Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There is a woman from Nashville
Who’s inhaling a lot of hash still.
Police try to stop her,
“I won’t, you dumb copper.”
Nothing works but I bet lots of cash will.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Someone wrote a beautiful little story I saw on Facebook one day. I didn’t save it and I am sure I would have a hard time finding it again.

So from memory, I will try to recreate the sentiment of it, accompanied by my own thoughts on it.

A big part of the delight of raising children are the many “first times” involved in the adventure. The first time you hold your child in your arms, their first bath, their first bedtime story, their first steps, the first time they call you Daddy. Their first day at school, the first time they ride a bike with no training wheels. The first night they stay over at a friend’s place.

Almost all of these first times are more or less predictable. We don’t know on what day they will happen, but we anticipate all these significant stages of development and they happen more or less on cue.

But what we cannot know is the timing of the many “last times” that are also inevitable. The last time we hold them in our arms, the last horsey ride, the last bedtime story, the last time they come running to meet us at the front door when we come home from work and jump up to be caught before we’ve set all our gear down.

For a while, it seems like there are more last times than first but that isn’t exactly true. There are always more firsts. The first boyfriend, the first extended time away from home, the first time behind the wheel of a car.

Maybe it is just as well that a parent doesn’t know that when he held his daughter’s hand on the way to school that day, that that would be the last time he would do that. Or when he laced up his son’s skates in the dressing room that day, he would never lace them up again. The next week, a sign on the door said, “Players and coaches only.” No more Dads.

I think if we knew that this time holding one end of the skipping rope would be the last or this song at bedtime to encourage sleep would be the very last song you would sing, you might go a little crazy. It is just as well we don’t know.

We have two big maple trees in our front yard. For a few years, they were filled with kids. My daughter would take a book up into the branches with her and sit there by the hour reading. Many times, I didn’t know the trees were populated until I walked by them and heard someone call my name from on high.

A couple of summers ago, I sat on my front porch and gazed up at the trees. It was August, fall around the corner. And it struck me. Not one boy or girl had scaled the lofty branches of the trees that year at all. My sadness was overwhelming.

But whatever Greater Power gives us our children, is kind. Each stage in their lives is gradually replaced by a new stage and the new ones are just as good in a hundred ways as the old ones.

Nevertheless, nothing can compare to tobogganing down a snow-covered hill with your child for the first time. Or taking them for their first ride on a train.

At least it seems that way. Parents who have gone through this already tell me the best is yet to come.

I believe them.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I have been a blogger since April. It has been a fascinating few months.

But I noticed something today. Gradually, I guess, my life has become one constant potential blog entry. I go through my days now, iPhone at the ready, on the lookout for possible photos to take that I could post later.

Also, every conversation I have with another human during my days is evaluated on the basis of whether or not I should convert this short back and forth blab into a story for the blog.

Whenever I read some news on the several Internet sites I peruse during the day, I think to myself, “I have an opinion on that. I should probably write about it on my blog.”

Someday, as they are frantically wheeling me down a hall in the hospital to try to save me from the several debilitating ailments I expect to befall me at any time now, I will think, “This would make a great story for my blog.”

I have mentioned a few times that I have, not so much a brain, as an obsessive organ inside my head that fixes like a laser on a thing and won’t let go. It has been sort of like a circulating radar apparatus, searching the skies for some input.

One day in April, my radar brain picked up some faint signals from the blogosphere. They grew in itensity. Now I am trapped.

Help me!

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Another local radio station has caught the golden oldie bug. This week, the station turfed four of its long-time deejays as it prepares to move to a whole “new” format, spinning all “classic rock” tunes for our eternal enjoyment.

Or, as in my case, eternal annoyance.

Now, all the FM radio stations my area will be cranking out “favourites” from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. John Lennon’s heirs will get a little richer and “fogies”, old and otherwise, will have to dig through their Frank Sinatra records if they ever want to hear him do it his way again.

As a child of the ’60s – I was 13 when the Beatles appeared for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show – I should be tickled that yet another business interest has gotten down on its knees for us domineering “baby boomers” who apparently have no interest in living today but merely want to sit around watching instant replays of our past life. But I’m not happy at all because to be utterly frank with you (and is there any other way to be frank?), I’m sick and tired of Jim Croce singing about Bad Bad Leroy Brown and Don McLean wailing away at Bye Bye Miss American Pie. And shouldn’t that be Ms. American Pie?

