Lifetime Sentences

If you were to spend a half hour, face-to-face quality time with me over the coffee I hope you would have bought me, you would scream, by the end of the session and before you stormed out, “Would you please stop with the sayings,” you would have yelled on your way out the door.

I’m a sayings junkie. I live my life by quotes. I research quotes on the Internet and I have a fabulous ability to remember them. If I haven’t peppered my conversation with you with at least five quotes, it’s as if we never talked at all.

Quotes are tailor made for people with short attention spans. But for me, they are also the shorthand of philosophers. (Readers under 40 are just now asking, “What the hell is shorthand?”)

Sayings encourage thought, dress wounds, light fires under asses, and generally, keep us interested in life.

The amazing thing about my association with quotes is every little saying I stumble on is instantly my favourite one. At present, I have about 1,200 favourite ones.

Here is my favourite saying today:

“The heart has its reason which reason cannot know.”

OMG! Those nine words say it all. Why do we want the things we want? After all my long life, it seems to me, we have those wants for some very good, if mysterious, reasons. Why was Wayne Gretzky trying to score goals in his living room by shooting a ball through his grandmother’s legs when he was three years old? Who knows? I am pretty sure one of the greatest-ever hockey players didn’t know. And neither did Grandma Gretzky.

During my almost seven decades, my heart has taken me to a lot more wonderful places than my mind has ever managed to.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I first had a piece of my writing published 50 years ago this year, in a high school newspaper.

It was written out of love. Not love of writing. Love of a girl in my class who had my 24/7 attention. She was a writer and smart as a dewdrop. So, I could easily see that I needed to be a writer too if any of the fantasies I was having about her would ever come true.

She wrote poetry. Obscure stuff. I never understood a word of it. She was the Atlantic Ocean; I was a parking lot puddle after a light rain. So my first published piece, of course, was a poem. In restrospect, more like an unpolished nursery rhyme. In fact, rhyming was my key objective. I rhymed everything. Not only at the end of lines, but in the middle and even at the beginning. She hated my poetry and that feeling somehow started to transfer over to the poet. And while we kissed a few glorious times eventually, she realized she could not be seen in public with such a terrible writer so she sat down and wrote me, in a very unobscure style, a Dear John letter. I understood every word of it.

I moved on. Found myself a younger student with long, flowing blonde hair and a vocabulary that was peppered with the word “ain’t.” More my style. She never wrote a word as long as I knew her. But she kissed up a storm and I was fully onboard with that.

Eventually, however, like my first love had done to me, I decided I was destined for more greatness than this and after one too many “ain’ts” and a hundred too few kisses, I moved on. For me, that was one move too many and a half century later, there is a tiny ember in my heart still glowing for her.

And in spite of my earlier cataclysmic rejection by my girl Shakespeare, I kept on writing. And lo and behold, I found people in the world who were willing to pay me for my scribblings. These people were called editors and they worked at newspapers and they gave me a desk and sent me out interviewing farmers, factory workers and firefighters.

Life was good for a few decades till one day, one of those editors told me she was sick of paying me for my writing so she sent me home but told me to keep writing. I did that. I became a freelancer. I lanced for free, day in, day out. And still do.

Sometimes I write some poetry. It rhymes very well. And is not one bit better than the poetry that caused my first love to send me packing.

But if you are a writer, you don’t have much choice but to write, well or badly. Like a cat that, despite happily chowing down its three squares a day, still goes on homicidal binges in the backyard between meals.

I have never suffered from writer’s block. Readers’ block. Faced that a few times.

Starting with the girl of my dreams in Grade 10.

Believe me, it ain’t much fun when it happens.

By Jim Hagarty

Should be a good week.

Saturday is World Naked Gardening Day. I always look forward to it.

Of course, I garden naked every day, but this is the one day of the year when I really feel like I belong.

Like all things, however, even this day has its downside. My neighbour George, for example, has really embraced the day.

Another special day is recommended: World Don’t Walk Past George’s Place Day.

By Jim Hagarty

Our doggie can’t hold his licker.

He likes to lick my neck, bald head and ears. To him, I am a 200-pound salt block with glasses.

Two members of our household hate to see this extreme tonguing going on and shut it down. They are known as the licker inspectors. Doggie hides his licker when he sees them coming around.

And there I sit – all lickered up.

If he and I are in the shed alone, it’s OK. We call that the licker cabinet.

By Jim Hagarty

I am about to be murdered.

It is true. I don’t usually joke about my own violent demise, but the crime is about to be committed. I can’t tell you the exact time or place or the method that will be used to end my existence, but I do know who will perpetrate this misdeed. The murderer even now preparing to do me in is my neighbour, ten houses to the west of me. He used to be a good guy, as far as I can tell, but life has made him hard. And determined. I have no doubt about his determination.

Why, you ask, would anyone want to take the life of such a terrific soul as me, you rightfully wonder. What have I done to so enrage my neighbour that he is willing to spend the rest of his life behind bars to right what he sees as a wrong? Not to make excuses for myself, and you don’t have to believe me, but I have done nothing. However, in this weird little passion play, the fact that I have done nothing is a big part of the reason for the passage of the death sentence upon me.

