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 us preparing to move to Pittsburgh.  My wife and the pastor at our church in Kennewick, Washington convinced me to move to my new job.  I wanted to stay in the Great Northwest, but the job was three time zones away.  My wife barely survived the separation period, but soon the empty nest period would start.

She visited me prior to moving for a house hunting trip.  We found a cute house in a coal mining town.  We both loved the sunken living room, but when we got older, it became too many steps.  Oddly, she flew in on Mother’s Day to find snow on the ground and more snow falling.  It wasn’t much, but that year was the last, since we moved there, to have snow in May, but that year there was a little snow every day that month.

Our trip to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

The boss that made me pay for my hotel, meals, and automobile after one month in Pennsylvania was too focused on his vacation to give me a deadline upon my return with family in tow when I went to Washington state to retrieve the family.

And then, that was a difficulty.  Our older son was staying, but he helped drive us to Pennsylvania, just to drive the car back to Washington afterwards.  The other son was in the middle of an Alaskan church mission trip.  He was on the island of Sitka, Alaska.  When the church group returned to Washington state, one of my cousins, or their father, my last surviving uncle as of this writing, met him at the airport and stayed with him until his flight left for Pittsburgh, PA.  My wife then met him at the airport outside Pittsburgh.

But as for the trip to Pittsburgh, we scrubbed and scrubbed in our vacated house, but the real estate agent found things that were there when we moved in and documented as being a problem.  Oddly, the rental agreement had been doctored to leave off the inspection results when we arrived at the house.  We not only lost our deposit, we got a bill for additional “damages.”

With all that work, for nothing, we stayed in Kennewick the first night.  We then got near Yellowstone National Park the next day.  It was the day before the Fourth of July and even though not a holiday, the office was closed.  So, the next day, instead of racing toward Pittsburgh, we took a sightseeing day in Yellowstone.  We left by way of the eastern entrance and drove past Cody, Wyoming into dinosaur country.

Early the next morning, we were driving along a road into the Big Horn Mountains, and we came to a halt.  Some cowboys were on a cattle drive.  We stopped and simply watched as they drove the cattle across the road.  They tipped their hats to us, and we then continued to the Black Hills of South Dakota.  We went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse statue construction.  I got a rock from there.  I told everyone that it was a nose hair from the horse, ridden by Crazy Horse.  Some well-educated teenager thought he needed it, and we have not seen the nose hair for a couple of decades now.  We live in a nice, law-abiding neighborhood.

We then drove across South Dakota to Wall Drug.  If you have ever been through South Dakota, you know about Wall Drug that serves ice water, for free.  If you are a veteran, you can get a free coffee, very small, but free.  Not really terribly small.  My wife said it was larger than a thimble.  A major tourist trap, just to go and laugh at the tourist “trappiness” of it is almost, but not quite, worth it.  Actually, ice water was their claim to fame, having ice water when no one else did, but that was a hundred years before, give or take a few years.

From Wall Drug, we left the interstate highway so that I could scratch off the last of the contiguous 48 states.  So while one son was in Alaska, a state I have never been to, I scratched off North Dakota.  We then stopped in Minnesota during wedding season.  Who knew?!  It isn’t June; it’s July.  We drove well into the night trying to find a hotel.  My wife reminded me of Gallup, New Mexico, but it was not that bad.  Note: our second honeymoon chapter of this biography, many weeks ago, was the first late night search for a vacancy.  This one lasted only about two hours.

But I was excited.  We were now able to go to the Mall of America in the twin cities.  And then we were going to make an early stop south of Chicago.  There was a fantastic restaurant there that I wanted my wife and son to visit.  But that was when we got into a traffic jam in Wisconsin that lasted hours. No one was moving in either direction, a major large-scale accident.  Again, after dark, arriving at a motel, north of Chicago, no grand dining experience.  My wife and I would finally make it to the restaurant, four years later.

We made it all the way to Bridgeville, Pennsylvania the next day.  The next morning, we got a call from the moving van.  They would be at our house about lunch time.  I went to the office where I had parked a leased car, packed solid with my household goods and clothing that I had used at the hotel.  I was told as I checked in to say I was going home to help unpack the truck – “hey, the customer wants additional training.  Your flight leaves in two hours.”  I got to see the truck drive in front of the house as I ran out the back to go to the airport.

And nothing was placed where we needed it except for the beds.  We made it work.

Also, the house had no air conditioning.  We were told the area did not need it, but we got one air conditioner for the master bedroom and two more the next year for the rooms upstairs.

After leaving in a hurry that first day in Pennsylvania, three and a half weeks later, I was home.  One son was gone and would only return for rare visits, and the other son had showed up.

My Wife’s Job Search – Again

My wife almost immediately found a position open at an eye surgeon’s office.  He needed a surgical technician.  The doctor offered her minimum wage.  He could care less that she had many years of experience.  He could care less that her pay in Washington state was twice that much.  He was not impressed by her lifetime certification.  This was the Pittsburgh area.  A local college was pumping out college educated surgical techs willing to work for minimum wage since most graduates were not finding work at all.  And this job was perfect.  No call.  Straight days.

