She treated me like crap when I was her assistant, even though I made her job monumentally easier.

Then she got a different job and a different assistant. She called me about 2 months into the new job and apologized for not appreciating me better and said she never realized how much I knew and how much I did until she wound up with someone she had to train in every little thing and my work was still better.

As you can imagine, this conversation proved profoundly helpful to me when she was diagnosed with Breast Cancer.

During the couple weeks before her passing, I had been reading a book, which was actually one of the worst books ever written, but it had one redeeming quality: a little story about what the title character learned after her family had been killed by insurrectionists. An old man told her to write down 3 things that she had learned from each person that had enriched her life, and blah blah blah… the book was a wretched mess of badly written descriptions, meant more for killing spiders than for reading.

Anyway, after I found that little jewel in the hideous haystack of literary garbage, I stopped reading the book and wrote down the things that I had learned from Marcia.

February had been her favorite month. She loved the sheer excessiveness of Valentine’s Day and she was also fond of groundhogs and patriotism. She always decorated for Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day and put a little stuffed groundhog on her desk. She was seriously OCD, and every paper heart had to be put up exactly where it had been the year before. It was ridiculous. I don’t know how she managed at all, having to change jobs.

Anyway, I made a pink paper heart and wrote the following on it:

3 little Wisdoms from Marcia~
1. There is no such thing as too much masking tape.
2. A little make-up goes a long way.
3. Never drive barefoot in your pajamas.

She would have smiled.

Oh, and always order ‘Jumbo’ paper clips because they remind her of Pennsylvania. Apparently, that’s what you east coast people call baloney. Anyway, she thought ‘Jumbo’ was funny.