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.

The last episode ended with my wife, our eldest son, and I driving to Washington state to my new job, all while my wife had pneumonia, the first year of what would become COPD.  The drive there was interesting.  We drove to Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent the night with her sister.  We awoke to an ice storm in progress.  Instead of driving to Denver, Colorado, we went back south, along what had been Route 66.  We then went from Amarillo, Texas to Gallup, New Mexico and then to Las Vegas, Nevada, St. George, Utah, Boise, Idaho and finally Richland, Washington.

We found a place to live in the horse heaven hills in West Richland, Washington.  We still get our electrical utility to give us a few dollars back every few years.  We had to join the cooperative to get electrical power to our home.

My Wife’s Job Search

We had soaring credit card debt.  We had cashed in an IRA (before they were called 401K).  We were going to an extremely high cost of living area, and I was offered a pay cut from what I had been paid by NASA.  My wife needed to find work, but all she did until she was healthy was look in the newspaper.

She found a job at a nursing home.  She was in training for about a week and then she had the graveyard shift.  Many nurses liked the graveyard shift, less supervisory interference, but she had no upper body strength.  The graveyard shift was understaffed, and she was required to roll her patients over during the night to prevent bedsores.  Most of the night staff refused to help her, but she befriended one large male practical nurse who taught her little tricks in rolling the patients from one position to the next.  She pulled a few muscles along the way, but she was finally getting the hang of it when the local hospital called.

The hospital in Richland, Washington had a unionized nursing staff, and they hired my wife to be the surgical tech in the birthing center.  Quietly, she was the union buster, but her job was to assist in the center in natural childbirth, but at any point when the doctor said that a caesarian section, or C-section, was required, the delivery room would then become a surgical room and my wife was in charge.  She had to make sure that the room was sterile and all staff that was required to scrub were properly scrubbed, the instruments sterile, etc.

She was again on the night shift, but many of the nights were nights when she had nothing to do.  The nurses suggested that she become the baby photographer.  The new mother had to have a baby picture before she left.  Since my wife had plenty of time on her hands, she would wait for the new mother to fall asleep.  She would then enter the room, play with the baby, and then take the photograph with the baby’s eyes open.  The nurses marveled in that my wife never failed in getting the baby’s eyes open and each of the other nurses might get less than one out of ten, more like one out of twenty with the eyes open.  Of course, they never noticed how much effort she went through, but it was a work of love.

As far as the nurse union was concerned, there was one nurse, who was not even liked by the other nurses, who hated my wife.  She saw my wife as the union buster, so she went on strike, the “checking the union contract” strike.  She showed up to work, but if a patient buzzer went off, the patient in pain and needing medication, this nurse would say, “Wait!  I have to read the union contract to see if I am required to do that.”  The other nurses would get fed up and take care of this nurse’s patients just to silence the alarms.  It worked out that this nurse on strike kept getting paid, but she never did any work.  It backfired on her.  The nurses throughout the hospital heard about her “strike.”  Then the striking nurse needed a hysterectomy (I think it was), and the nurses on the floor during her recovery, all of them, had to check the contract to see if this nurse should be given her pain medication when she buzzed the nurse call button.  She knew what it felt like, suffering greatly, but she did not repent.

My wife loved this job.  She was also paid more than she had ever been paid.  She got overtime pay also.  The work was the easiest she ever had in the hospital.  And she would have paid them for the time spent playing with the babies, but don’t tell the hospital.

Our Worst Lemon

For those who do not understand the term, an automobile that is in the shop far too often is called a lemon.  Not far before my first lay off, from the NASA project, we got rid of our large conversion van.  We bought a “program car” from the dealership.  They said it was only driven sparingly by people at the dealership, but Mississippi has no lemon law, and what keeps a dealer of used cars from lying?  The stereotype is that they always lie.  During the layoff, we had it in the shop twice.

Soon after arriving in Washington state, we were invited by one of my cousins in Seattle to visit her home which had a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.  We drove to a small town east of the Cascades to see where they shot the television show, Northern Exposure.  When we got to the main street, I looked to the left and the scene from the television show was so vivid, I imagined a moose walking out from behind one of the buildings.  We got back on the interstate and drove toward Seattle.  After going through Snoqualmie Pass, I wanted to see Snoqualmie Falls.  The falls were 33 miles down the mountain from the pass, but when we got off at the exit, I had no transmission.  Somewhere in those 33 miles, the transmission had blown.  We called my cousin and her husband came to pick us up, still before cellphones.  In the meantime, we towed the car to a repair shop.  The shop could not do transmissions, so we had the car towed across the pass to a transmission shop in the Tri-Cities, near where we lived.  The insurance paid for the first tow, but we had to pay for the second tow of a few hundred miles, plus the new transmission.  The transmission only lasted a year, but our son was using it to commute to college.  Hick-ups, loss of power, and noises seemed strange, so he called me.  We got it to the shop before it had lost all the gears.

