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 learning the hard way that she was retired.  There are laws against not hiring old people because they are old, but then they just say you are overqualified.  The company lawyer is happy, and you are still looking for a job.  But she was not even in her fifties, or was that soon after her fiftieth birthday?  It was close.

Her Vacations within Vacations

My wife had a knack for picking and choosing her trips.  There were nieces and nephews and trips to see her Mom.  There were birthdays and weddings and there were only a few weddings where my wife was not there.  Many of those were me giving her an airline ticket, but if we had relatives nearby, she would ride in the truck with me as I drove the demonstration equipment to a training job and then stay with relatives.  Oddly, she stayed with me when we were near my parents.  Our best of those trips was a training program in Texas.  The customer wanted a two-week gap between the first class and the second class.  The training program was in the Dallas area.  I dropped my wife off with one of her sisters in Dallas.  The sister then picked me up and we saw where JFK was shot and we shopped nearby.  Then that sister handed my wife off to the next sister.  Three weeks later, I pulled up at a Fourth of July picnic in a rental vehicle.  The demonstration equipment had been shipped to Mexico.  Note: The Mexican training program was cancelled, so I never got reimbursed for the shipping costs and the people in the Mexican customs holding yard stole all that they wanted (mostly the tools) and were so nice to make the toolbox feel like it had tools in it – filled with automobile radiator caps.  I could guess what their main goal was.  But this gave my wife nearly a month to visit family.

About the time we were living in Mississippi is when the family singing group stopped getting invitations to the Folklife festival.  They had a following that always showed up to a few performances each year, but the family had grown and the cost was too great for the Folklife Institute.  But really, the nature of the festival has changed drastically.  In the beginning there were few professionals, mostly family groups or ethnic clubs that loved to perform.  You got the true Folklife of Texas, but what we hear about the festival is that most of the performers are professionals with plugs for the night club, honky-tonk bar, or other regular venue.  Good music with a splash of the melting pot of Texas, but not the same feel.

With us living ten years in South Carolina and loving the state, our favorite town was Charleston, SC.  I was blessed with four or five training contracts down there.  A steel mill near Charleston had two different furnaces, and since they liked showing off their furnaces to the other sites within that company, they hosted repeated offerings of the course to new employees.  The only time that I did not take my wife to Charleston was one of those last-minute replacements for a manager giving a talk at a conference.  Another study the notes on your way to the conference.  But all the other trips included my wife, and we loved each trip.  We would always go to Shem Creek to eat seafood.  At one point, we had been to each of the restaurants along the creek, but I hear that our favorite has changed ownership and has a new name.  We would always go to the marketplace in downtown Charleston where the horse drawn carriages start their historical (and hysterical) tours, hysterical if you get the right guide.  On one of the two-week stays, my wife walked the streets of Mount Pleasant, SC, where our hotel was, and found Pittsburgh natives everywhere she went.  It must be a popular place for people of my present area of residence to retire, and many opened small shops in small strip malls – my wife’s kind of shopping.

On one of my business trips, we were in New Orleans, Louisiana, but for the life of me, I cannot remember why.  Again, she went for the marketplace.  And as you walk from the marketplace, along the river toward Jackson Square, you walk by stores making fresh pralines, and if you like strong coffee, the last business before you reach Jackson Square is Café du Monde, coffee with chicory and beignets.  I place this memory here, because when we went back with our younger son and his family, it was at least the third time that we had been there.  We had our places that we had to visit or it just wasn’t NOLA.

I mentioned those two cities, because my last big project was nine months in northeast Florida and we fell in love with St. Augustine, Florida.  There were four old cities that we loved to visit, but I doubt if we would like to live in any of them:  Charleston, SC, New Orleans, LA, St. Augustine, FL, and Savannah, GA.  And maybe in that order, but NOLA and St. Augustine flipped in our rankings for a variety of reasons, the cuisine, the activities, the variety of crafty, cutesy stores, etc.  Call it a tie.  But then the king and queen of Spain visited St. Augustine when we were there, and my wife brushed against some of the court at a restaurant.  At least, she screamed one night after having been in St. Augustine that day.  She said that she talked with a couple of the people in fancy dress that were waiting for their table in a private dining area, and she recognized them when later identified on the news that night.  She was always friendly.  She would strike up a conversation with anyone, but this time a random conversation in a hallway was with royalty, and she didn’t even know.  I think it was the 450^th birthday party of St. Augustine at the time.

