Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty

“Advice is highly overrated.”
Says the man who never takes it.
The man who paddles his own canoe
Has nothing at all to learn from you.

He’s sure his advisers mean well and all
And he knows that their words are meaningful
But the man who charts his very own course
Will never give in to suggestion or force.

For he knows he can do it all on his own
And is happy to plan his path all alone
For he’s sure that he is much smarter than you
And needs no one’s counsel on what he should do.

The man who paddles his own canoe
Is happy and wishes you could be happy too.
But when he sees rapids approaching ahead
He is apt to consider your caution instead.

And as his craft tumbles and tosses him out
He finally yells “Help!” but there’s no one about.
And as he’s submerged and his head hits a stone
He wishes for once he wasn’t alone.

The easiest thing in the world to do
Is push away people who try to help you.
And sometimes that’s fine and sometimes that’s brave
But it’s too late as they gather at the canoe paddler’s grave.

By Jim Hagarty

I did my good deed for the week on Sunday, a perfect day to do a good deed, I have found over a lifetime of distributing good deeds to the left and the right of me like a Good Samaritan on steroids.

On this day, I bought someone I don’t even know five screwnails.

It cost me 50 cents but it was worth it to see this anonymous do-it-yourselfer happy although I haven’t actually ever see him or her and I don’t know if they are happy but I hope they are. I hope, in fact, they are downright gleeful.

In the middle of a construction project, I was sent to the hardware store to pick up a box of 100 woodscrews. I raced like a maniac to the store and found the last two boxes of the screws I needed. However, the seal was broken on both boxes. Someone had been helping themselves.

So I asked the manager about it and he agreed that yes, someone had pilfered a few screws. He didn’t offer to knock a few pennies of the price of the box and I didn’t care enough to ask for a discount, so I bought the screws and raced home. Once there, just for fun, I dumped out all the screws and counted them. There were 95, not 100, in the box.

Now, I am glad the screw thief got away with the bargain he or she was looking for, but I am also very interested in the thought process that went on in the brain of this person who gave themselves a five-finger discount on the product. I am thinking they are an adult, as kids don’t usually need woodscrews. They must be in the middle of some kind of project themselves and so, by definition, they must have the money to pay for the whole project.

The hardware store is located just outside of my city so the person probably went there in a car that he or she presumably owns and maintains. If they have the money for all this they must have some sort of income and therefore, probably have a job.

So, here is a responsible, job-holding, car-driving person, probably a family man or woman who is operating under a belief system that suggests that it is OK to have someone else pay for 100 screwnails and only take home 95.

I guess that person’s conscience is clear and that their workshop is not cluttered up by 95 screwnails they have no need of.

That brings me to the notion that perhaps it should be possible to go to the hardware store and buy five of these screws when that is all you need.

Does that justify stealing? I don’t know. And given that most of the shoplifting done in these big stores is done by the employees, who knows who took my screws? Maybe it was an inside job.

All I know is, I got screwed.

And not in a fun way.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A nice little piglet named John,
Squealed cause he couldn’t find Mom.
He enquired of a cow,
“Have you seen my sow?
“She was here but now she is gone.”

By Jim Hagarty

We had a nice long autumn last year and I got well caught up on my yard work.

I trimmed all our perennial flowers right down to ground level. I worried all winter long that I had been too brutal in my pruning. Would the lilies and iris and phlox even come back at all in the spring?

They did come back and are more beautiful than they have ever been.

It occurs to me it doesn’t hurt for humans to be cut down to size now and then too.

Doesn’t hurt us at all.

By Jim Hagarty
The Letter is another cut from a CD I am working on. Far from finished but I am happy with the building blocks laid by guitarist and record producer Earl Filsinger. The lyrics are based on an actual letter I once received after a break up. The break up was devastating. The letter was worse.

The Letter by Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

What do you do with the idiot man
Who knows he is completely right?
When you point that out he will yell and shout
And you’re in for a hell of a fight.

