Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I’m the wife of Lieutenant Deviled Yeggs, Trinity Naomi Tesla, that’s TNT, Yeggs, but most people call me Naomi.  My husband still calls me Glyce, pronounced “Gliss,” since it is short for Nitroglycerin.  I explode when shaken.  My husband works homicide in the big city of Tracy.  He works with his old partner, Jim Wednesday and his nephew Poached Yeggs.

I had the day planned; too bad a whirlwind, who is not quite two years old, wrecked the plan.

Kinesiological Psychology has been approved on both the Medical and Mental Health organizations as a therapy of its own.  Now to sell it and present the program to other universities.  That would start with a joint presentation by Pauline and me at a convention in a few months.  They accepted the abstract, but now the paper must be submitted soon.  If I went to work, I would be interrupted constantly.  So, I stayed home.  Gigi was also home.  I could have taken her to Lily the Pink, but I missed being with her most of the time.  What could go wrong?  The answer to that question: Everything.

I had typed an outline, identifying where videos would be added including the comical videos from Pauline’s doctorate documentation, curing Mashie Niblick of his slice on water holes, before she became Pauline Niblick.

Then, it happened.  Gigi was supposed to be in her room playing.

She ran into the room.  “Naked!  Mommy!  Naked!”

Without turning around, I thought to myself.  This little girl is a little slower than the other young girls at Lily the Pink that are near her age in vocal skills.  Her vocabulary is limited, but she knows the word “naked.”  How embarrassing is that!  I mean.  She announces her nakedness to everyone.  I am thinking that husband of mine and his bear hugs have something to do with it.  She announces that she is naked and then he picks her up and gives her a bear hug.  In that setting, for a girl who is not quite two years old, it’s cute.  Then my mind snapped to attention.  She was fully dressed when I put her in her room and she was busy kicking a ball around the room – hopefully, working on being the only one of my children who plays soccer.  Why is she saying “naked”?

I turned to see a naked little girl.  She looked like she was greased from head to foot.  She smelled of strawberries.  It took little time to solve the mystery.  Dev, my loving husband, bought some expensive shampoo for just Sophia and me.  He was supposed to put it under the bathroom sink where Gigi knew not to go.  Either he failed in doing so, or Gigi had gone out of bounds.

“What do you have all over you?”  As if I did not already know.

“I take bath.  Wash my hair!”

I groaned, “No, Sweetie, you have to run the water to have a bath.  All you did was get soapy.  And you got soapy with shampoo that is not ‘no tears.’  This is going to get messy.  Ummm. Messy.  If you are dripping in shampoo all over the carpet…  Oh, dear.  Let’s go to the bathroom.”

There were pink shampoo hand prints all up and down the hallway, pink footprints in the carpet, but the shampoo bottle was empty and the bathroom floor had an even covering of slick, slippery strawberry shampoo.

While Gigi laughed, the shampoo luckily not dripping into her eyes, it took three rolls of paper towels to soak up enough of the shampoo on the bathroom floor.  Not clean, just not so slippery that it was a safety hazard.

I called Dev.  He apologized.  He was going to clean out the area under the sink and got distracted.  He left the bottle next to the cabinet door, but why was Gigi in the bathroom?  She was not yet potty trained, but she was starting to show interest.  He had an excuse to leave early, but he was still tied up for a while.  He would buy another bottle of the shampoo on his way home.  Maybe he was getting off early due to it being Sophia’s sixteenth birthday.  We were going to have a big party at Lily the Pink – the entire softball team including Coach Kessinger and her husband, a few more school friends, Emmett with a mixed band to play some songs, and her extended Lily the Pink family.  I had no idea what Mabel had planned for the birthday cake.  Scrambled let Mabel experiment with whatever was new.

But then, I finally had a little naked girl who was ready for a shower that she would not forget for a long time.  I got undressed myself and we both went to the double shower in the master bath.  We might not have the kitchen like what the Niblicks have.  We might not have about one third of the floorspace in the house tied up with a panic room like the Levys, but we had the most luxurious bathroom we could get at the time that we bought the house.  The shower fits two adults that do not have to really like each other that much, but we have all those all over jets of water and I was going to maximize the laminar flow feature.  I was convinced that once I started trying to wash the shampoo out of her hair or even partially from her body, shampoo was going to get in her eyes.  She had done such a great job of matting her hair down with the shampoo and away from her eyes, that as long as she did not sweat very much, she had no problems.  And I wiped her forehead often while I mopped the bathroom floor.  If her cheeks and forehead stayed dry, I was hoping this would go well.  The bottom half of her body was fine.  When she started whipping her arms around and dancing, she started whining.  But the terror came when I started rinsing her hair.  She cried; she wailed.  It sounded like a three-alarm fire.  But I poured warm water from the laminar flow feature.  I placed Gigi face up and the laminar flow gently flowing across her forehead, or so it did when she was not flailing to let me know she was in pain.  Her flailing never stopped.  The siren from her screams never stopped for about forty-five minutes.”

