Rebekah Grace Wyant

I am conservative by nature, yet there is a facet of my personality that attracts someone like Marcia.

     

She dreamt of traveling the world, instead of walking down the aisle. When most young women in our circle of friends studied education or nursing, Marcia majored in advertising. Christmas breaks, she danced in an aerobics class at the local Y, then hopped, in her leg warmers, from one bar to the next.

     

Blinded by snow on a particularly treacherous drive home, she turned down a one-way street, the wrong way, past the only police station in town. Detained and nearly arrested, not for drunk driving, but because of a natural swagger and an insolent mouth.

     

Marcia was the kind of person who would agree to spend the summer in a place she had never been, with someone she barely knew. How Marcia became part of my school friends' plans to find a place to live and work escapes me. Howbeit, she was the only one who drove away with me that fated Easter break in 1976, toward a summer, long remembered.