If you try to persuade the always right man
That he almost always is wrong
He will call you a name and try to defame
The group to which you belong.

You can try to explain he has nothing to gain
By never admitting he erred.
He will badger you more and show you the door
And scream till you’re awfully scared.

All you can do, I suggest to you,
Is to run and to never look back.
It is not worth your time to alter his mind.
So try out this line of attack.

Tell everyone that you know of someone
Who is disturbed beyond your repair.
And put up a sign,
“He Is Out Of His Mind.
“Warning!
“DO NOT FEED THE BEAR!”

By Jim Hagarty
2001

If a man ever attracted the attention of beautiful young women at the beach during his early adulthood, it is unlikely he will do it very often as he approaches the age of fifty. Time, trouble and too many chocolate bars have a way of reducing the average male’s appeal to the younger members of the “fairer sex”, even given the long-held notion that young females often prefer the more mature male of the species.

And yet, there I was standing knee-deep in the gently waving waters of Lake Huron one sunny afternoon, tossing a frisbee back and forth to a friend, when I noticed two young women a little further out on the next sand bar, obviously glancing at me. They had long, sleek hair, and perfect human figures which they were scarcely bothering to conceal with small ribbons and bows, otherwise known as string bikinis. You might wonder how I managed to take this all in so quickly between frisbee throws, but I have a policy of returning looks that anyone bestows on me and so I checked them out as carefully as a man my age would dare to do while his wife was sitting in a lawn chair on the sand, a beach-ball throw away.

And I was not dreaming: they were definitely looking at me. And smiling. Sort of tee-heeing to each other, too, as if sharing a juicy secret. I glanced around to make sure that someone else wasn’t, in reality, the object of their perusal – I’ve been laid low by that mistake a time or two – but no, this time, for sure, the “babes” were checking me out.

I have to admit, it felt kind of good, approaching, as I am, the autumn of my years. I wasn’t sure what it was these nubile young things were finding so noteworthy about me, but I sucked in my gut and soaked up the notoriety and didn’t question it. You learn, as you go along, not to examine gifts such as these too closely; better to simply enjoy them.

I smiled back in the direction of my admirers as benignly as I could, a look of gratitude, I’m sure, spread across my chops, and turned to my frisbee-hurling buddy to apprise him of my good fortune. Leaning down to the water to retrieve the red plastic disk that had splashed down in the water before me, I looked down at my bathing suit and caught my breath as I did. The garment looked almost strange to me this day, its tie-strings and little pocket flowing freely on the outside of it rather than inside as they normally would be tucked. A second or two passed by till I was able to fully take in the situation: the women who had shot me the friendly glances were tossing me looks of amusement, not amour, at my shiny, green boxer bathing suit which at that moment I was wearing inside out.

You know, along with the other emotions that age just seems to knock the sharp edges off of, mortification is one that is somehow less daunting at fifty than at twenty. Still, it was a letdown, and as my friend also became aware of the situation and guffawed loudly as a result, I groaned at him in chagrin, “You know, somebody may as well just hang a sign ‘Nerd’ around my neck.”

Now, what did my sensitive, lifelong pal come back with, knowing as I know he did, how embarrassed I must have felt?

“You don’t need a sign, Jim,” was what he had to say.

Wow! That hurt more than the young girls’ giggles.

I think the measure of a man’s maturity is how well he handles being seen at a public beach wearing his bathing suit inside out. And I gotta tell you, I think I dealt with the situation pretty darned well. I betrayed little sign of anguish or even annoyance and in time, when I thought of the incident, I pretty well remembered only that two bathing beauties had looked me up and down and forgot, for the most part, why they did.

Selective memory, after all, is another benefit brought on by the advancing years. A good thing too as I have a feeling this won’t be the last time I’ll be putting my clothes on inside out.

And backwards.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a small centipede
Who only had 98 feet.
Two others he lost
In a foot-freezing frost.
“It was awful,” he said. I agreed.