The crying finally died down to a soft whimper, but I poured the water over her forehead and across the bridge of the nose.  Lukewarm water, and Gigi would feel better soon.  She even started giggling.  But in spite of the terror of burning eyes, her hair was soft and manageable.  She was going to look good for the party tonight.

Suddenly, there was another person in the room, just outside the shower.  Dev said, “I heard the siren, and I was afraid to come in.  I know, big, strong, policeman that I am, I chickened out.”

Gigi squealed, “Naked!  Daddy!  Naked!”

I winced, but then I asked, “Dev, I told you that we had a little issue to deal with, but I dealt with it.  Why are you home so early?”

Dev snickered, “Sophie has something to tell you.”

On cue, Sophia came into the bathroom.  “Mom, I got my driver’s lice…  Mom!  You’re naked!”

Gigi yelled, “Naked!  Soapy!  Naked!”

Sophia tried to clear her throat.  She tried to avert her eyes.  “Mom!  I’m sorry.  I heard Dad say that I had a secret, and I thought that was my cue to come in and show you my driver’s license.  I’m sorry, I’ll leave now so you can finish what you were doing with Gigi and Dad.”

I groaned, “The damage is done now.  Come and get Gigi.  She is definitely not Gloria today.  And Grace?  She hasn’t shown any, but I think God has shown her some.  So, her initials or Gigi is fine for today.  Dry her off and then put her in her party dress.  We have to go to Lily the Pink later.  There are some details that I have to get straight with your father.  Thank you, Sophia, and congratulations on getting your license on the first try.  It took me three times before they were satisfied with my parallel parking.”

Sophia came to the entrance to the shower enclosure, and she took Gigi by the hand.

Gigi said, “Naked!  Soapy!  Naked!”

Sophia said, “I see that, Gigi.  Let’s go see if we can fix that little problem.  Then maybe, I can take us out for some ice cream.  But since my nose if filled with strawberries, I think we’ll have chocolate or vanilla.”

Gigi asked, “Can I have manilla?”

Sophia replied, snickering, “Sure, kiddo!  In looking at the scene of the crime.  The bathroom floor is sticky.  It will be really slippery when we try to wash the stickiness off.  Then there are pink footprints all over the place.  I think Daddy will be using the carpet shampoo thingy tonight, and using only hot water.  Shampoo on top of shampoo might be an overload.  And with all the fingerprints and an empty shampoo bottle to file in evidence, I am thinking you got into the fancy shampoo.”

Gigi said, “I wash my hair, and Mommy made my eyes hurt.”

Sophie snickered, “I don’t think Mommy did that on purpose.  Now, you are dry.  Let’s go see about those party clothes.”

Gigi said, “Naked!  Soapy!  Naked!”

Sophie said, “Yeah, I know.  And Mommy is naked too.  You look wonderful, and you smell wonderful.  And Mommy looks really good.”

I was wrapped in a Dev Yeggs bear hug.  His clothing was getting wet, but he could change.  When I heard Sophia say that I looked really good, I felt a little better about myself.  I had assumed Gigi was fine.  I neglected watching her and she got shampoo in her eyes.  I felt terrible as a mother at that moment, but Sophie said I looked really good.

Then Sophie took Gigi by the hand and walked into the hallway.  She said to Gigi, a little too loud, “Yeah, Mommy looks really good, considering how OLD she is.”  They both started giggling.

And there it was.  I looked good only considering how old I was.  And Sophie held the “O” in old a bit too long.  Hey!  I am now a grandmother, but that does not put me with one foot in the grave.  I’m not Old; I’m simply not exactly as young as I used to be.

While I was thinking about such things, I had unhooked Dev’s trousers.  We were taking things one step at a time.  Dev was apologizing and promising that after the party, he would put the carpet shampoo machine together and he might have to adjust things.  Sometimes, the tubing got clogged.  Maybe he did not run the cleaning cycle long enough after the last shampoo.  I told him to not mention two words ever again: “naked” and “shampoo.”  He said that might be hard to accomplish.  He said that my hair smelled nice.  He liked strawberries, but my blue hair was amazingly soft (continuing to dye it since the Purple Four continues to get wedding gigs, even though Menzie replaces Lilith most of the time – now flaming red (Menzie), pink (Pink), blue (me), and the one purple (Gisele)).