I have written about returning to Snoqualmie Falls almost twenty years after the incident.  I was in Seattle teaching a class at a steel mill.  We had never made it to the falls on our first attempt.  My wife and I hiked around a resort hotel to the falls.  It was a beautiful day, but the weather was just right for the mist from the roaring water to create a fog that filled the valley.  We heard the roar, but in two attempts, we never saw Snoqualmie Falls.

But back to the lemon: With the second transmission in the car, we thought ‘what else could go wrong? We need to see the countryside.’  We drove to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and drove around Lake Coeur d’Alene.  The boys wanted to go to the mall in Spokane, Washington on the way back.  As we pulled into the parking garage, we heard horrible banging under the hood.  The fan belt was disintegrating.  While they shopped, I found a repair shop.  They suggested that I get a new water pump.  I thought they were trying to scam me, but as we approached Ritzville, Washington, in the middle of the high desert, the water pump blew out.  I coasted to a gas station at the exit.  It was a Saturday, and we knew only about a half dozen members of our church.  No one could come rescue us.  An ostrich farmer, taking a young male to Coeur d’Alene for breeding purposes, heard our conversation and he volunteered to take us in the wrong direction, but to a town with car rental at the airport.  We rode in the truck cab with the farmer, a man who had become a Christian and his wife left him due to it.  He went from a six-digit salary job to farming.  Oh, and our boys had to ride in the trailer, with the other boy, the young male ostrich.  There were hick-ups along the way, getting to the airport five minutes before they closed for the night, but we made it home and eventually got the car fixed.

The only successful long trip in the car was to Portland, Oregon, down the Columbia River Gorge. We saw the Mary Hill museum, the Stonehenge Replica and a few of the falls, like Multnomah Falls.

The car had a variety of other issues.  We could never trust it on a long trip.  After I had moved to Pennsylvania (the paragraphs that follow), I went back to Washington state to move the family to Pennsylvania.  We traded in both our vehicles and bought a little car that our son would use to commute back and forth to college.

My Next Layoff

I had only been working at my new job for nine months when our contract was cancelled.  The Department of Energy had a cabinet member under fire, and she had to jettison contracts.  For our location, they decided that the two contractors working directly for DOE would competitively bid for the next year contract.  Our company won the bid, but somehow the other company was selected.  Odd, they had to meet our bid, and they had two employees, the boss and the guy who did almost all the work, who made more than the bid amount.  Our company had five people.  The pay difference was that severe.

So, I was out of a job again.  This time my wife had a better job, the best job she ever had.  This time the unemployment benefits were about four times more than in Mississippi.  And I found a job in only four months, outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  But I knew my wife loved that job.  I called a few of the jobs within commuting distance, and a couple where I would have to set up an apartment during the week.  No one would take me on.  I was turned down at an aluminum smelting operation due to not having any metals experience, but the job I got in Pittsburgh meant I would return to the area near that same smelter and teach courses in the field of metals, even writing a textbook in aluminum melting, albeit, not smelting.

I was trying everything I could to stay.

In the meantime, my younger son started doing cuttings.  He had a girlfriend, of sorts.  He was smitten, she not so much.  After finally having things going his way, it was all falling apart.  If we moved to Pennsylvania, he would have his third high school over the four years of high school.

But I flew to Pennsylvania and left the family behind until the end of the school year.

My Wife – Dealing with too much stress

From February until near the first of July, I was in a hotel in Pennsylvania, and she got one son to therapy a couple days each week.

We made a plan to have our older son stay in Washington state, living with a church family.  My wife disagreed with the plan, but I saw someone who made great grades, was up for an Irene Ryan Acting scholarship, and who had been working in fast food for years, helping us with bills.  My wife saw him with me not at home, womanizing, rebelling, and irresponsible.  She would never tell me why she disagreed.  She thought him immature and not ready to be away from the family.  So, he helped us move and then drove the car we had let him use back to Washington on his own.  If my wife had only told me what he had been doing in my absence, I would have agreed with her.

But one night while she was at the hospital, she collapsed.  She woke up in ICU with extremely high blood pressure.  With having to be both mother and father for five months, and the trouble each of the boys were causing, half of it unknown to me, she had collapsed.  While our finances were horrible upon arriving, my new employer reneged on their promise to pay my car rental and hotel bills after the first month.  Our financial disaster was getting worse, and my wife was paying the bills.  Medications were changed and she never had another collapse like that, but it was a warning of what was to come.

The reason why the move waited until near the first of July was that I had a six-week contract worth about a quarter of a million dollars on the southside of Chicago.  I taught four weeks straight in June.  I flew to the Tri-Cities, and we had the movers show up the next day, traded cars the next day, and we left the day after.  I’ll leave the trip to Pennsylvania for the next episode.  I owed the customer two more weeks of training, but the customer had begged for the gap around the Fourth of July.  I thought I had about three weeks for the shift schedule to mesh so that I could do the last two weeks, but … I got a call.  More on that next week.

And what is next?

With one son gone, we settled into Pennsylvania life.  We found a cute house with a sunken living room and a lot of character – character that became a nightmare with our aging bodies and stairs everywhere.

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.