Lifetime Sentences

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is helping me a lot these days. I have been reading his biography for the past couple of months and will continue to do so for a few more at least.

And while my bank account has not magically expanded, I have learned one major thing about him. Reading the words on 816 pages detailing the life of Warren Buffett is the best sleep inducer I have ever found.

It is not that his life is boring; far from it. But trying to follow the minute details of every deal that resulted in his achieving a net worth of $60 billion is a challenge that this human, for one, cannot meet without passing out.

The other night, for whatever reason, I lie in bed wide awake. Tossing and turning, stopping and staring at the ceiling. It looked like a long, restless, sleepless night awaited me. I was frustrated.

Then I remembered Warren. I dashed upstairs and grabbed his hernia-inducing tome. I crawled back into bed, book in tow, and began reading. Two to three paragraphs later, I couldn’t have kept my eyelids open with toothpicks.

I turned out the light and slept like a billionaire.

It worked again last night. I am hoping that eventually, just the sight of the book on my bedside table will bring on the slumber.

Now that would be rich.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

There are 40 houses on my block in the Canadian city where I live, bounded by Romeo Street on the west end and Burritt Street on the east.

When I moved here in 1986, I was number 40 on the list of homeowners on my street. Mr. Newbie. As fresh as they came. All 39 other homeowners had been in their houses before me, were here when I came.

That is 26 years ago and now, as far as I know, I am number 5 on the list. Thirty-four of the 39 homeowners that used to be ahead of me have moved on, one way or the other.

I am gunning for number 1 so I can legitimately be called the King of Albert Street, although I suspect that’s what everyone calls me now anyway (because of my vast wealth – and the moat I dug around our castle.)

Before I got here, I had moved 11 times in my life. When I first walked in the front door of the house I’ve called home for the past 26 years, I said to myself, “They can carry me out of here someday.” That prospect is looking more and more likely, not because I am deathly ill (I’m not) but due to my absence of itchy feet. I like it here.

Around the time I moved to Albert Street, I encountered the saying, “Bloom where you are planted.” If you drive by my place and see a guy in a straw hat, whistling, that’s just me, blooming the best way I know how.

If you’re lucky, I might even give you a royal wave.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

I was watering a section of new lawn at a back corner of our lot yesterday when My Bunny came dashing out of the long grass.

I hadn’t seen her there.

Some background. I gave this friendly little wild rabbit three showers with my garden hose in the very same area of our property on the hottest days of last summer.

So here we were again. She stopped by the tree and I slowly brought the mist over her, so as not to scare her off. She sat there absorbing a lot of water, eventually licking her lips and blinking her eyes.

Now here is a new wrinkle in these shower stories I presented here last year.

Seemingly all showered out, My Bunny dashed into some bushes by our wooden fence, a few feet away. I wasn’t surprised by that and just carried on watering the grass.

But I did a double take when the little critter left the bushes and returned to the very spot where I had just finished administering an over-the-top soaking. She stood there, facing me, looking right at me.

So, I did my duty and brought the mist over her again. For the next five or so minutes, she took in all the water I could toss her way.

Finally, she returned to the bushes.

But I had to water the grass back there too and I could see her little bum sticking out of the weeds, so I put the mist over her again.

No complaints.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a rabbit that comes and gets me when she is out of food and occasionally, will come hopping up to me when I call her.

But for my little friend to ask for “more water, please” is the strangest – and nicest – encounters I have ever had with a wild animal.

And I am grateful for the experience.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

You might get the feeling that you live in a small town when your aunt calls you up and asks if you don’t have a better picture of yourself you could put at the top of your weekly column in the local newspaper where you work as an editor.

“A woman I know asked me the other day if that’s what you really look like,” my aunt said to me, “and I told her, ‘No way, he looks a lot better than that.”’

That said, how it is you really know you live in a small town is when you take your relative’s word for it and get a new picture taken so she won’t have to apologize to the neighbours about her homely nephew anymore.

So, you can thank my aunt for the new mug shot of me at the top of my column in the newspaper today.

(Some of my cousins who read this will wonder which of our many aunts tuned me in 37 years ago about my headshot in The Beacon Herald, the daily newspaper published in my hometown city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. I won’t be able to be of much help to them because I honestly cannot remember which one it was. Whichever aunt called me, she did me a favour. My new photo was much better than the first one – the darkroom boys did wonders and even added a touch-up or two by means of which I was suddenly endowed with a full head of hair – and maybe even helped me attract the woman I married two years later.)

©1987 Jim Hagarty

As you know, I like to provide periodic crime updates from around the world.

In the latest news, it appears that clues are coming together in the mysterious death of a person found in a pit in Spain. Authorities are suggesting the victim died after two heavy blows to the forehead.

This is a cold case – the victim is 500,000 years old – and the perpetrator has had lots of time to get away. But there is hope yet that the mystery will be solved.

So, if you see someone suspicious walking around, call CrimeStoppers immediately.

One identifying feature of the suspect will be that he or she is pre-human, a human ancestor, in fact. You know, high brows, caveman-like. He may be trying to pass himself off as an enforcer on a hockey team, a rock star bodyguard or a gun enthusiast in Tennessee.

Approach carefully if you encounter him, but make light conversation and if he answers to the nickname “Bubba”, we might have our guy.

Some might say there are current unsolved murders that are more important than the oldies, but how would you feel if your ancestry search led you directly back to that poor woman in the pit a half million years ago?

By the way, no word on whether or not a reward was ever posted as a way of helping find the murderer. But it has been speculated that a prize of ten coconuts might have been offered.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Everybody jokes about blind dates. There is something exciting, if also a bit frightening, about going out for an evening with someone you have never met, with an unspoken expectation that maybe these two total strangers could become a couple.