But then, I asked Dev to hurry up and finish.  He got confused since we were going so slow and now, he had to speed up, but he managed.

I suddenly thought that I needed girl time with my girls.  Instead of using the quiet to right the paper, I tossed Sophie the car keys and us three girls went to the fancy ice cream parlor for the expensive sundaes, even though we were about to go to a birthday party with ice cream and cake, probably.  And I agreed with Gigi, manilla (or vanilla if you prefer) would make less of a mess on her party dress, but she actually kept it clean.

Later, we walked into the conference center (dining hall, etc.) of Lily the Pink and there were video cameras set up around a huge box in the middle of the room.  Emmett, just home from school was in the corner doing sound checks and setting up for his jazz band, as the band members started trickling in.  Pink Lady had arranged for transportation.  She had buses at the church parking lot to pick up Sophie’s church friends, and buses at Flintheart to pick up her school and softball friends.  They would take the children to their homes afterwards.  It was a good thing the buses all had GPS.

But as the time arrived, there was no cake.  Mabel showed up and handed Sophie a long pink rope.  She hooked up the rope to some rings on the corners of the big box.  Mabel instructed Sophie to gently pull on the rope.  Then Mabel crossed her fingers because she’d never done this before.  I think the “engineers” that designed the box got irritated with her lack of faith.  The front of the box fell forward and the sides fell in opposite directions.  As it did so, birthday cards started falling all over from within the original box.  Cameras were flashing.  Menzie, Margie, Brooke, and Carla ran to the box and started gathering the birthday cards.  There were far too many to read and respond to at the moment, so Sophia gave a general thanks to everyone.  But the only cake was a small three-layer cake, sitting on a huge box, just a little smaller than the original.  It could not feed all these people.  But by this point, Mabel had reattached the rope and handed it to Sophia.

Sophia pulled carefully again, and the same thing happened.  Except, this time, gift cards from every big store in town showered down as the box fell apart.  There was structure on the inside of the side pieces.  Now the cake was two tiers of three layers each.  Again, while Sophie stood there in shock, Menzie, Margie, Brooke and Carla, gathered the gift cards, each with a note on who had given the card.

As the debris was cleared, and Mabel had reattached the rope, she handed the rope to Sophie and promised it was the last time.  Sophie pulled carefully on the rope.  The yet smaller big box fell into three pieces.  By this time, as the fireworks, mostly sparklers, were lit and confetti was blown into the air from inside the third box, Jim Kaiser, Kevin Johnson, and Blaise were giving each other the high-fives.  They had carefully designed the three boxes to fall and spread their contents so that the cake would be protected with each pull.  Now Sophie saw the decorations around the bottom three-layer tier.  There was a photo of Sophia from a birth picture to her recent photo of her Sophomore year softball team photo.  Seventeen photos, from birth until recent.

I turned to Dev and asked, “How much did it cost, Dev?”

He shrugged, “Mabel did not give me a bill yet, but she said she would only take the cost of materials.  It was announced to only give birthday cards and gift cards, packaged separately.  Menzie, Margie, and Emmett have been collecting them and giving them to Mabel.  The three engineers, or is it musketeers, donated their time, including Griffin Grunge giving Mabel a full set of drawings.  If it worked, and with Blaise in charge, it had to work, they could rescale the cake and the boxes depending on how much the family wanted to pay, but it would be costly regardless.  But for this first time of doing it this way, Mabel volunteered and the engineers volunteered to prove that it would work.  A challenge, if you will.  And that was the reason for all the video cameras.  They wanted to see how everything fell, to fix anything if it needed fixing.”

Gigi walked over to the cake.  Out of all the photos, she focused on Sophie’s one-year-old photo.  “Mommy! Soapy Naked!”  They had used the obligatory bathtub photo.  And I think that solved who in the family gathered the photos, her loving little brother, Blaise.  I was thinking that pay back would come in about six months.

Dev snickered, “I told you it was going to be impossible to not hear ‘naked’ again in your lifetime.”

I asked, “And what is the cake?”

Dev said, “Sophie’s favorite.  Banana Split Cake!”

I almost cried, “More strawberries?  No!”