My wife spent so many trips, either with me or alone that the pharmacist that we first used in Pennsylvania would write her name as “Mrs. Vacation.”  The head office caught one of the bottles in a tray and said that was not professional.  I will talk about medical issues next week, but for the time after she was “retired” she took a lot of medicines.  When that pharmacist left, we did not feel like family with the replacement pharmacist, and we moved to the wholesale store.  With the insurance, it was the same price for the prescriptions, but it is amazing how a huge store has a pharmacy team that greets us, even when we aren’t picking up anything, but near the end, it was usually once per week, even with most prescriptions on a ninety-day cycle.

Of all the places that I had contracts with steel mills, Alabama had to be the most contracts.  There were only four steel mills that asked for my services, but all but one of those were repeat customers, going to a couple of them 4-5 times each.  My wife had our evenings planned before we ever left, after the first trip.  She knew where we could find every type of cuisine you could think of in two of those cities.  We felt obliged to visit my parents on each trip to Alabama, and most of the ones in Mississippi and Tennessee.  On one of the Alabama trips, we asked for a long trip home.  Our younger son got married.  We parked the rental truck in my parent’s backyard, and I think we rented an SUV to take the family to Oxford, MS for the wedding.

Our Son’s Brief Visits

Our younger son had two years where he stayed with us.  He graduated college and could not find work.  He came home and became a manager at a fast-food restaurant.  A year later, he had a medical issue with only one other employee on shift.  He tried to call his boss and his boss’ boss, but they were at a free admission to the local theme park day for top management.  They had their phones turned off, but they fired him for not being authorized in closing the store thirty minutes early because due to his medical situation, he was incapacitated.

Without a job, he went back to the university and nearly completed his graduate degree when he found his soul mate and they got married.

Later, with a child that was a year old, they came back to Pennsylvania to live while he looked for work again.  They went back south before their son turned two, a nine-month stay, but they experienced Snowmageddon while they were here.  With everything shut down, our son built a tunnel to the neighbor’s house.  While the snow cover was in feet, the drifts were a lot higher.  And our grandson loved “disappearing” into the snow.  Of course, we were scrambling to find him, homing in on his laughter.

It broke our hearts when they left.  Our son had found a job, but it still was not a teaching job.  That came a while later.  They would have two children when they moved to southern Mississippi where our son taught elementary school music in a rural impoverished area.

The Biggest Moment in My Wife’s Life and a Wonderful Vacation for Her

Early on in this forced retirement for her, I got an extended contract in Gary, Indiana.  I went there to collect data for a week.  Then an analyst with our company, who had a different contract at the same facility, created a mathematical model for the process.  He combined the data that I collected with the data that he collected.  I then worked with him to suggest better methods to operate the equipment.  The data showed that some of the equipment was in bad need of repair.  So, I gave them all options when I taught the course to six weeks’ worth of shift workers.  It was every week between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then we went back in February to be there for the last two weeks of training.

As usual, my wife researched the dining experience, and she had many “must-do-restaurants” on that last two weeks, but then she got sick.  I did not want her to be alone, so I took her with me.  I already knew where the hospital was.  I alerted the front desk that the shuttle might be needed to take her those two-blocks, and when I came home, she was still sick, but she had the story that changed her life.  She had a vision or a dream (never really knew), and she had seen her death.  And God is real.  Jesus is real.  It was what I had prayed for our entire married life.  She was sweet, kind, and approachable, but she had never been on fire for Jesus.  But now, she had.  I wrote about this recently and the link is HERE.

Just four days after that, now no longer sick, one of our team wanted to go to the restaurant where my wife and son had missed years before.  We had gone in December, but this guy was one of the big bosses and I took him there along with a consultant and my wife.  The rest of the team went into Chicago that night.  It was highly irregular when the team split up like that.  But then again, less witnesses.  None of us, not even my wife, had given the fact that it was Valentine’s Day a thought.  That is, until the waiter announced the Valentine’s Day special for two.  With a direct order from the executive, who was acting as one of my instructors for this course – working for me, I ordered the special.  When the waiter finally came to the table with the check after my wife and I had some of the most exquisite meals in our entire life, he gave the check to the big boss, but the big boss handed me the bill, telling me to add an extra $40 above and beyond a generous tip.  Our meal was far from cheap, way above the expense report guidelines, the added tip was extravagant.  But since I had picked up the tab at that restaurant with ten people at the table, I had given a bigger tip.  The comptroller was about to complain upon our return but then she remembered who I had dined with that night, and she approved it.  I think the tip was well over a hundred dollars, for four people dining.  I cannot remember what we got, but everything was over the top.  After all, it was Valentine’s Day.  But my wife and I were celebrating her being set on fire for Jesus, only four days before.