I went on a few blind dates in my younger days. Some were good, some not so great. The truth is, I forget now almost all the details of those dates except for the one where my female companion said goodnight by telling me what an awful person I was.

But nothing I experienced back then compares to the poor man in Arizona who went out on one date with a woman and then decided not to pursue a relationship. The woman, however, fell in love, found her soulmate, said he completed her.

To emphasize the strength of her feelings for him, she sent him 65,000 text messages including 500 in one day. Things really got out of hand when he came home one day to find her freshening up in his bathtub. A lot of people (me included) might be delighted to discover a blind date freshening up in their bathtub, but this woman had never been to her date’s house and didn’t have a key.

Police found a very long butcher knife in her car. If she couldn’t have him …

On second thought, all my blind dates were simply wonderful.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

It is an enduring stereotype that describes Canadians as too polite. I see that idea challenged regularly by road ragers on Canadian highways, but, in general, it seems to be true that we are a patient nation.

I don’t have to look far to find proof of the too polite notion. On Sunday, I went out in my backyard with the weekly flyers from two hardware stores. Others have their novels; I have my flyers. As a consumer, I am always on the lookout to consume something but I want to do my consuming as cheaply as possible, another well-noted Canadian characteristic.

I didn’t get too far along in my reading and had just started checking out the bargains on garden hoses when a family member dropped in. When I got up for some reason, he sat down in my lawnchair. No worries, as they say in Australia. I chose another chair.

As we chatted, I started loading up our firepit with twigs to maybe get a little inferno going. My guest loves backyard fires and immediately got in on the act. If he somehow ended up on the moon, he’d have a campfire going within an hour of leaving his spacecraft.

Eager to help, he picked up my unread flyers and started ripping them to pieces and rolling them up, sticking them under the twigs in preparation for starting the blaze.

Now, this is where I realized how Canadian I really am. I didn’t say a word as I watched my cherished flyers disappear. Ten feet away, there was a box of old papers that could have been used, but I just couldn’t bring myself to ask the flyer shredder to stop destroying my reading material.

It was a nice fire my family and I enjoyed Sunday night.

I was a little quieter than I normally am.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

I picked up a two-by-four at the Two By Four Store today. Here is what the two-by-four specialists did with my new board before they put it in my car. And they are quite open about it if you ask them.

First, they fired up a bulldozer and ran over it six times. Then they went to a gym downtown and fetched the biggest body builder they could find and hired him to come and whack my two-by-four a dozen times with a sledgehammer. For fun before he left, he took a heavy chain to it and gave it 12 more beatings.

Then they took my board up to the highest part of the roof and threw it into a pile of rocks. Finally, they shut down the Two By Four Store for a while and every staff member came outside and jumped up and down on my board for five minutes.

“Is this one okay?” asked the young man as he slid the poor wooden mess into my car. I looked it over carefully.

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” I said, and as I drove away, because I was born and raised in Canada and am not allowed to emigrate to another country, I called out the window to him as I drove away, “Thanks!”

And as I did, my receipt for the board flew out my open window and now I couldn’t take it back, even if I did find something wrong with it when I got it home.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Once in a while, the Universe comes through.

A fitness place has opened up next door to my house. Not five doors down – next door. Among the members of this establishment are about 25 young, beautiful women who need fitness training like I need caramel popcorn training. And on several days of the week and at various times of the day, these women emerge from the fitness centre wearing skintight outfits and jog up and down the sidewalk right in front of my house, about 20 feet away from me. They all lope like pony-tailed gazelles down to the end of the street, then turn around and jog past my house again, return to the fitness place and then do this all over. Ten or 20 times at a stretch. They don’t run as a big group, but one at a time with about 10 paces between them, like a speeded up fashion runway, if the fashions were all painted on.

I have never spent much time on our front porch. It is too hot there in the afternoon when the sun beats down. But lately it’s been hot out there in the morning and evening too, and yet I find myself sitting out there a lot more than I ever have in the past. Pop and chocolate bar in hand, dog by my side, unread book at the ready.

I swear I didn’t train him to do this but the dog sits by the front window all day and barks like mad when the joggers start, which is our cue to go out for some fresh air. Doggy appears to sense that an outside visit at those particular times seems to have the effect of improving my mood.

Sadly, now and then, a group of young men replace the women for a while so I text a neighbour a few houses up the street and she goes out on her porch to catch the parade. I go inside to refresh my drink. In a world that depends on good systems to keep society functioning well, this arrangement seems to have few if any flaws. I do not believe there is a statute anywhere in the Criminal Code which forbids a man from sitting on his front porch and looking towards his street from there. On the other hand, if I went to a fitness centre downtown, sat in a lawnchair by the door and took in the scenery, my lawnchair and I would be arrested inside of five minutes.

There are a few thousand houses in my town. Almost none of them has a fitness place right next door to them. I can’t explain it. Just another happy Mystery of the Universe. There must be someone, somewhere out there that I need to thank for this.

Cardiac arrest might be just around the corner, but what a way to go!

©2014 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 during the heist or fall out of a window on my head.

I also cannot die while involved in any other criminal activity so I am going out tonight to disassemble my meth lab. As well, 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 some rat poison accidentally gets mixed into my spaghetti sauce (not an impossible development), and I eat it not knowing it’s there, no dollars.

How is that fair?

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

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 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.)

And to top it all off, if I get killed in a war, no money. So, if the U.S. decides to retaliate for losing the war against Canada exactly 200 years ago this year and invades us, I’d better quick build a bomb shelter and get in it or the 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!

©2012 Jim Hagarty