But my wife asked him for the weekend to think about it.  He said he would allow that, but then he hired someone else over the weekend that took the job without hesitation.

Over the next six months, she found nothing.  She even interviewed at the company where I worked as the receptionist, making a lot more than minimum wage.  She had no experience, but all she had to do was answer the phone.  Since the company did work around the world, my wife’s language skills might have been the difference in getting a new contract or not getting it.  Even my broken Spanish led to two contracts in Mexico, me being one of the few people the receptionist thought might know … something.

She was considered overqualified.  No job where we could share the ride each day.

She got a job as a dental assistant, minimum wage, but with the promise that her pay would increase by roughly 50% more when she learned how to be a dental assistant.  Since the dental assistant job was basically the same as a surgical technician, in fact, less complicated, my wife was passing him the correct instrument without him asking for it within the first month.  His other dental assistant that had been with him for years could not do that and her pay was twice as much.  But, then again, the other dental assistant and the dentist would have closed, locked door meetings in his office, and moanings and other suggestive noises could be heard in the hallway.  So, maybe there were other services that the other dental assistant was good at.

The dentist added a second dentist and my wife was assigned to her exclusively.  Then he shifted the other dentist’s hours to the second shift.  We only had one car, which my wife had to pay parking in a coin operated parking lot, while all other employees had a parking permit paid for by the dentist.  This shyster of a dentist even billed me for an unnecessary root canal, that he botched, even though free dental procedures were a benefit for all family members of employees.  I did not pay the bill.  But with my wife going to second shift, we could have never worked out a work schedule.  I was already getting to work an hour early and staying an hour late each day, just so she could have the car at her workplace, paying parking every few hours.  She was forced to quit.

She then saw a job placement service open across the street from the office building where I worked.  She soon became the receptionist and office manager for an eye surgeon, not the same one from before.  She worked for him for several months before he first met her.  She had organized his medical records.  She had set up appointments.  She knew the difference between an emergency and a need for a regularly scheduled appointment.  But once he saw her, he hired someone else, again with access to closed door meetings, and my wife was then required to go to all remote sites.  This doctor had offices that were anywhere between thirty minutes from our home and a two-hour drive away, with no traffic issues.  Again, the change in job conditions required her to quit.

She had met the office manager for another eye surgeon at her last job.  They were night and day different, but my wife could make friends with anyone.  This other lady also left that eye surgeon’s office and she also left her next job, an office manager for a home nursing service.  My wife’s friend suggested my wife to be the replacement.  Again, my wife organized everything, answered all the phone calls, and knew more than the ordinary receptionist in getting the right nurse to the right place, on time.  But, the owner thought the job needed an extra person, a friend of hers.  There were a few key patients that paid top dollar for good nursing care.  Those medical records were crucial.  The owner’s friend slid one of the top patient’s folder inside another folder when my wife was not looking.  My wife was fired for losing the medical records of a crucial patient, customer paying top dollar.  My wife found the folder as she was cleaning up, getting ready to leave, but the termination was final.  The nursing service collapsed within a few months after that.  With the lack of quality of management, it had probably already lasted beyond its natural time.

And the final termination was my wife’s final termination.  She half-heartedly read the advertisements, but as a neighbor said, “You are retired.  You just don’t know it yet.”  Retired before her fiftieth birthday, and no benefits.

A Fateful Thanksgiving Day and its Eventual Outcome

Now that we were only 850 miles from my mother and Thanksgiving Day was approaching, we were told we had to be home for Thanksgiving Dinner.  The fact that I had no vacation days to drive ahead of time was not an excuse.  We had to meet my brother’s third and final wife.

To catch you up, my brother’s first wife had surgery to not have more children and while recovering, their only son died of infant crib death.  Not long afterward, my brother went from one church as their pastor to serving as the coordinator for the denomination’s house at a nearby university to being unemployed, supplying pulpits when someone went on vacation to finally getting his own church again, two churches that became one church, but not enough money to pay him, so he again worked a fulltime job and preached on Sundays.  They lived in a mobile home behind the church.  His first wife, after all these moves and job changes, had a mental episode and divorced my brother, soon after our first son was born (as if that had anything to do with it …).  My brother married the day after the divorce was final and eight months later, a boy, nearly nine pounds, was “prematurely” born.  When this second wife saw her first husband was making better money, she left my brother.  My parents were happy in that my mother could have a son from her firstborn son inherit everything, and the second wife hated them, so no harm done there with her leaving.  As a pastor, getting married the third time required the church session to approve the union.

Now, I took off a day of vacation that I did not have to drive most of the way there, getting there by noon the next day, totally exhausted.  Then, my parents “innocently” explained that since my brother and his wife were both hunters, the noon meal would be at seven pm that night.  We had never eaten that late in our entire lives, but everything was catered to the likes of the third wife.

