Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty

Somebody realized a lot of people in North America can’t read and so now we have an illiteracy problem. Maybe we’ll do something about it.

Personally, I have a literacy problem. I can read very well. The problem is, I can’t stop.

Somewhere along the line after I’d learned my ABCs, I gave up reading for pleasure and information and started reading just to read. Like a gambler unable to walk by a slot machine or a glutton by a buffet, I can’t pass by a bunch of words without finding out what they say.

“Why don’t you just read what you want?” you might ask. That sounds simple except when you realize you can’t possibly know whether you want to read something until you have read it. You can’t do anything else with words except write them and read them. And the advantage the writer has is he already knows what the words he’s written say. You don’t. So, he’s got one up on you unless you read what he wrote.

It gets a hold of you. To illustrate: I sat down in my favourite coffee shop Wednesday night to read a newspaper and have a cup of coffee. Noticing my disappointment, the waitress broke it to me that the papers usually waiting there had been thrown out. “But,” she said, amused, “there is a department-store catalogue here.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, and I did. For the next half hour, I read about flannel shirts, winter coats and computers. It wasn’t Gone With The Wind, but it was entertaining enough. Did you know you can buy electric boot warmers?

I always read through the lottery literature a popular magazine sends me and all the information on breakfast cereal boxes. I read three or four newspapers a day and various magazines throughout the week. I’ve read through the manual to my television set and I read politicians’ pamphlets at the door.

And the posters in store windows.

I just finished reading a pamphlet on urinary tract problems in neutered male cats, a fascinating treatise. I read up all the old journals in doctors’ offices and barbershops and have been known to lose my place in the haircut line while engrossed in an ancient newsmagazine. I read in the bathtub and on other fixtures in the bathroom. I read at the kitchen table during meals. I read in bed and sometimes I go out on the front porch and read outside. I read on buses, in restaurants and at the newstands in stores.

Basically, I’m a wordaholic. There, I said it. Sometimes when my system gets low, I just need a quick fix. A few hundred words about anything at all, to relax me again. A paragraph or two. A couple of sentences. A hasty browse through some junk mail.

On a boring Sunday afternoon, on my fourth time through the Saturday paper, I can even get all the way down to reading about the marital troubles of lesser-known actors as well as articles on preparing your lawnmower for winter. I read one this Sunday on how to remove stains from a concrete floor. I don’t even have any stains on my concrete floors. But, if I ever get any, just see how long they stick around.

It has been so long since the days when I couldn’t read, I have forgotten what it’s like to be illiterate. Except that I was a pretty happy guy back then. Maybe not reading about tragedies, turmoil and terrorists and problems, problems, problems, kept my mind freer for the odd uplifting thought that might want to float into it. As it is, where is there room in there for a pleasant idea?

Like the alcoholic who gets a job as a bartender to be close to a ready supply of booze, I made my living for decades serving up the very words I’m hooked on.

It’s The Curse Of The Grammar Book Demon.

And to think it all started with Dick and Jane. And their dog Spot. I never did like Spot. He was always running.

Running.

By Jim Hagarty
This is the title track from Bad Daughter by the McCullough Girls. All 12 songs on the CD by the Stratford-based mother-daughter duo were written by the Deborah McCullough and her daughter Callie. The CD was recorded in Nashville. It will be available for sale soon in the Corner Store.

Bad Daughter by the McCullough Girls

Sometimes I look back, year to year,
And wonder how I wound up here.
Could I have found a better place
To spend my nights and spend my days?
But then I think it’s pretty clear
The Universe has put me here.
And though I cannot answer why,
I ended up here by and by.
I’m glad a place was found for me.
There is no place I’d rather be.

©Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I worked at a small daily newspaper 30 years ago.

The composing room, where the paper was prepared for printing, where all the ads were assembled and stories and photos laid out on broadsheets before being photographed and sent to the press, was populated by older and younger workers.

The older workers spent much of their time regaling the young journalists such as I was at the time, about how things used to be done years ago. The years of “hot type”, where metal letters were physically placed in special trays to form every word that appeared. It is a cautionary tale for people who think talk of the old ways in fascinating. It wasn’t.

But we tried to respect our elders. They were nice hardworking people, deserving of our respect. I liked them.

The owners of the paper were middle aged and in a constant battle to keep up with the times. I admire them to this day for their willingness to embrace change.

One momentous day, computers were introduced to the composing room. Henceforth, though there would be a long period of adjustment, all the ads would be created by the computers and the people who operated them.

Needed were volunteers who would be willing to be trained in the new methods. A few people stepped forward eagerly. Five gray hairs could not have been assembled from the heads of those who applied.

For their part, the old guys laughed defiantly and declared they would not be caught dead on one of those computers. One semi old guy did embrace the new way, but wasn’t great at it. Another tried it and quit in frustration, going back to the banks of broadsheets and what he knew best.

One by one, the old guys were gone, in fairly short order. They gathered in the coffee shops and bemoaned the indignity and injustice.

Thirty years later, many of the volunteers who stepped up that day are still there. One young woman I know eventually left and is now a teaching assistant in a high school.

Helping kids learn computers.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a mean mosquito.
He was somewhat of a hit though.
He stung young and old,
Had no heart, he was cold.
He even bit into my kid’s toe.

By Jim Hagarty

I ate my lunch in the food court of a lovely little shopping mall in a nearby city recently.

It is one of the city’s oldest malls which is fitting, in a way, because it appears as though there is a dress code for the place: You have to have white hair to be allowed entry.

