Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty

My life insurance company, not content with their monthly haul from our home, wants to sell me another policy which will pay $250,000 to my estate if I die accidentally.

No medical tests necessary.

So I read the fine print.

Apparently, it will be no slam dunk for my family to collect on this policy after I accidentally kick the bucket. For starters, I can’t die while breaking into a bank, which is likely to happen in the absence of the $250,000, kind of a Catch 22 if there ever was one. Presumably, I will be shot by police. From my newspaper days, I know quite a few of the cops in this town which increases the likelihood that this would be the result of my break in.

Also, the company won’t pay if I take my own life “while sane or insane.” But what if I am not sane or insane when I do it?

I can’t use illicit drugs to die, although it looks like I can make it work if I can talk my doctor into giving me something deadly.

I can’t swallow any poison around the house “whether voluntarily or otherwise.” That means, if my wife puts rat poison in my spaghetti sauce (not an impossible development), and I eat it not knowing it’s there, no dollars. How is that fair? (That reminds me of what Winston Churchill said to Lady Astor after she told him that if he was her husband, she would put arsenic in his tea. Madam, he said, if you were my wife, I would drink it!)

I can’t inhale any type of gas “voluntarily or involuntarily” so there goes the whole car in the garage thing. I can’t get the car in the garage anyway.

If I die during a visit to the dentist, the company won’t pay up. How do they know what my dentist is like, I wonder. No mention of who pays if my dentist dies during one of my visits.

I can’t die after contracting an infection so I may as well go back to washing my hands after changing the kitty litter before meals.

And this one really gets me.

If I fall out of an airplane or the plane crashes and I die, too bad, so sad – no moolah for my family. (This does not apply if I pay a fare and am on a regularly scheduled flight.)

To wrap things up, if I get killed in a war, no money. So the U.S. decides to retaliate for losing the war against Canada exactly 204 years ago this year and invades us, I’d better quick build a bomb shelter and get in it or the damn insurance company gets off scot free.

In other words, where can I sign up for this policy? It’s just too darned good to pass up! I am dying to get on board.

By Jim Hagarty

Here is a song I’m in Love Again, written and performed by my friend and singer-songwriter Michael “Earnie” Taylor. It is included on a CD entitled Me an My Uncle.

The entire album is a musical delight from start to finish. There are 14 tunes, seven of them written or co-written by Earnie, the rest covers of other songs in his unique country-folk-bluegrass style.

The CD is available for sale in my Corner Store.

I’m In Love Again: Earnie Taylor

By Jim Hagarty

I had last week off from work and experienced an enjoyable, illuminating time.

This might not be everyone’s idea of the ideal vacation, but I spent my days off with my three favourite psychiatrists, mental-health helpers that have been with me since I was a boy. They are Dr. Hammer, Dr. Sawyer and Dr. Shoveller. Their services are surprisingly inexpensive (aside from a reasonable initial outlay) and I can never remember a time when they have failed to cheer me up, or at the least, distract me from my worries.

Dr. Hammer, especially, has a good head on his shoulders. So often, when I bring him a problem I can’t identify, he simply nails it. Between the two of us, we pound away at things, over and over, sometimes for hours, until there are no loose ends left. He can be a bit hard-nosed and sometimes I get my fingers rapped, but all in all, he is a master at putting it all together.

He can also undo my mistakes, sometimes, clawing away at them till we’re able to remove them and start again.

Dr. Sawyer is a healer, too, but in a much different way. Where Dr. Hammer loves order and likes to put it all together, Dr. Sawyer never fails to cut to the chase and believes that things have to be taken apart before they can be reassembled. Sometimes, his approach is to arrange for problems to be handled in small chunks. Other times, he likes to trim down the rough edges and slice away the unneeded extras.

He is sharp, very flexible, and loves to sink his teeth into any conundrums I might bring him.

Unlike the other two, Dr. Shoveller works his magic by digging into problems, getting below the surface of them, to the very roots of the issues. In fact, he does his best work when he is uncovering things, and he will turn over every rock to see what lies below. When I’ve gotten myself into a hole, I can always lean on Shoveller to get my way back out, to fill in the rough spots and to smooth things over.

There seems to be nothing the two of us can’t handle.

I’ve been to other specialists over the years. Dr. Rake, Dr. Laundry, Dr. Ovens. But they have never been able to work the wonders of my three best healers.

I wouldn’t trade them for one full week on the nicest beach anywhere in the world.

By Jim Hagarty

The Game of Pretend is a song from a new album Snippets of Truth by my friend and fellow singer-songwriter Jim Ryan It was recorded in 2014, produced by J.P. Cormier. It contains 12 new songs, all written by Jim Ryan. The one posted here is a favourite of mine, one I like to sing. Jim is a very talented guitarist and lover of guitars as well as a great songwriter. The CD is available in my Corner Store.

By Jim Hagarty

I was thinking of my friend Jim today.

I need to send Jim an email, I thought.

Jim lives 20 miles away. We see each other at guitar jams. After the jams and listening to Jim, I have to resist the urge to toss my guitar in the ditch on the way home.

I always enjoy seeing Jim but I never see him outside the guitar jams. Never once ran into him all these years.

But today I needed to email Jim about something.

Didn`t get around to it. But the thought never left my mind.

This afternoon, I hopped in the car to go get a coffee. A too frequent occurrence. But on impulse, on the way there, I decided to drive a little farther and go to the computer store for some cordless phone batteries.

I wandered in. Found my batteries. Went to the checkout.

And ran into Jim.

Tomorrow, I am going think about Julia Roberts all day.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a girl named Kate.
In her heart there was no trace of hate.
But I bugged her somehow
And I think I know how.
I ate the pie right off her plate.

