Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I remain confident of this:
    I will see the goodness of the Lord
    in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
    be strong and take heart
    and wait for the Lord.

• Psalm 27:13-14

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

• Mark 9:35

To explain the verses, Psalm 27:14 is the verse my wife quoted most often, but when you add Psalm 27:13 and Mark 9:35, you get the essence of the woman I married.

At the end of the last episode, my wife had a mental breakdown after unjustly being fired.  To give the entire story there, they had the usual person who was an expert at not doing work, disrupting the work of others, and malicious fallacious gossip.  And typical to most organizations, management listened to her.  My wife had four of those situations that I can confirm, maybe more, probably more before I knew her.  This woman was ill-trained, not certified, and my wife posed a threat, being highly trained, certified, and dedicated to the patient.  The troublemaker spent all her time in the nurse’s lounge, while my wife spent almost all her time in surgery.  The troublemaker told the supervisor that if my wife were to be fired, the place would run better.  But when the only hard worker was fired, it severely crippled the hospital’s ability to perform surgery and the woman who fired my wife, the hospital nursing supervisor, was the next one who was fired.  The lazy troublemaker may be in her 60s or 70s and still getting paid to never do anything.

Although the title mentioned Cub Scouts, two very influential deaths occurred during that time.

Her Cake Business and My Mother’s Mother’s death

When my wife pulled herself out of her PTSD meltdown, she did two things.  I mentioned that she became a den leader with the Cub Scouts.  I volunteered as the assistant cubmaster, but after six months, the outgoing cubmaster decided I was much better with the kids than he was.  I was silly.  I loved to sing.  But he really didn’t want to do it.  My wife, however, found a way to be silly with about ten boys on a weekly basis.

In the process of meeting other parents and getting into the community affairs, she found people that needed someone to bake a birthday cake.  My wife had a lot of experience cake decorating for our boys.  Never any fondant, she was strictly a buttercream frosting type person and cakes from scratch, all real ingredients.  She volunteered to bake a couple of cakes.  The ladies at the first birthday party started asking what she charged.  The cakes tasted better than those from the grocery store, and the town had no bakeries.  She threw out a rough estimate of what her ingredients cost, and she added a couple of dollars for labor (working for less than half the minimum wage), and she was in business.  The orders came in as a trickle, and then she was baking a cake at least once each week.

With her meager earnings, we bought business cards and put them on community message boards, but word of mouth was the biggest draw.  Then she finally got one of the big boss’ wives to order a cake.  This lady’s husband worked at a plant that had about 25,000 people in employment, and he was the next tier beneath the plant manager.  I was one of those 25,000 employees.  The cake was extremely complicated, but my wife had all the skills necessary.  The birthday party was on Thursday, and she had bought all the ingredients fresh.  Some things had to be done on Tuesday and the rest on Wednesday, with little touch-ups on Thursday.  When she reconciled her expenses, the labor on this cake was for free.  In fact, counting a couple of last minute extras, we were not even covering the cost of supplies or the electricity for the oven.

But then, on Sunday night, I got a call that MawMaw had passed away.  MawMaw and my wife were extremely close.  MawMaw was my mother’s mother and almost exactly my mother’s opposite in everything.  MawMaw was sweet, kind, nice, and extremely fun to be around.  And my wife and MawMaw were nearly twins in likes, dislikes, and temperament, just 50+ years difference in age.  Besides, MawMaw was the only grandparent my wife ever knew, from either side of the family.  When MawMaw had a cerebral hemorrhage and she lost her memory about five years before she died, she still remembered my wife, the only person of recent memory (like less than seventy years) that she could remember.  One day, they were sitting in the den talking and MawMaw asked who those kids and the one adult were playing in the yard.  My wife said that it was her grandson and two of her great-grandsons.  MawMaw just said, “That’s nice,” but she had no recognition of who we were.  In her mind, she was a teenager, and she had no idea how she was related to my wife, but she knew so many details about her that it was clear that the memory was genuine.

And as for me, at times, MawMaw raised me.  For one full school year, the tumultuous seventh grade, I lived with her through the week and on most weekends, my parents picked me up, but those weekends with my parents were only after they had found a new house in our new hometown.  I was with MawMaw to avoid changing schools in mid-school year.

We could not avoid going to the funeral.  MawMaw meant too much to us.  She called the big boss’ wife and explained the situation that the elaborate cake would take basically two and a half days and she would only be driving back to the area after the funeral on the day of the birthday party.  The only viable option was the expensive cake at the grocery store, with no special embellishments.  The woman was furious, and she was powerful.  When we returned after the funeral, the phone never rang with another cake order, not even from the previously satisfied customers.

She eventually gave away most of her equipment, but about eight years later, she baked a wedding cake for the daughter of a friend when I was working on the NASA project.  The friend thought it might be “okay”, but when a four-tier cake arrived that could feed a couple hundred people, with every style of decoration, roses everywhere, and the top layer on structural columns towering over everything, her friend said that what that cake should have cost made my wife’s gift the most expensive gift at the wedding.  But that was her, always serving the other person, giving in the ways that she could serve best.

Her Father’s Death

Her father was an open-heart surgery survivor before I ever met her.  He had mellowed.  The younger daughters could do no wrong in his eyes, and he never let the craziness of the world bother him, but his heart was still not that good.