This, in a nutshell, is why I’m fed up. In my younger days, like a lot of teenagers back then and I suppose now, I took a radio with me wherever I went. I sang along with all the songs and knew a lot of them by heart. I had my favourite deejays and I liked everything about radio. I even went out and bought records of the songs I heard over the airwaves so I could listen to them whenever I wanted.

Back then, a popular song had a lifespan of anywhere from one to three months before it was replaced with a newer, fresher song either by the same group or some other one. There used to be great excitement when it was announced a band like the Beatles would release their newest single on a Monday. A lot of us would be talking about it at school on Tuesday.

But even Beatles records had a best-before date and after you’d heard Hey Jude for the 400th time, you were ready to move on.

And that was the great thing. We always knew the songs we hated, and there were lots of them, would eventually disappear, never to be heard again.

Little did we know that 30 years later, they would all be back, along with the remakes made of them which themselves are now golden oldies too, or that they’d be playing 24 hours a day on almost every station around, like “muzak” on the overhead speakers at the mall.

So, now I wake in the morning to, “We had it all. Just Like Bogey and Bacall,” which are lines from one of my all-time, most-despised songs. I hate it mostly because the singer refers repeatedly to his “layday”, a reference, I suppose, to the word, lady.

I know, I know. I’m just too darned prickly. But how else would you expect a curmudgeon in the making to be? I just wish I could turn on my radio and hear a new song now and then. They’re still being recorded and some of them I have had a chance to hear on television and elsewhere are pretty good. Without them, where will the golden oldies of tomorrow come from?

Please don’t tell me when I’m sitting in the lounge of the nursing home 40 years from now, I’ll still be listening to, “We had it all. Just like Bogey and Bacall.” And blowing another artery every time that guy gets to the part about his “layday.”

Jim Croce. John Lennon. Eivis Presley. Mama Cass. Janis Joplin. Buddy Holly. Jim Morrison. Otis Redding. All great singers. Some of them great writers.

And all of them dead.

Jim Croce used to sing about how he wished he could save time in a bottle. Well, he couldn’t but he did manage to save it on vinyl records and compact discs and radio stations have turned themselves into giant time machines.

Maybe that explains the surging popularity of country music which seems to be the only area of popular music which still gets support for new creations from radio stations. So far, they’ve pretty well resisted the mouldy oldies rage.

What’s happening with radio, both FM and AM, is eerie, almost bizzare. Imagine coming home to your TV every day to nothing but reruns of I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver and Bonanza. Might drive you a little buggy after a while. Or going to the library to find nothing there that’s been published since 1972.

Life is today. The Beatles “Yesterday” belongs to yesterday. In the name of Graceland, Woodstock and Abbey Road, let’s get on with it. And give that poor guy and his “layday” a well-deserved rest.

I just hope, with all that love bubbling up inside of him, that he and his layday got together and made a baybay, providing, that is, that the baybay grew up to follow any career other than music.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A clumsy wee flea name of Spike
Fell off of his tiny blue bike.
I did mouth to mouth,
Breathed in and not out.
Now he’s livin’ somewhere I don’t like.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I have mentioned before that I know exactly how I will die someday. The last image I see will be the big ugly face of an angry bear. I am deathly afraid of bears and they say that what we fear we attract, so I am doomed.

But I was reminded today that there may be an alternative exit waiting for me.

My neighbour asked me to come over to his house and replace a light switch. I am as qualified to do electrical work as a bear is to perform heart surgery, but I am nothing if not up for a challenge. I told him to make sure the power was off.

I showed up for the job with wire stripper in one hand and needlenose pliers in the other. I wanted to show my neighbour the awesomeness of my electrical skills.

Ten seconds into the job, the one strand of hair that is left on my head stood straight up, my eyes turned into lasers and I could see right through the wall. I also broke into song – the Ukrainian National Anthem, I believe it was.

The hydro was still on.

Oops.

Undaunted, we finally found how to turn the power off for real and I finished the job.

Funny thing though. I went to put a frozen meat pie in the oven for supper but after holding it in my hand for 30 seconds, it was done.

This is the fourth time I have electrified myself over the years. I am starting to think it’s good for me. I feel completely energized afterwards. Seems to jazz up my heart.

And I can read in bed after dark without turning on the light. So that’s a bonus.

In light of all this, this is the likely outcome: I will be electrifying myself by accident some day with more juice than I can handle when a murderous bear will break in just at that moment.

It will all make for a very interesting obit.

By Jim Hagarty
The 1957 Studebaker Lark was part of a car show in my town tonight. The owner said it had been refinished to resemble a 1953 model, something I didn’t understand. What I do know, is that it is one beautiful machine. The interior is amazing.