Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty

If I ever win a lottery
And I hope some day I do,
I’ll call your number on my phone
And give the prize to you.

I think you need it more than me.
I’d only waste the cash.
I’d buy a car I can’t afford
And put mine out for trash.

I’d buy a bigger house that comes
With hot tub and a pool.
I’d have flat screens everywhere
Like a big spendthrifty fool.

I’d hire two servants and a maid
To cater to my needs.
Produce a documentary
To broadcast my good deeds.

I’d own a helicopter
And a nice two-seater jet
And fly to Vegas twice a week
To toss the dice and bet.

I’d buy a ranch outside of town
With horses, cows and goats
And guard my special privacy
By installing great big moats.

Now that I think about it,
Though I’ve known you a long time.
If I ever win the lottery
I won’t give you a dime.

By Jim Hagarty

I never used to cry.

I think I went a whole decade or two in my earlier life without shedding so much as a tear.

Now, some days, I’m a blubbering idiot.

The other day, I wrote a poem about cattle and I bawled louder than a calf lookin’ for its mama all the way through the writing of it and for an hour after. I’m tearing up right now just remembering it.

The slightest thing can set me off.

But it’s the strangest thing. There doesn’t seem to be much sadness associated with the tearbursts that come over me like a sudden rainfall in spring. Maybe a bit. But it seems like the waterworks are associated more with gratitude than with regret.

I have been an incredibly fortunate man and have lived what seems to me to be five lifetimes in one. I am not sure what my goals were at 20, but I surely never imagined a life as good as the one I have been given. I used the word “given” on purpose. The Universe has been kind to me.

I spent a lot of years, I think, not feeling much. Hunkered down in the chase after all the things that are supposed to matter to a man in mid-life. Success, recognition, financial stability, accumulation of possessions, accumulation of experiences like the kind that travelling the world can bestow. Too busy living life to be absorbed with much reflection.

But now I remember moments. I remember people. I remember favourite pets and favourite trees and favourite places on Earth that have brought me joy.

And sometimes when I do, a tear or twenty escape their normally locked-tight holding cell.

These days, there seems no need to keep the door locked on my feelings.

That is the thing I am most grateful for.

Because mixed in between the tears is laughter, laughter like I have never known before.

Tears and Laughter originate from the same sacred holy ground called Perspective.

Whatever advantages young people have in life, and they have many, Perspective seems to be the prize waiting near the finish line.

Perspective is what causes old folks to declare …

I wouldn’t change a thing.

By Jim Hagarty

There is a special pain reserved for the hearts of the parents of young children.

It has nothing to do with the stress of bringing them up safe, sane and sound but rather, with the certain knowledge that the children we see before us today, will have vanished forever by next month, or even next week.

Children change so rapidly that it seems that overnight, the boy who screamed from the back seat for his father to stop at every fire station on their route so he could be taken in to meet the chief and see the fire trucks, now can ride by the biggest firehalls without even a glance out the car window.

To see your child walk dismissively past toys that only last month captivated him for entire days or to have him protest, “I don’t want to play that game, Daddy!” when you try to resurrect an old routine, can leave a lump in your throat the size of ten of those toys. Because what it means is that you are losing him; he is one step closer to walking out your door for good. And to contemplate never again having that person you would literally die for around all the time is to peer into a future too lonesome to imagine.

The child, of course, has only one mission: to develop, to grow, to expand his horizons. It is a crime to hold him back. But as the length of those times during which he is content to sit in your lap and snuggle in front of a good cartoon on TV begins to shorten and now everything is baseball bats, bicycles and best friends, a Dad can be forgiven for wanting a few more uninterrupted hours curled up in the armchair with his son.

Any amateur psychologist will tell you that what the father is really mourning here is not so much the passing away of his boy’s childhood days but the ebbing away of his own life. It is himself he is crying for, not his son. And while I’m sure that’s right, I’ll bet that same psychologist never sat in the dark with his boy at bedtime playing, “I love you higher than the moon, much” and had that little boy fall asleep with that tiny cheek against his face.

Because if he had, he would know what he had lost when that boy, instead, climbs up by himself under his comforter covered with hockey team crests and says, “Will you scratch my back, Dad?”

Fortunately, each new stage of a child’s life is as interesting as the one he just left which is supposed to be compensation for your loss. But I will always remember those hugs that were tighter than the tightest wrestler’s hold and that little voice whispering in my ear, “I love you higher than the sky, much.”

No feeling I have experienced before or since, matches that one.

Unconditional love is a hard thing to put out of your mind.

I have never been able to do that.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I sit down behind the shed.
An old cap covers my head.
I go there to hide
As the cats wait inside
Demanding that they be fed.

By Jim Hagarty

Today I looked across a field
And the cattle there.
I recalled in my young life
How vital cattle were.

Such noble beasts that I once fed
And cared for in my way.
I wonder if I miss those cattle
In my life today.

We roamed our fields together.
Sometimes they liked to play
But I was taught to face them
And never run away.

The joy those gentle giants showed
Out in their pasturelands,
Is something I will not forget
I don’t believe I can.

I gave them straw for bedding
And then twice every day
Went up into the hay mow
And forked them down their hay.

And then walked through the manger
And scratched their heads and ears
To think of cattle, as I write,
Is bringing on the tears.