By Jim Hagarty

I have long known that I am somewhat different from your average human being and nothing illustrates that terminal uniqueness more than my opposition to motion-sensor lights.

You know, those little seeing-eye devices that peer down from the upper corners of large rooms and sensing no motion, turn off the lights to save electricity. Who else but the cranky old storyteller hereby addressing you would be bothered to spend enough time thinking about this modern-day invention to become upset about it?

But I am.

Darned mad, in fact.

My disenchantment with this modern wonder stems not from the fact that it doesn’t work, but that it works too well. It can crack the lights off in a instant and whack ’em back on even quicker. Where it runs into a little trouble, however, is in the way it defines motion. Maybe it’s a matter of how its individual users program it for the specific room it’s in, but some of these gizmos seem as if they would hardly respond if a tornado ripped the ceiling off while others would spring into action if a fly hiding under a desk scratched its nose.

So, this is the basis of my disapproval. The thing is simply unreliable and as a man gets older, unreliability and unpredictability are twin evils to be deplored.

Perhaps my disenchantment has its origins in the time I was teaching a summer college course at 8:30 a.m. one fine Monday morning. Though the ranks in the rows before me were somewhat depleted, given the time of day, the season and the subject, there were, even at that, almost 20 hardy souls gathered there to hear the words of wisdom that dribbled from my mouth in those days like spring waters over the rocks in a stream.

So, when my truly dedicated crew had taken their seats, I started dribbling. And as the gentle rhythms of the babbling brook can have a certain soothing effect on those who listen to its cadence for a while, so too can a college instructor’s gentle voice calm the human spirit, especially the spirits of humans who have spent the weekend just past in wild celebration the likes of which have not been seen since the end of our most recent world war.

In what seemed like an alarmingly brief period, all normal student activity – note passing, arm stretching, paper rustling, cartoon doodling – had ground to a halt. And there, before this sea of tranquility, stood a weary teacher who was finding it difficult on this day to become animated by a section of course material on which he had lectured dozens of times before. Like a recording star grown tired of singing his same old hits, the teacher was suddenly weary of hearing himself yak on.

So, how best to describe the degree of inactivity in this classroom setting on this day? Perhaps the motion sensor said it best. In a room where 21 human beings were engaged in the stimulating process of acquiring and delivering a college education, the lights went out. So little movement was being generated by the gathering, not even by a lecturer in mid-flight, to interest a little black box up in a corner of the room. So, it pulled the plug, the modern-day equivalent, in this case, perhaps, of giving the hook to the Vaudevillian actor dying on stage.

To re-activate the scene, I had no choice but to get something going, so I waved my arms frantically in the air till illumination returned. As distressing as the embarrassment of suffering through a negative review by a motion sensor was the fact that at least half the students hadn’t seemed to notice that their classroom had suddenly plunged into darkness. And many of them appeared, as a result, to have only slipped into a deeper level of sleep during the light-less interlude. A change in their rapid-eye movement dream-cycle resulted, perhaps, from the onset of darkness.

For the remainder of that session and the semester, I dashed about during lectures in that classroom like a hands-on preacher in a gospel tent, my students seemingly startled at the surge of energy with which I was from then on approaching my lessons.

They didn’t seem to grasp the fact that a little high-tech hardware had delivered a lesson of its own that dark day in July.

And that whatever might have been my previous level of disinterest in my teaching duties, thanks to science I had finally seen the light.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once had a dog named Luke
Who couldn’t control his puke.
He threw up on my shoes
But here’s the good news.
Turned out it was only a fluke.

By Jim Hagarty

I am a hermit.

Sounds awful, right?

I blame it on the 10-hour days on the back of a tractor, rooting up the earth on our farm. I was all by myself and I got to like my own company that way. I didn’t have much choice. No fun riding around on a tractor for 10 hours with a guy you can’t stand.

One day there were no more farms or tractors but it was too late. I have gone through the last 45 years as though I was still sitting in that leather seat, hands on the steering wheel, blue skies, seagulls and trees stretching out before me. And not a human in sight.

Some day, I might slide from hermit to recluse but that’s a bit off yet. Still, were I a member of a Trappist Monestery, where they don’t talk to each other from one day to another, I am sure the other monks would get around to saying, when they were allowed a word or two: “What’s wrong with Brother Jim? He’s a weird one.”

I would be a terrible monk.

My best friend is also a hermit. I am not sure what his excuse is. He was raised in town. But we share a happy hermitry together. To be honest, I am not sure how one hermit finds another hermit, but it happened.

We don’t see each other very often, as you would expect from two hermits. But when we get together, our coffee sessions last, on average, five hours. Both of us spill out all the words we would have used if we were normal and not hermits. It’s exhausting but once emptied out, we can each go back to happy hermiting in our separate hideouts. Those hideouts are sacrosanct; we never visit each other.

I can’t really tell you what it is about being a hermit that appeals to me. Maybe it has something to do with the almost total absence of other human beings. Humans are fine and all but they get on my nerves a lot less when I can’t see them. Because most of them spend their time with me, talking about other humans.

Someday before I die, probably alone somewhere, I will likely throw a big party, invite everyone I have managed to meet over the years in spite of my hermitry. Then I will forget to send myself an invitation and fail to show up.

It told you it’s awful.

By Jim Hagarty

Above is a song from a great CD called Restless by my friend and fellow musician Stephanie Martin. Called Like She Know She Never Will is one of 12 songs written for the album by the very talented singer who owns a music shop in a small town in Ontario. Restless is available for purchase in my Corner Store.