Marci and I met our sophomore year in summer band. We'd been cast together in a squad and maybe she can help me remember who else was with us -- Robin Blackmon, and who else? Marching side by side in the sweltering Houston heat on a half grassy/half bald patch of field tends to create foxhole friends for life.
It wasn't long before we were hanging out at each other's houses, spending weekends together, going to the movies, trading notes on boys -- real notes, not text messages -- folded in that funky 80s style. (Here is a refresher course, if you need one. Amateurs.)
We traded clothes, ones with giant shoulder pads, skinny ankles, high waists, neon colors, and crazy bold patterns. We should probably cop to being caught many times in a blazer with rolled up sleeves, skinny tie, and/or beret. . . and stirrup pants with two very long, collared shirts, popped, with gigantic earrings.I admit nothing concerning leg-warmers.
Marci entered my life at a time when I was feeling alienated from the regular group I'd been a part of from church. After my first heartbreak, it was Marci who kept my head on my shoulders... and made a few prank calls to get me laughing again. After my second break-up, we were out shopping at the mall and laughing the next day. Paulette still mentions how much she enjoyed being my lockermate in homeroom, primarily because of the Chippendales calendar hanging inside the locker door, my Christmas present from Marci that first year. (Marci, Dad nearly banished our friendship over that calendar. You just skated by!)
We never had many classes together. She was doing the higher order math and all the computer classes she could take, ones where you had to have your own supply of 5.5 floppy disks for memory storage on the Commodore 64s. I was taking much tougher stuff like Introduction to Drama where we lip-synched to the Supremes' "Stop in the Name of Love" for one assignment, and Mr. LaTouche's Business Law class, after which I planned to make millions as the youngest partner in history at some firm resembling L.A. Law's. We did have a semester of Academic Decathlon together, hours before and after school and on weekends studying ten different subjects, before she jumped ship. (Quitter ;)
But we made up for the brief moments in the hallways and afternoons of band practice with hours of talking at night. These were the days were you spent evenings on the phone, tying up the only land line in the house, getting fussed at by the rest of the family, and not being able to move farther than across half the room before the cord stopped you. Those were conversations where you were actually present, listening and talking and not multi-tasking a millions other things, mostly because you just couldn't reach anything else.
One of the hardest classes I struggled through was homemaking (read: sewing) that I got stuck in my freshman year when I'd signed up for typing. It was that class that made me appreciate Marci's seamstress skills. She often made her own banquet gowns, and then let me borrow them. At right, us at our Band Banquet, as juniors, her last year in band while trying to also keep up with the Lariaettes dance team. She really couldn't be in two places on the football field at once, it turned out. We are both wearing creations by Marci, the teal number being one that she'd whipped up for her junior Lariaette banquet that year. If memory serves, the previous year we'd both worn the same lacy blue number I'd picked up at 5-7-9 (in a size 2, sigh) which I wore to sophomore band banquet and she wore to sophomore Lariaette banquet. Looking at the photos, we were recycling long before it went viral...
At Baybrook Mall, right near the food court, was a camera shop that had a large photo booth where you could pose together without sitting on top of one another. Here is the surviving evidence that we were giant goobers:
We strategically stayed at school on Senior Skip Day, and made our own, a week later when we could easily get away with it. What did the rebels do? We hit the zoo, Hermann Park, and the Museum of Natural Science. Livin' la vida loca, baby.
Senior Tea
Prom, Table 17 and after graduation at the overnight Project Graduation held at the school.
We had one last summer of hanging out, laying out by the pool, and running around before we headed our separate ways to college. She was heading to UT and I was going to SHSU. 
We had only one weekend in the fall where we were both back home at the same time in October, 1988. We also sat for a set of pictures together, this time at the local camera guy's place just down the strip center from Randall's. We included these in our Christmas Party invitation we sent out to a bunch of high school friends to be held over Christmas vacation at my parents' new house in Clear Lake. (How I have zero pictures of that event, I have no idea.)
It was at that Christmas break that the wheels started turning in my mind about transferring to school in Austin for my sophomore year, where Marci and I shared our first apartment at 2232 Royal Crest and adopted our kittens from the Austin shelter, Calvin and Hobbs.
But after that year, deciding I was in a rush to graduate and seeing that I could finish all the requirements of my degree at SHSU at least a year faster than at UT, I moved back to Huntsville in 1990. She was my maid of honor in 1991. I was hers in 1994. And somewhere is a picture of her in her wedding dress and me in my hugely floral printed bridesmaid dress and hat.
In 1999 we spent a weekend down at Nuevo Laredo shopping, long before you were taking your life in yours hands crossing the borders there. And then life really got in the way, so that the next ten years are kind of a blur. I remember coming up to Austin one weekend, buying beanie babies on the side of the road, going to the pool, and watching The Usual Suspects in the upstairs loft when Brittney was a little baby. Marci and Ren came to visit us once in our rent house in Navasota. Marci came for a weekend one time in the house we bought in 2000, when she and Ren were deciding on the house plans they would eventually build in Austin, and where they still live today. We'd trade Christmas Cards with updated photos of the family. But there were very long stretches of silence, when we were both caught up in raising kids and working, years just slipping by.But every time we did manage to reconnect, it was like no time at all had passed, as though we were still those giggly, eye-rolling girls who kept trying to keep Robin marching on the correct foot in time to the music: "LEFT, LEFT, LEFT!" In 2004 I went to Austin for a conference and spent a night at the Maddox house.
In 2008, I flew from Colorado to Austin. It had been four years since we'd seen one another. And there she was, waiting for me at the top of the escalator, just like she's always been there for me. We spent the first night plowing through all her old scrapbooks from high school and college. Then we drove to Houston for our 20th high school reunion and stayed at her parents' house, the same one where I'd spent so many nights at as a teenager, crammed in the single room that housed her and her two sisters. We drove around all the familiar haunts of the old neighborhood. It was such a fun weekend of reminiscing and wondering how time passes so slowly, and yet like quicksilver.
In 2010, for her 40th birthday, Marci took the weekend to visit me. We ate out, talked, took walks, watched TV together. It was nothing major, but it was special. 
In 2011, when I was laid up from surgery, she sent me Puppy Flowers and chocolates, which arrived at exactly the right time to make me smile when I feeling blue. I got an email from her that she found herself giggling so much late one night while reading my blog, she was afraid she was going to wake Ren. We chatted for nearly an hour a couple of months back. Just those tiny little strands that continually bind us together, remind us of how far we've come, and how precious our friendship is.
I get to spend the weekend with her in Austin as I'm helping Nick get moved to Southwestern. August in Austin. I think we could have planned that a little better...
Happy Birthday Marci! I love you, my dear friend.
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