The only other special dining night was when my wife insisted on a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel.  Two problems: They did not serve beer, so my boss was going to be irritated the entire time.  And, it was a fondue restaurant.  The boss had his wife with him, but they were both vegetarians.  The executive and my wife told stories, he from India and she from Indonesia, for hours.  Fondue takes a long time anyway, but with those two chatting like long lost friends who had years of catching up to do, my boss gave me this look that said, “If you ever have us go to a fondue place again, you’re fired!!!”  That night we did not get a full night’s sleep due to the late arrival back at the hotel, but the executive and I had most of the lectures the next day and we were still riding that emotional wave from all the small talk he and my wife had the night before.

Her Church Work

When my wife had that Damascus Type experience in a hotel south of Gary, Indiana, she was the chairman of the board of deacons at one church near our home.  I had been a Sunday school teacher, but after the pastor took off the gloves and let everyone know that he was liberal, more a universalist than a Christian, and he did not believe in the Bible hardly at all, I quit going to the church.  She served out that year, and we started going to our present church.  We said that it would be our last stand.  We had changed churches too many times.

Within another year, she was already a deacon and a year later, I was an elder, in charge of Evangelism, even though the pastor never knew my background in Lay-Witness Missions.  I had five years of intense resistance before the interim pastor, after the one who assigned me the task of evangelism had left, asked me to step down, not because he disagreed with what I was trying to do, but that I had become burned out.  My wife only served three years as a deacon, and she quit when she found that she could no longer drive in the dark.  In fact, the last six months that she served as a deacon, I drove her to the meetings and went to an adjoining room and read books for a few hours.  Even infirmed, she followed through with her commitments.

Besides serving as an at-large member of the Evangelism team, she joined the “knit wits,” a group of ladies that knitted or crocheted prayer shawls and other things, giving all of it away, usually to someone in need.  She was an expert in crochet, but the other ladies taught her how to knit.

But her primary passion was cooking and providing food.  The church was part of a program that had qualifying homeless families who would be housed for a week, given transportation to work, and have a family meal.  My wife jumped on the idea of cooking the family meal.  We would only do one night each week that it was our church’s turn, rarely less than once every other month.  And having cooked meals on weekends as a teenager for her family, two parents and nine children, she easily adapted recipes for twelve to twenty guests at our table, and it was never a simple meal.  She knew others might do pizza or sandwiches or a stew or even stop at fast food and have fried chicken, but we would have sweet and sour chicken over rice with a couple of vegetables on the side or sauerbraten, red cabbage, German potato salad, and other German fixings.  And always a dessert, with the big issue becoming dietary restrictions, mostly cakes or whipped cream and fruit.  We realized after she had to learn so many new techniques to fix food that she had fixed for years, just to account for the dietary restrictions, we knew that pizza and breadsticks would be so much easier, but it was as if we were having them over at our home.  It drove her crazy when the number of people always changed from one night to the next, but she always had extra food.  We would package the leftovers in case there wasn’t enough food the next night.  As I set the tables so that we could all dine together, they would ask me what I had prepared.  My answer was always, “My wife is the cook.  I’m just her pack mule.”  Since I had carried everything from the kitchen to the car and then from the car to the dining room that we had designated at the church, I knew what would be served.  I would always follow my comment with the menu, but I wanted them to know she had done all the hard work.  I just did the heavy lifting.  And after a sweet and sour chicken accident where extra sauce spilled in our trunk and made our trunk smell both fruity and sour for months, I shampooed the trunk carpet a couple of times and then lined the trunk with old worn-out towels, easy to discard if another accident happened, and the towels stayed that way until my son bought our old car when we bought the present SUV.  Even though she was too infirmed to sign up to cook anymore, we stayed prepared.

When we stopped signing up for those dinners, it broke her heart.

And she spent over ten years as a church prayer warrior. She attended all the meetings, and after I retired, she got me to drive her to the meetings and it was inevitable that I would join the group too.

And what is next?

Her health issues started to get worse as she eased into retirement.  And in a strange way, my eventual retirement, being laid off while in my 60s and unable to find work… That retirement became a blessing in that I had the time to become her caregiver.  But before things started falling apart, I got a nine-month contract in Florida, our last big “move.”

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.