The first appearance was shocking.  I could not figure out which was the man and which was the woman, but since I knew what my brother looked like, I figured it out.  Undaunted by the appearance, my wife went into her nice mode.  She learned all the details of the other wife, birthdays of all family members, where they lived, etc.  She learned that the only hobby was hunting.  She learned that her new sister-in-law had fallen asleep in the deer stand and while asleep a deer had passed within a few feet of the stand – something my wife has still not repeated to anyone, but everyone already knew anyway.

My sister had moved into the old homestead where I grew up by this time and her son and daughter were there.  They came from next door to where my parents lived in the traditional family homestead that had been in the family for over a hundred years.  My sister’s son lived in town at the time, and I think the daughter, my niece, was either working on her masters in Southern Mississippi or teaching in Jackson, Mississippi.

As we started filling plates with food, the last two to arrive in the dining room were my wife and the other wife.  As the dressing (not stuffing), cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, yams, etc. was being passed around, my niece asked the new wife if she shot a deer, knowing what had happened.  The new wife grunted something about not seeing one.  The niece then made a snide remark about how she doubted if she could have hit a deer anyway.  Then, the new wife said, “I don’t know about a deer, but if your fat lard butt passed my deer stand, I wouldn’t have any trouble hitting it.”  She then turned to my brother and said that they were leaving.  And they left.  The meal was fantastic.  More food for us, but then, this was Thanksgiving.  We were eating the meal seven hours too late and Thanksgiving always meant five times more than we could ever eat in the first place.

Nothing else was said about the incident.  It had been totally been between my niece and the new wife.

Then, back home in Pennsylvania, we got a phone call.  My mother, who only called us on the phone about ten times in our 36 years of marriage before my mother died, wanted to talk to my wife.  The conversation was very short and I heard it from across the room.  My mother screamed, “I know it was you.  You said something in the living room!  She was angry when we got to the dining room.  What did you say!  WHAT DID YOU SAY!!”  My wife said that she found out the birthdays of her, her children from her first marriage, other family history like where they were from.  The new wife could care less to know any of that information about us.  Only hobby being hunting.  That was it.  “YOU ARE A LIAR AND A SCOUNDREL!! YOU WILL TELL ME WHAT YOU SAID TO MAKE HER MAD!!!!”

As I said, there were about ten phone calls in total over 36 years of marriage and we got another 5-6 over the next 2-3 weeks, carbon copies of each other.  I finally got a chance to call my Dad and I explained the situation.  “Dad, my wife is having chest pains.  She nearly goes catatonic each time the phone rings.  Please, tell Mom that my wife only said nice things.  You know her.  She does not have a mean bone in her body.  My wife is nice to everyone.”  Then my Dad said words that I may never forget, “Son, to your mother, your brother is all that matters.  You don’t matter.” And he hung up without saying good-bye, but the phone calls stopped, replaced by letters in the mail. One each week for about two more months.

My wife went to the doctor and found she had aortic stenosis, but open-heart surgery was not necessary yet.  They did not know what the chest pains were, but she showed no enzymes that she had a heart attack.  Odd, she only had those enzymes a few days before she passed away, even though she had two confirmed heart attacks.

I tried to put a positive spin on it.  “Sweetie, if my mother had not been so cruel, we might never know about your heart condition until it was too late.”  She just growled at me.  And as it turned out, when she finally had those enzymes show up, the doctors did not think it too late, but it was.  But that was nearly 27 years later, and after open-heart surgery.

The Empty Nest

The one son had misled us about the Irene Ryan scholarship.  He also claimed that the church members were secretly turning him into their slave.  He moved out, slept in a drug pusher’s house, was homeless, but he refused to move to Pennsylvania.  He married a girl and had joined the Air Force.  A baby came the next year and another three years later.  His wife was militantly against Christianity, and the relationship with us was on and off before this point when they have not spoken to us for years.

When I was in India for one month, my wife and other son went to visit the newborn grandchild at an Air Force Base in Texas.  They stopped at a community college near where my parents lived and a bidding war started to get the music prodigy, our son, at their community college.  My son would live briefly with my parents, my mother abusing my son, but he never told us about it until afterwards.  He finished at the community college, living on campus after my mother drove him out.  Then after finally finishing school, he could not get a job.  He moved back home for a year, but then left again to go to graduate school.

Through all this abuse from my mother, I knew that retaliation, or even mentioning that it was abuse, would make matters worse.  We obeyed.  We were nice. And we made our trips to visit shorter and more infrequent, even spending the night an hour down the road without them knowing.  We honored them.  Others in the family told my mother to go to Hell, and they were among the ones she admitted to loving.  But we never said such things.  Secretly, my wife said that she was too mean to die.  My mother died a few months before her 90^th birthday, but only twelve year before my wife passed away at 72 years old.  God is sovereign, and He knows what He is doing.

And what is next?

With her “early retirement” my wife started travelling with me, including the time she had a vision from God and her life was never the same.

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.