He was fired from his job as the president of the most prestigious credit union in that area.  The unions wanted car loans for union members to be based on mere membership, with no credit checks and with history of defaulting on car loans.  He refused.  His attitude was that it was not good business, so the unions placed pressure on the board to have him fired.  While looking for a job in his upper 50s in age, his heart condition worsened.

Each year, usually in the summer or fall, she would get a call.  “Dad is dying and he may be dead before you can get here.”  I had mentioned in the previous post that we needed her added income just to pay the bills.  With her job loss, as a surgical tech and then no cakes to bake, we were borrowing money, hoping the non-existent pay raise for me would come in.  But then, I would pull out the credit card and have my wife and the boys fly to Texas, once first class, with no available seats in coach.  By the time they got there, he would always be fine, a major rebound.

In the meantime, she was a den leader.  Once a week, she met with the boys.  Once each month, they had to perform a skit or a song at the pack meeting, which I emceed, or something else to show they had learned something that month.  To be more effective as leaders, my wife and I took the free training.  We enjoyed it so much, we volunteered to be part of the training team for the next training session.  I had just conquered my glossophobia (fear of public speaking), at least when I could tell jokes, and this course was perfect for that.  My wife simply loved helping others.

On top of that, there was a monthly roundtable where we discussed the monthly theme.  After the first couple of years, we became roundtable staff members and I eventually became the roundtable commissioner.

At one point, someone turned to my wife and asked her to go to Wood Badge training for Cub Scouts.  She went for it.  She was in a den with the brother of a Georgia Senator and a few other people.  She had a blast.  But before she went, her knee gave out.  The doctor said she needed to use crutches, due to bone on bone contact.  She hobbled for the week at the campsite.

She had what they call a ticket to complete.  These were things that must be accomplished with proof that they were accomplished in a proper manner.  One of her items was a song book.  By this time, I was an expert, teaching others, in desktop publishing, so I published the book she created.  But she had two years to complete the ticket and she eventually completed it a month before the deadline.

She was always driven, but in taking a week on crutches that summer, and using the crutches for the rest of the summer, she did not visit her father that year.  We got a call on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving to be told he had died.  The first year in several that she did not go to visit was the year he died, and something she wanted for herself was what she did instead, at least in her mindset.  Even something for herself was improved knowledge and skill to help others more effectively.  She had spent seven years as a den leader, but now she taught and assisted other den leaders.  So, it took her over a year before she brushed the dust off her “ticket”.  She had accomplished over half of the ticket simply by wanting to help others.  I did the typing and publishing of the song book which she had written and edited.  And it took a little effort on the proof that she had done everything.

Oddly, I was not asked to go to Wood Badge until the following year, but I completed my ticket at the same time she did, one year of work for me and two years for her.  She resolved her conflict about having not visited her Dad on her own, but it took time.

The last event of any social nature at all before I left to work at the NASA project was leading and saying goodbye to the Cub Scout roundtable.  I had been given the outstanding cubmaster award for the council and the district award of merit, but my wife had been snubbed.  Yet, she received phone calls from 40-50 den leaders around the council on how to do this or that.  And she was a program director at Cub Scout Day Camp for three years.

My wife and I were also asked to go to Philmont Scout Ranch, to get more training.  We met people from all over the United States at Philmont, and the three week trip – with me taking no vacation days due to excessive overtime with compensating hours – we visited my folks in Mississippi, her mother in Texas, and we went to Juarez, Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico, Capulin Mountain which was part of our second honeymoon, all before the week of training.  We took in Mesa Verde National Park, Arches National Park, and a few other things, including visiting my favorite uncle, and hers, who then lived in Denver, Colorado.  All before the mad dash back east to South Carolina.  In miles, it was our second longest vacation trip.  It was the longest trip considering the number of days.

Expanding on her Volunteer Work with a New Job

With her growing skill set of working with elementary aged boys, she started enjoying teaching Sunday school to the younger children.  She started thinking that helping teach young children would be better than nursing.

At the church where we attended, a woman who immigrated from the Netherlands, similar to my wife, told her about a teacher’s aide job that was open at the school.  Her friend said that she would have to survive an interview with the school principal.  The school principal was our Sunday school teacher’s wife, when my wife was between her times teaching the children.  Not only did she get the job, she joined the prayer group that was made up of the principal and four teacher’s aides, all who went to the same church.  It was strictly the church connection.  What my wife learned in this prayer group was how to pray in a group setting.  In later years, she was often asked to do it.  The others never knew the skill came from having to do it often in a small group, in other words, practice.  The other teachers and aides became jealous of the “special” treatment, but when my wife would sing, play the guitar, and wear her traditional Dutch clothing for special all-school assemblies, she was accepted.  She even helped other teachers than her assigned teacher, who was starting to think about retirement – letting my wife teach some of the topics.

With that added boost in her confidence, she started going to a local university, but just as before, she advanced to the level of a college senior in elementary school development when I got a job at a NASA project and a strong feeling that layoffs were looming at the plant where I worked.  A year after we left, the plant went from 25,000 employees to 11,000 employees.  We had escaped, but our house did not sell for over two and a half years, financially wrecking us.

And my wife would never go back to college after that.  She would use her song book again, teaching scouting leaders from the song book near the NASA project.

And what is next?

The next three years were very interesting years for my wife, but they were not financially profitable years for us.  But in developing skills, that never seemed to garner a job, my wife became a dynamo.

And to all this, I give praise and honor to God.  Only He knew that the two of us would one day marry each other, and it would truly be until death did we part.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.