doors opening into traffic instead of with it.

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By Jim Hagarty
1986

Time was, the back yard was a fine place to get rid of garbage – at least in the country. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to load it all onto trucks, drive it a dozen or so miles from home, dump it in big piles along with everyone else’s “waste” and bulldoze it underground.

Our “landfill site” was an old gravel pit in the 20-acre field at the back of the farm. In there went all the things we couldn’t incinerate in the barrel behind the house or feed to the cats in the barnyard. Old beds, bottles, cans and barbed wire ended up in the bottom of the shallow pit and on one not-so-busy day during the dead heat of mid-summer – we doused it all with gasoline and burned it.

For day-to-day garbage, we kept big boxes in the back kitchen and in them went the stuff most suitable for burning. On a regular basis, Saturday mornings usually, all that paper and cardboard was carted out under the big maple tree by the fence behind the house, stuffed into a rusting, semi-burned-out barrel and set alight.

To a kid fascinated by the magical ability fire has to make things disappear, this exercise provided an hour or two of great entertainment. You could toss the most sturdy, indestructible objects at those flames and in minutes, they would be reduced to embers and ashes.

Meanwhile, into a pail under the kitchen sink, all our table scraps were scraped, eventually forming an unappetizing mixture appropriately named “swill.” The contents of the “swill pail”, while they were really rather revolting to any human with a reasonably active sense of smell, made up an apparently delicious supper for our many barn cats. They fished through this orangey-coloured soup in the same way children might wolf down chili without touching the kidney beans. It wasn’t the sort of meal Garfield might like, but it kept our kitties going.

On the farm, for everything there is a place. Each spring, or early summer, a small trailer hitched to a tractor was backed up under the upstairs’ window of the summer kitchen. That window was removed and out into the trailer, for the next few hours, flew things we couldn’t use any more and which weren’t worth giving away. Things like old winter coats, curtains, radios that didn’t work, lamps, school textbooks. When the trailer was filled, it would be drawn around to other buildings on the property that housed things we didn’t need and eventually the whole affair made its way back to the gravel pit.

Into the pit we threw everything from clothes to couches and from tree limbs to tractor tires. A gallon of gas and one match later, all that junk began to vanish.

In a year’s time, the average farm produces a lot of garbage. But you never saw much of it lying around our place. We got rid of it in the ways that seemed most sensible to us.

It was a simpler time. Environmentalists were as rare as Cadillacs on the road that ran by our farm and even if it had occurred to us that the belching black smoke from our little yearly fire might be doing some damage to a thing called the ozone layer which we hadn’t even heard of anyway, there was no one around very much concerned about it. We just wanted to clean up the place so the neighbours wouldn’t think we were deadbeats which are pretty terrible things to be mistaken for.

Today, waste disposal is an important issue. A real one. What kind of world do we want to leave for the generations to come? On that point, we’ve come a long way. Most of us think we’ve got to do a better job of getting rid of our garbage.

However, and it’s a big however, can people be blamed for not wanting a large landfill site in their backyard? In the past, to belittle the concerns of people who complain about the prospects of a huge dump in their neighbourhood and thereby undercut their arguments, planners have arrogantly dubbed the phenomenon of people opposing landfill sites (and other developments they don’t want) the NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard, effect. These planners, who often live out of the area to begin with, only create deeper anger and suspicion when they treat affected citizens like a bunch of local yokels who have nothing better to do than bellyache about inevitable change.

Granted, no site will please everybody. But there must be one site, somewhere, in any rural area, that would adversely affect only a few people. That’s the place to build a new dump.

We used an old pit at the back of the farm for our dump, as far away from our house as it was possible to get on our property. No engineering studies told us that was the best spot for our garbage.
Common sense did.