Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Like apples of gold in settings of silver
    is a ruling rightly given.
Like an earring of gold or an ornament of fine gold
    is the rebuke of a wise judge to a listening ear.

• Proverbs 25:11-12

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

• 2 Timothy 3:16-17

I have not bought many books this year.  I have not been to the closest Christian bookstore since my wife passed away over a year and a half ago.  I made two trips last year to Tennessee to either visit or babysit the grandchildren.  I was supposed to go this year, but the reason for having to babysit kept getting postponed, probably sometime next year.  But I am visiting near Christmas.  I bring up the trips to the South because I drive past a McKay’s bookstore.  They deal in used books, DvDs, CDs, video games, jigsaw puzzles, etc.  Of the many stores that I have traded books, they give the best prices and, if you want store credit, it is a really good deal.  From nearly thirty-year memories of The Bookworm in Kennewick, WA, they were comparable.  But I did not do enough trading to be resupplied at the rate that I was reading.

My goal this year is to reach 3,000 books (since I started putting everything on a spreadsheet in 1993, with a six-year gap in the early 2,000s).  So, 25 active years of reading and 3,000 books, that is 120 books per year, probably average length of book being about 300 pages.  I have plenty of time left, but not enough books.  I may have to go to the church library (now called the resource room) or the public library.

But there are little stashes of books here and there in the house, and I have discovered books that my wife hid, knowing that I would add them to my collection, and she wanted to read them first.  I look with great sorrow, finding her bookmark in the book between twenty pages into the book and one hundred.  She always read faster than I did and with better retention, but with her combination of illnesses, she lost her attention span as well as some memory loss.  Like the neurologist said, he hesitated in even calling it a mild form of the early onset of dementia, in that each of my wife’s illnesses was a contributing factor and she was doing so well compared to others with those illnesses, he did not think he needed to see her anymore.  But, I pull a new book off the shelf, and there is a butterfly bookmark or a poem on a card with tassels tied to one end at page 27 or 44.  In the old days, she would have gotten that far in a half hour, and could talk about the nuances of the characters for an hour after that.  My synopsis of a similar book would be “It’s a story about a man, sorry, can’t remember his name, but his dog’s name is Rufus.  Sorry.  That’s all I’ve got.”  Okay, not that bad, but close.

The other day, I found her devotionals, prayer books, and poem books.  I would tell her what the theme of the Sunday school class would be, and she would have two or three readings available, not knowing how the class would veer off topic.  She had a sense of how I taught and how their collective minds worked.  When we would veer into a strange rabbit hole, she had a poem that fit.  She read the poem, and then said a short prayer to close the Sunday school class.  And I was amazed, even up to the end, of how she anticipated the specific rabbit hole.  It was definitely the Spirit working within her.  Sadly, no one dares follow her act, and I am left closing us in prayer, something impromptu.

But all these books are small, maybe a bit thicker, but smaller than a paperback novel.  I found a stack of a half dozen.  In the middle was a book that did not belong with the others.  When I opened it, the inside cover had my name, middle name spelled out (my mother’s maiden name since her parents only had two girls, and none of the uncles had boys – thus the family name would die out).  Underneath my name was “from ‘Mammy.’”  And then my sixth birthday.

The book, in the photo above, is the Bible for Young Readers.  I had just finished kindergarten, and I would be learning how to read in the First Grade.  Mammy was my father’s mother.  Mammy was a retired school marm, retiring not long after all her four sons had gone into town to attend high school.  Mammy taught first through eighth grades in a one-room schoolhouse.  My uncle’s book, God’s Physical Record of Creation, is mostly technical information and his way of being a lifelong geologist who believes that God created the heavens and the earth, but he makes a point at the beginning of the book to talk about how his mother and one other lady started the school, and how the woman I knew as Mammy wanted everyone to know how to read, write, and do arithmetic, and more importantly – to think.  I guess my zeal in that latter point came from her.

As I wondered how this book got into a stack of devotionals in my wife’s hiding place, the remembrance of my sixth birthday came flooding back.  We had lived on the hill near my Dad’s parents home for four years.  The road into town had been paved for three of those years.  One of my earliest remembrances was fording the creeks to go to church on Sunday.  Bridges are the slow thing in constructing new roads.  The turkey farm was in full swing, with our family having one of the highest employment roles of anyone in the county – before the proliferation of small factories, with the county and town governments, including schools, being the biggest employers.

In those old days, we learned a lot in kindergarten, but I was not the reader that my boys were when I reached first grade.  I received the book.  I thanked her, but most of the words in the book were beyond my present vocabulary.

I cannot remember exactly what she said, but she said a few things that stuck for the rest of my life.

What I remember from what Mammy said was this.  “I know that you will be learning how to read this coming school year, and I had a burden on my heart that you needed a Bible to be the first book you ever read.  You will not know every word that you read, but always read with a dictionary next to the book that you are reading.  Do not give up.  If you do not know a word, look it up in the dictionary.  And I pray that you add a lot more books to this one, but it is important that this be the first.”

The ”Bible” was a chronological series of Bible stories from Creation to Revelation, with selected poetry afterwards.  I grew up in a KJV only world, but this “Bible” was in plain English, authorized by Thomas Nelson and Sons of London, Edinburgh, Paris, Melbourne, Toronto, and New York.  Each 32 pages of the text was divided by a two-sided print of full color paintings of some biblical scene.  A note on the book printed in 1952: it was authorized, in Edinburgh, by Queen Elizabeth II on 31 January 1952, but she was not queen until 6 February of that year.  An interesting note on the copyright page. She authorized the book, not knowing that her father would die roughly one week later and by the time the book went into print, she was the queen.

And one of my earliest memories of reading was that I did not know a lot of the words in the definitions in the dictionary either.  Just more words to look up.  And at first, my mother and siblings helped me read the book, but it was my first.

My priorities have changed as for the last twenty books, as of writing this, maybe ten books left when this post comes out.  One of the books near the end of the 3,000 books will be a rereading of the book that started it all.  One more reason to marvel at the loving grandparents that I had and the loving wife who hid the book, probably knowing that I would be the one to find it.

And to God be the glory, great things He has done.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.