Don’t think too ill of farmers
And disregard the news.
For those folks love their livestock.
To leave them brings the blues.

And when you know a farmer
At 90, on the land.
He simply can’t retire, you see,
Cause he’s a cattle man.

By Jim Hagarty
Another self-penned song from a friend of mine, singer-songwriter Stephanie Martin (www.almostfifty.com) from her album Restless, available in the Corner Store. Steph is a passionate writer and singer and is passing along her skills to others through her music shop and the lessons she offers.

The Way it Used to Be by Stephanie Martin

By Jim Hagarty

Today, marks my entry into my second month of blogging.

That parade you hear going by your place this morning? Just one of the many taking place in cities and towns across the world to mark the occasion of Month Two.

A friend looked over my blog last week and couldn’t believe I had produced so much in such a short time.

But in classic fashion, it took me 50 years to become an overnight success.

So it’s confession time. Most of what I write here is new and fresh. But at least once a day I go down the stairs to the dusty Hagarty Archives and drag out some nugget or another.

Over the years, I have had more than 1,000 newspaper and magazine columns published. Fortunately, I have most of those now in digital format.

But it has been a hogwrestle.

I had no digital copies of most of what I have written over the years. I did keep scrapbooks of a lot of it. But being lazy and unwilling to retype all those stories into my computer, I had to photocopy them all, carefully cut them out, feed them through my scanner and use a great “optical character recognition” program to enter them into a word-processing program. Even then, the struggle was not over as OCR is never completely accurate. So I had to read through every sentence of every column, making corrections along the way.

There were whole swaths of material that I had not kept. This required me to spend hours in our local community archives, photocopying my stuff from the hard-copy newspapers they still have.

I probably could have found King Tut with less trouble and in less time.

And I am tormented by the writing I did but which I will never find. I don’t know how good it was, but it’s gone.

My goal is to corral all this stuff into a series of books which will sell like crazy, allowing me to live a semi-luxurious existence. Or at least as well as the neighbour across the street who has two Corvettes (really).

So now and then, if you are discerning, you might notice a story of mine has a Dead Sea Scroll quality to it. That one might have emerged from the Hagarty Archives.

To get to those, you go down into my basement, open a trap door, climb a ladder down to the subbasement in which you will find another trap door. The files are in boxes, right behind Tut’s old coffin.

By Jim Hagarty

I am so proud of my daughter.

Last night, she created, what I think, is a new word.

As I was sucking on my seventh or eighth popsicle in a row – it’s hot up here in Canada right now – my little doggie jumped on my lap, eager to participate in the frozen treat bonanza.

“He thinks it’s a pupsicle,” she said. And he did.

She’s a writer too. And any creative writer who doesn’t invent words now and then is probably just a stenographer. (Kids, ask Grandma what that is.)

I don’t work with wood, except as a rough carpenter, with clay, wool or flowers.

I play with words like you might do with your tennis ball on Sunday mornings.

And years ago, in my mind anyway, I reached the pinnacle of my creativeness when I coined the word “geneosity.” I explained to my kids, who were baffled by their dad’s latest invention, that geneosity refers to my genius and my generosity. They reacted to my new creation, and have done ever since when I used it, with a very old and familiar word: the groan.

My geneosity is my being generous with my genius.

I thought it captured my personality perfectly.

My kids seem to believe I am indulging in a bit of insanosity.

Now that’s just a stupid word which I will never use again.

But maybe that’s just me being way too promisecute.

And of course, I discourage promiscutey.

By Jim Hagarty

You know, we’ve come a long way.

Drivers have GPS and I see an ad now for a Ford that can park itself. I wonder if it also stuffs the parking meter with coins.

Amazing have been the advances in transportation over the past few years with many more to come including driverless autos and even flying cars.

But in another way, there isn’t much new under the sun and in some respects, what went before was just as incredible as what we have now.

I wasn’t around in the horse and buggy days (though I live in Mennonite country so the practice is still familiar) but I was just one generation removed and so the elders in my family had lots of stories to tell about the times before the horseless carriage came along. Stories such as fatal buggy accidents – not high-speed head-ons like today, but buggies overturning and the ensuing mayhem resulting in death. I imagine that was a lot rarer incident than traffic fatalities now, but it happened.

And for some farmers, the horse could double as his designated driver when too much imbibing was done by the driver. My Dad told a story about a farmer from around our parts in southern Canada who used to go by horse and buggy to town on Friday nights and hit the hotels, often getting completely pie-eyed during an evening’s fun. He’d make his way somehow to the buggy at closing time, crawl in and sometimes pass out.

No problem.

The horse promptly left town and carried its owner the almost 10 miles home, never missing a turn in the process.

Match that GPS!

Sometimes the farmer in question didn’t completely pass out, but instead provided the entire community along his route home with a free concert. On a still night in winter, the sounds of the inebriated man’s musical voice could be heard across hill and valley, seemingly for miles.

And while he was in the buggy, he didn’t need to take the reins but could sit there in comfort and sing while horsey did all the navigating and steering.

A wonderful John Wayne movie shot in Ireland in the fifties called The Quiet Man has some great scenes in it involving a little old matchmaker who practically gets thrown from his buggy while on chases through the village because his horse insists on stopping automatically and suddenly in front of a pub, a stop it had made many times before.

Just like GPS, I guess, horse sense has its limits.