Meeting the code, I fit right in, which was a problem for me. I looked around at everyone who looks pretty much like me now and thought, “Oh no, these are my people.”

I took out my cellphone and looked at the crowd of 50 or 60 people and thought, “I bet if you held everybody upside down and shook them, only three cellphones would fall out of the pockets of everyone here.” And even I am behind; mine is not a smartphone. (I have since upgraded.)

I also doubted there were very many computer-users in the group, but I bet their homes are filled with radios, radios, radios and lots of tube TVs. Not very many CD or DVD players and not one BluRay (I don’t have one yet myself). And I bet a daily newspaper gets dropped on the doorstep of most of the people there.

There were several tables of men only, swapping tales amidst uproarious laughter. At a couple of tables, women sat by themselves drinking a coffee and reading a novel. A younger man arrived at the table next to me but even he had almost-white hair. I suspect he dyed it just to fit in. He spread out a feast before him and also picked up a novel. At only one table did I see what you might call young people – two mothers with their infants in strollers.

Finishing my pizza, I took a stroll past the stores and could see that they reflected the crowd. There was a big drug store at one end and an optometrist half way down the stretch. Another big store offered home health products such as special walkers and foot baths and massagers. And as though to put an exclamation point on my no-cellphones observation, there was a bank of payphones in the front entrance, the better to call a cabbie with.

I never thought about a mall having a personality before but this winter I wrote about skating at an indoor rink in a shopping mall in Cambridge and realizing that I was the oldest person on the ice. That realization gave me kind of a sinking feeling.

Today, I was one of the younger ones in the food court of the mall. Same sort of feeling, coming from a different direction.

Guess I’m going to give up malls as they appear to be contributing to the aging process.

This one had great pizza, though.

By Jim Hagarty

So many things are disposable these days.

Lighters, diapers, cups, plates, knives and forks, napkins, even clothes.

And backyard water wands.

As we do most winters, we worked hard to prepare our backyard this year for a skating rink. The big moment arrived, the snow was packed down and ready, our old brown wand was hooked to the hose and sploosh. It had sprung a terrible leak.

Off to the store for a new one. A really nice blue one. A quality wand befitting the amazing rink about to come to life.

$19.95 plus tax.

A small price to pay for endless skating to come, all within sight of the kitchen window.

Unfortunately, the wand was left out in the cold a little too long shortly after being pressed into service and it too sprang a terrible leak.

Back to the store.

$19.95 plus tax for the same wand. Same blue colour. Small price to pay, yadda, yadda.

Winter came and went. It blessed us with two skating rinks (the first one melted away in January.) The skating was not endless. It ended. But we had a few hours …

Two weeks ago, I saw the first of the wonder wands we had bought for $19.95, sitting forlorn in the garage. I picked it up, said a sad farewell, and put it in the garbage. The garbage truck came and took it away.

Last week, I went looking for its replacement, the good wand.

But as I write, the Hagarty home is wandless. Apparently, in the confusion brought about by the hours spent freezing my ass off building the rink this winter, I had already thrown out the first bad wand.

And having forgotten about that, I threw out the good one too.

My blog is called Lifetime Sentences, “Tales from a Wandering Mind.”

It is no coincidence the word “wand” is contained within the word “wandering.”

Next winter, I will wander off to the store again.

This time, I will buy the purple wand.

The blue ones suck. They really do.

Tonight, my wife dug out the very first wand, the brown one. I felt bad watching her trying to water the flowers. Water flew out of that thing from every part imaginable except the nozzle. If the flowers got wet, it was just a drive-by.

Guess what I wand for Christmas?

By Jim Hagarty

When we walk out into the sunshine each day, we can be positive and greet our neighbours with a smile.

Or, we can do this.

I bought the house you see at the top of this post 30 years ago. It was a bit of a shambles when I bought it which helped in the price department. But three decades of love, sweat and bank loans and the place seems to be out of reach, for the moment, of the building inspectors in my town who go around and actually condemn houses, deeming them unfit for habitation. Ours is still fit for habitation although some days, we might just slip under the wire.

But back in 1986, a few weeks after I bought my new palace, a neighbour who had lived on the street since back when milk was still delivered by a horse and wagon, sidled over to give me the home inspection I had failed to formally acquire before I made my purchase.

“I watched this house being built,” he said to me. “They built it in a hell of a hurry.”

“Oh,” I replied, waiting for the hammer to fall.

It wasn’t long in falling.

“It’s a terrible house,” said neighbour.

This is what I replied (in my dreams that night):

“Well, at least it isn’t a terrible neighbour.”

But I didn’t really say that, of course.

I just went and got out my paint brush.

Maybe it’s a pig, I don’t know. But it has nice lipstick.

And terrible or not, I love it.

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(Full disclosure: I miss the days when you could just tell half the story and leave some out. Too much honesty going on these days. My neighbour turned out to be pretty nice guy and we had great chats over the years before he died. He did, however, become one of the “sidewalk superintendents” who came around during my extreme renovations and gave me the helpful news that I was doing everything wrong. That didn’t bother me much because they only “thought” I was doing everything wrong. I had the advantage of knowing for sure I was actually doing everything wrong. Because my neighbour was able to describe in some detail how he felt the housebuilders had rushed the construction, I was able to make a better job of the makeover. The foundation was the weakest part, he said. He was right. It cost me thousands to repair. In the end, I have a better house because of his bluntness.)