Please, No Empty Chairs: Don’t Mess With Marci

If the world could only have one Marci Ann Walton, I will be forever grateful that our family was the one blessed enough to have her. There’s not a person in our family that hasn’t been affected by her. She absolutely does not allow you to take yourself too seriously.

One lunch time when she was about five, Marci, Jamie, and I were sitting at the table. Marci had been talking about people’s names. Then she asked me very thoughtfully, “Mom who were you named after? Were you named after a star, a flower, or . . . a Q-Tip?

One time Marci and Jamie were sitting at the kitchen bar eating lunch before Marci went to kindergarten. As Jamie looked at Marci’s red cup, she said to me, “I don’t understand why Marci loves red so much . . .” To which Marci responded, “I don’t like red.” Jamie reasoned with, “You ALWAYS choose the red cup.” To which Marci replied, “Well, that’s because it’s my favorite color.” Jamie looked at me, shook her head and said, “She’s weird.”

One afternoon I was walking Marci to the bus stop and we realized we were kind of late. We started running up the hill and Marci said, “I hear the bus! . . . or else it’s birds chirping.” “Those sound just alike, don’t they Marci.” And she was sure they did.

She might’ve been number six in the family and way younger than her bigger brothers, but somehow she has this innate sense of how to keep those older guys in line. One day I was making bread, and as I was pulling the dough out to make it into loaves, Marci begged me for some dough. I gave her a little wad to play with. She did everything she could think of to it and left it in quite a disgusting state until she saw my pile of lentils sitting there waiting to be washed and cooked. She shaped the dirty dough into a cookie shape and then put little lentils all over it and surprisingly, it looked exactly like a chocolate chip cookie. Unsuspecting Dallin walked in from school right then as Marci was standing there holding her cookie. He stopped long enough to ask for some as he put it into his mouth and she was surprisingly willing to let him. He took at least half of it in one big bite and for once Marci didn’t scream that she’d been robbed. Well, I just have to say that the face he made as his taste buds went into hysteria was what has been referred to as one of those Kodak Moments.

One morning I was doing something in the kitchen and Marci was sitting at the bar. She says, “Mom, what happens if you don’t like the guy at the temple? Do you slap him?” After trying to figure out where in the world she was coming from, she told me she thought I found Jim at the temple and that I loved him and said to him, “Can you marry me please?” (I’m quoting her) and “that I took his hand and kissed it.” She thought that some day she would go to the temple and see someone there and have to marry him. Well, I tried to set her straight. Somehow she remembered that I had punched someone, but I explained that it was someone that had tried to kiss me and not someone that really liked me or that I liked.

Here is a page out of Marci’s journal that she can use to keep Devin in line: (bottom paragraph)