The fault lies with Bell Canada, and as my neighbour hasn’t got the resources and know-how to kill Bell Canada, his murderous intent has been directed towards a simpler target – me. Five years ago, Bell Canada, for some reason, gave me the wrong address in its phone book. Instead of my own address – 550 Albert, they put me down as living at 500 Albert where, coincidentally, my neighbour actually lives and will continue to live until his arrest someday soon by a SWAT team. Because they steal Bell’s phone book listings, all local phone books produced by other companies over the past five years have also listed the incorrect address. As have Internet directories. The result has been that my neighbour’s mailbox, for five years, has been jammed with mail that is meant for me.

At first, this merely annoyed my neighbour. He would knock on my door, hand me my mail, and ask me to correct the phone book listings. I said that I would. And I meant what I said. And I have tried. For years. But with every new phone book, I see the mistake has never been corrected. Over those years, my neighbour’s attitude towards me has deteriorated. He used to scribble, in small letters, across every piece of mail, “Change your address!” The scribbles turned to scrawls. And now, each envelope is covered in lettering worthy of a kidnapper demanding ransom: “CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS!!!!”

And this is where, I have to declare, that I could get a sex change, and then have it changed back again, easier than I can get an address change. I could have had cornea transplants, hair weaves, stomach-stapling, joint replacements with more ease and speed than getting Bell Canada to change my address. I floated a few alternatives with my neighbour. Maybe we could just switch houses. Maybe he could nail his mailbox shut. Maybe I could move to another town. But I am pretty sure he has settled on neighbourcide as the best solution. And I think I know how he might be planning on ending the torment that I have become for him. He has a grumpy dog named, ironically, Jimmy. I think Jimmy is being prepped for his first kill. At least I assume it will be his first.

So this week, I decided that my past failed attempts to right this wrong had to be set aside and I needed to try again. So, in the only life-saving move I could think of, I phoned Bell Canada. I talked to numerous people at Bell Canada, in fact. And I began each conversation with this life-saving plea, spoken in a tremulous voice: “My neighbour is going to murder me. Please help me!” Well, points to Bell Canada employees. They expressed full support for the idea that my being murdered was not a desirable outcome. I spoke finally to a wonderful woman who I really think wants to know that I die peacefully in my bed someday and not by wounds delivered by the sharpened teeth of Jimmy the dog. She put me on hold to talk to a supervisor and came back with the good news that I would be receiving a call within 48 hours by people from another department, fully trained in saving lives. They would sort it out.

I was relieved. But rightfully terrified that I would miss the call. I carried my cordless phone with me everywhere. Everywhere. I was careful not to get beyond the 75-feet range that my phone is capable of reaching. I was bound to my property at 550, not 500, Albert St. Forty-eight hours passed. My fully in-range phone never rang. Yesterday, I phoned Bell Canada again. Gonna be murdered. Please help. Talked to several wonderful people. None of them up for contributing to a slaying. Finally reached a sympathetic woman who I think should consider counselling as an occupation. She put me on hold. Went to talk to a supervisor. Came back with the information that my file is still being worked on and that Bell is very busy. If I do not hear from Bell by the middle of next week, I should call back and re-start the process.

Please do not send flowers to the funeral home. Instead, make a contribution to our local, understaffed Humane Society. When it is all over and done with, I think it only fitting that two Jimmys be laid to rest. Not side by side. The only cemetery in our town is so big it has streets and numbers. Bury Jimmy the dog at 500. AND ME AT 550!!!!

My final wish: Do not let Bell Canada be involved in the arrangements.

By Jim Hagarty

I am a singer.

During the first 20 years of my life, I performed hundreds of free concerts. They were well attended. I worked my magic on a unique, slow-moving stage, sitting atop the leather seat of a John Deere AR tractor. The concert halls were the 335 acres of plowable fields on my family’s farms. My inattentive audiences were the birds, mice, snakes, foxes, squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, dogs, cats and cattle that occupied the fields where I practised my craft.

No humans ever heard my dulcet tones. And that is just the way I wanted it. I learned how to project my voice so I could hear myself over the noise from the tractor. I always knew I could not be heard by anyone in the vicinity of those fields. The tractor sounds were too loud. That was fine with me, as I tended to the shy side.

One afternoon, towards the end of my John Deere days, I was standing in our farmyard when I heard something going by on the concession road at the end of our lane. It was a farmer singing at the top of his lungs as he rode past our place on a tractor. I couldn’t hear the tractor. I realized the tractor noise must have been travelling through the air on a lower and slower sound wave than was the farmer’s voice. His voice reached my ears loud and clear; the tractor putt putt, not so much.

It was an awakening. I realized that at least some of my back forty concerts were probably heard by humans somewhere who happened to be in the vicinity. If I had known I actually did have non-critter audiences, I might have charged admission to my shows and be a rich man today.

Hi there.

My name is Jim Hagarty and this is Lifetime Sentences.

Welcome aboard!