Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

My relatives have gone away;
    my closest friends have forgotten me.

• Job 19:14

My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds;
    my neighbors stay far away.

• Psalm 38:11

You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
    darkness is my closest friend.

• Psalm 88:18

Do not trust a neighbor;
    put no confidence in a friend.
Even with the woman who lies in your embrace
    guard the words of your lips.

• Micah 7:5

At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them.

• 2 Timothy 4:16

I finished a couple of jigsaw puzzles recently.  The thought came into my head how I had become such a fan of jigsaw puzzles.  I would go with my Florida cousins to Lucy, TN, a small community north of Memphis, TN.  We all had an aunt there, and my cousin’s father was from a block over.  They went to visit their cousins.  I went to be with them, but also to see my aunt.

On occasion, the weather would be bad, and Aunt Relia would open her entertainment closet.  Aunt Relia’s husband had died just before the stock market crash.  The life insurance policy came in just in time for her to be the only one in town with two pennies to rub together.  Radio was king from the 1930s to the 1950s, but Aunt Relia wanted something else to entertain her.  She had an entire closet of puzzles, floor to ceiling, barely enough room to step into the closet to search for a puzzle you had not pieced together before.  I would put a puzzle together with my three cousins.  Then, my parents, knowing that I loved puzzles, would get me a puzzle each year for Christmas, and I would put the previous year’s puzzle together to keep myself busy during December.

The point is, I rarely put puzzles together by myself, but it is basically an amusement meant for one person, or one person at a time.  I miss that time with my cousins.  I miss that time with my family at Christmas.  And with me and the boys as they grew up.

Now I am rediscovering the joy of this amusing form of entertainment as a solitaire amusement.

But that got me to thinking about three other things that are solitary in nature, that were turned into a social event.

I loved to fish.  The cousins from Florida liked to fish, and the cousins from my Dad’s side of the family would fish.  But I really liked fishing with my brother.  But I made one monumental blunder.  He took his girlfriend with him, and I jumped over the electric fence.  I put a rusty lure on the swivel and made a first cast while my brother was getting his girlfriend over the fence.  I caught a largemouth bass that was one of the largest in that pond.  After an hour of not getting a nibble, and constantly being teased by his girlfriend, we went home and the entire family had a fish fry dinner, off my prize fish.

My brother married his girlfriend, and it was years before he was assigned preaching at a country church near where I was going to college.

I mentioned to my parents that I missed fishing with my brother.  My parents made my brother take a couple of hours out of his afternoon to go fishing in a pond across the road from his home.  My brother was surly.  He did not want to be in that boat.  He did not want to talk.  He was letting me know that I was not wanted, and he was no longer big brother.  He had a family of his own.  He had moved on, and I needed to do the same.  I doubt if my brother and I had a meaningful conversation for the rest of our lives, even though he officiated our wedding ceremony a few years later. Social yes, but we talked at a distance.

And I never fished in earnest after that day.

I thought about golf.  I started to play golf with friends, but to practice and get better at it, I spent a lot of time on the course by myself.  But I could talk golf for days.  I am not sure whether it is a social or solitaire amusement.

But then there is solitaire itself.  I was reading one day at lunch and I heard the distinct sound of cards being shuffled by my office partner.  He was playing Yukon Solitaire.  I watched enough of him playing to get the rules down.  I then made suggestions.  After a while, we were both moving cards and arguing over what the next move should be.  Both of us were looking two or three moves ahead in some cases.

But the nuclear engineer from across the hall was interested in our animated conversation.  He joined us, but he was Mr. Mayhem.  He would make an impetuous move near the beginning of the game that screwed everything up.  We got to the point of slapping his hand, but all three of us would laugh.

When the project closed a year later, the nuclear engineer and I moved to the same building and he invited me to his office, along with a couple of other engineers.  Imagine, four men playing solitaire with a single deck of cards while eating lunch.  A year later, I was transferred, and then there were only three engineers at the table.  I was left to do things on my own.

Shuffling the deck and playing Yukon solitaire alone was no fun at all, but I have played the game on the computer, a little.  Still not much fun.

So, there you have jigsaw puzzles, fishing, and Yukon solitaire.  All are done alone with no problem.  Maybe all three designed to be solitary activities.  But I first learned them in a social setting.  Playing them alone just was not that much fun.

As I said, I have rediscovered jigsaw puzzles as a solitary activity.  I do not understand people who glue puzzles together and frame them.  I put mine back in the box.  It is a brand new adventure each time I put the old puzzle together again.  A lot of things do not work that way.

But the Scriptures talk about family deserting us, friends letting us down.

God is always there.  We are never alone.

But those solitary things that we learned in a social setting do not seem the same without those friends who have moved on.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.