Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty

Our family has two cars. We are living the American dream. Most days, it doesn’t matter to us that our cars are just a touch shabbier than the old truck The Beverly Hillbillies used to ride around in with Granny in a rocking chair in the back. Yes, we do get envious. We can’t fit a rocking chair in either car.

We are only able to keep these junkers on the road because we have a genius for a mechanic. If he was a medical doctor, there would be people walking around our town well into their 150s. He’s younger than us so we are hoping our driving days will be over just about the time he hangs up his wrenches and oil can.

Many people who own beaten down jalopies know a little about cars themselves which is how they are able to keep their wrecks on the road and the right side of the law. Collectively, my wife and I know this about cars: A sedan has four doors and the AC button, if it worked, stands for air conditioning.

So, we pay the car bills and keep on truckin’, in Beverly Hillbilly fashion, minus Granny.

However, our ignorance leaves us open to friends and neighbours who like to assess from a distance what is wrong with our vehicles. In short, we believe what they say even though we have absolutely no reason to have faith in them.

Our oldest car, manufactured in 1997 and released on an unsuspecting world, started making terrible sounds a couple of weeks ago. The faster the car goes, the louder the sound is. It sounds somewhat like a space shuttle ready to launch without all the smoke and TV cameras, at least so far.

So a friend drove it.

“It’s your transmission,” he declared, shaking his head. “The car is done. I wouldn’t put a new transmission in a car this old.” Most people wouldn’t put gas in a car this old, so what was his point?

“Don’t drive it out of town,” he ordered us. So we don’t.

Friday night, my wife and I were driving along in our other car, foisted on the general public after emerging from the car factory in 2005. Suddenly, there was a terrible clunking sound from the back end, like might be expected if we had somehow driven over a landmine. Our town of 35,000 souls in Southern Ontario, Canada, is not heavily mined. We ruled that out. As we did a rocket attack by insurgents. Fortunately, the local police have kept insurgents on the run in our town and they are not a big problem. Kids on skateboards? But I digress …

We called a tow truck and our car soon disappeared out of the parking lot and on its way to our friendly mechanic’s shop. It was a Friday night, he doesn’t work weekends, and we had all weekend to worry about the fate of what had been the better of our two cars.

We asked our friend of the transmission assessment noted above what might be wrong.

“It could be the differential,” he said, with what appeared to be a sad look on his face.

“What the hell is a differential?” my wife and I said to ourselves after our long walk home carrying 45 pounds of groceries. I suggested at one point that we should just sit down and eat the groceries and be done with it but my proposal was spurned.

So we have spent the past two weeks in a morass of transmission and differential worries.

Our mechanic called on Tuesday.

“Got your car fixed up,” he said, and explained that the problem was a broken spring. No differentials were harmed in the making of this movie.

Today I drove to the mechanic’s in the old jalopy with the defunct transmission, to pay the non-differential bill on the other car. I fully expected to hand over a thousand dollars. The bill was $129.

Pleased, I asked him about the other car, the doomed one with the bad transmission, and told him our friend’s diagnosis. He smiled.

The mechanic took it for a short spin.

“It’s a wheel bearing,” he announced on his return. “No big deal.”

So, between Granny Clampett, landmines, insurgents and the friend who is always wrong about car troubles, apparently, we have made it through another week.

We have a little shrine in our home dedicated to our mechanic. We have a framed photo of him on the wall, and below him burns a candle in old soup can.

We pray for him every night before bed.

By Jim Hagarty

I am not sure what the appropriate timeframe is for retrieving two pairs of short pants from the garbage can after you have thrown them out.

I waited just over 24 hours, so hopefully I am within the safe zone. These are 10-year-old shorts that I have worn daily from May till October for a decade and these days, it is a very generous description of them to even call them shorts. The one remaining qualifying factor is they have no legs below the knees.

I bought new shorts, you see, which seemed to necessitate the discarding of the old ripped and torn ones. Getting rid of them offered an important benefit: It would stop me from wearing them into stores and restaurants and attracting disapproving stares from shoppers, diners and establishment managers.

But there I was, shooing away the flies and tossing aside filled doggie poop bags to get to my shorts at the bottom of the garbage can. I shook them out, put one pair on and cut the lawn.

An hour later, I wore them into a large department store.

The boys are back in town!

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A significant number of fleas
Leave my dog when he lets out a sneeze.
They run for the hills.
I should give him his pills.
Stuffing meds in a dog is no breeze.

By Jim Hagarty

I was tired when I woke up Tuesday. I had spent all day Monday digging my own grave. A friend has the key to the cemetery, so he let me in. Even lent me a shovel.

All this activity was in preparation for a medical appointment yesterday at 10 a.m. I have known about this visit for some time now, a couple of months at least. And each day, as I thought about it, the prognosis from the medical professional sitting before me seemed to get worse and worse.

“Routine checkup”, I came to believe, is a medical term for “pull the plug.”

Each day I sat in my backyard, awaiting the end. At first, the likely outcome of the appointment seemed to be a bunch of unpleasant changes in my lifestyle. Then, day by day, sitting in my lawnchair under the maple tree the kids gave me a long time ago, things somehow went from unpleasant to downright horrifying. I looked around the yard with a mixture of fondness and sadness, tearing up at times, thinking about how much I would miss this place. So many memories. The swing set, the plastic swimming pool, dragging the kids around on a plastic tarp, the skating rinks.

Yesterday I was up early. I showered and stuffed myself into what in my world can be considered my “good clothes.” I drove myself casually to the medical office, wondering if I would be driving myself home. But I was relatively calm. Sort of resigned to my fate.

I sat in the waiting room. Didn’t even crack open a magazine. What would be the point of reading about the first manned mission to Mars if I will not be around to see it. Dieting tips? Too late. Relationship advice. Hah!

“Mr. Hagarty?” came the call from the man in the white coat. “Come this way.”

I would have liked to have hugged the receptionist goodbye but there was no time.

“Have a seat,” said the medic sternly. He started shuffling through my records, looking concerned. Let’s just get this over with, I thought.

“Well, your tests are fine,” said the medical professional seated before me. “Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.

“I’d like to see you again in six months.”

I floated my way out of the medical centre, as though on a cushion of air. Hardly said goodbye to the receptionist. Didn’t need her any more.

I went home and sat in my lawnchair under the tree the kids gave me and looked around.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

So I did a little of both.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A word about my new pet gnat.
He’s friendly but way too fat.
I gave him less food,
Which soured his mood.
He’s a charmer but also a brat.

By Jim Hagarty

I just returned from my nightly walk around the block.

Tonight was a little unusual in that I stopped to talk to a neighbour, out giving her doggie his bedtime pee. Feeling the need to explain why I was out walking so late at night, I told her my doctor says I need to walk.

Well, she grabbed onto that, one thing led to another and the conversation took a horrible turn when she began rattling off the evils of processed peanut butter. I was commanded to quit that shit as it is full of sugar and salt. In her fridge, is a nice big jar of natural, organic peanut butter, no additives. We have a jar of that stuff in our fridge too and now and then, if I am desperate, I will scoop out a spoonful. To call it peanut “butter” would be to call a round hunk of asphalt a cherry pie. The worst thing about natural peanut butter is it tastes, well, like peanuts.

I like the peanut butter that has eliminated any association with the peanut, while keeping the brown colour.

I made my neighbour no promises to quit that shit but maybe some day I will.

I will do it, in fact, on the day I cut myself up a nice big slice of asphalt pie.