Dev laughed, “Yes, each three-tier section has a strawberry layer with something like Rocky Road icing, a vanilla layer with whipped cream and bananas and a strawberry jam ribbon, and a chocolate layer with caramel icing and more bananas.  Only Mabel seems to know how to keep the layers intact.  Then Mabel wrapped the whole thing in her usual fondant.  Do you like the pictures?  They are reprints on icing.  They are edible, so if you want photos, you better take a few, but Blaise took a lot as he and Kevin were boxing everything up.”

As I looked over to see my darling sixteen-year-old daughter, she was crying, hiding her tears with her hands.  I did not know if I should ask.  Was she overwhelmed by all the show of love for her that was in the room, or was she angry with herself – she being the ace detective, and everyone pulling off a monumental surprise on her?

Oh, why not?  I went over and put my arms around her.

“Mom,” she said.  “Who am I to deserve all this?  Easter didn’t get this kind of treatment.”

I snickered, “Easter turned sixteen when we were in a virus lockdown.  Besides, he is a boy.  Well, he will be twenty soon, and as a father, his sweet sixteen days are behind him now.  The focus for them now is Stormie.  And it looks like Gigi likes her niece.  I wonder who is going to break it to them that they are not sisters.”

Sophia laughed, “Wait a few years.  At this age, they wouldn’t understand anyway.”

Brooke came up to Sophia while I was still in hearing range.  Brooke said, “Now, are you and Emmett going to hook up?”

Sophia said, “What do you mean?”

Brooke tried to whisper, but too loud, “Do the deed?”

Sophia said, “No!  That happens after we are married and he hasn’t proposed, yet.  Why would sixteen be the trigger to do that?”

Brooke moaned, “Well, that’s about when Goober and I did it.  Not on my birthday, but…”

Sophia gasped, “You and Goober Gomez?  You don’t do any kissy face around school.”

Brooke sighed, “I first met him in the weight room.  His real name is Ricardo Francisco Gomez.  No, his parents were not I Love Lucy fans, nor did they honeymoon in San Francisco.  Both his parents loved Dick Francis novels.  But Carla wanted me to ask, since you were the only infielder that was still a, umm, a virgin.”

Sophia asked, “Who is Carla’s boyfriend?”

Brooke asked, “Do you know the top golfer in the school?”

Sophia asked, “She is sleeping with Brenton Munsford?  His family is old money and very stuffy, they are about the most stuck up of any of the Hoity Toity people.  Carla is black.  Her grandparents were in professional sports, and that’s the only reason that her parents got college degrees.  That’s a strange combination.”

Brooke shrugged, “She says that his parents know they are sleeping together.  She walks into their house through the front door.  And I think all four of us are wanting to go to school here at T.R.U.S.T. and see how the athletic thing goes before we tie the knot.  Anyway, I respect your decision.  You and Emmett are a great couple.  And, girlfriend, we are a team.  Anything for my teammates.”

Sophia walked over to me and asked, “Did you hear any of that?”

I nodded, “Let’s just keep them in our prayers, Sophia.  You love them as much now as you did before you knew.  And I hope this did not put any time pressure on you.  You know that God does not tempt.”

Sophia nodded, “Yes, Mom.  I know how you felt your senior year of high school and that is what I do not have to worry about.  Emmett wants to be a preacher.  He does not want to start off in life on the wrong road.”

I smiled and nodded.  I may be rusty, but I have some pretty good kids.  I thought, ‘It must be God filling in the gaps when the parent screws up at times.’  Then I prayed silently, “Lord, I am making the same mistakes with Gigi that I made with the other three.  There will always be work that can get in the way of being a Mommie, but does it half to get in the way?  Lord, give me wisdom.  First, I need to help Gigi improve her vocabulary.  Second, I need to give her more attention so that she does not have to take her clothing off to get attention.  And third, there always seems to be that third thing in the pastor’s sermon.  I guess my third thing is to schedule time each week in my calendar to put my work aside and get on the floor and play with her.  If I do that, I might have that soccer player that I always wanted in the family.  In your name I pray, amen.”

Credits

I baked the single banana split cake for my wife when we had been married just a couple of months.  She said it was far too sweet, and I have never baked another one.  But it was great!  I got brownie points for the effort.  She learned that I could bake.  And I ate all but one piece of it!  Now that really is a Win! Win! Win!

The idea of the surprise cake came from the internet in that some bakeries around the world actually make such creations with presents, cards and other surprises falling out of the box that hides the cake itself.  Funny how they say they “can” but never giving a price.