Eric Higgins fell in love with the girl next door -- but only after she moved out of state.
Eric, newly elected Pulaski County sheriff, and his family lived in a house at 28th and State streets in Little Rock, and he was just 3 years old when Caron Bunting and her family moved in across the street.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “My first memory of noticing him was that he was cute.”
He says: “I just thought she was the new girl across the street in pigtails.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “Eric wasn’t sick. He got sick a week before we got married and we didn’t know if he would be OK for the wedding.”
He says: “I had injured my back in a car accident a couple of years before and I re-injured it, plus I got sick, right before the wedding. I was watching the bridesmaids come in and I wasn’t sure how long I could stand there.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “I think what’s worked best for us is that we were friends for a long time before we got married. I think if you keep the friendship that’s what has really helped. At this point we are each other’s best friends.”
He says: “We have to communicate with each other clearly and understand that sometimes we misunderstand what the other person is saying. We don’t receive it correctly or it wasn’t articulated correctly, so we have to work on our communication, with grace.”
"We knew each other," he says. "But we didn't hang out with each other."
There were a few occasions when the neighborhood children came together to play Four Square, but for the most part they broke off into groups.
"She hung out with the girls, I hung out with the guys in the neighborhood," Eric says.
Then one summer, they realized they were the only ones still around. Both are the youngest in their families and their older siblings had work and driver's licenses to keep them occupied, as did many of the friends they had spent time with on previous summer days.
"That summer I turned 14 or 15, I guess, so I was a year away from being able to get a job," Caron says. "We spent a lot of time together that summer and I guess that's when we really kind of got to know each other."
When summer ended, Caron went back to Hall High School and Eric went back to Catholic High School for Boys, and both fell back into their own social circles.
Caron graduated from high school in 1981 and lived at home while she went to Philander Smith College. Eric graduated from high school in 1983 and went to work for the Little Rock Police Department not long after that.
Caron moved to Dallas after college. Eric remembers seeing her get out of her car and go into the house one weekend when she was home for a visit.
"It just hit me that I would be wasting my time if I was with anybody else, that she was the one," he says. "I realized I was wasting anyone else's time because Caron was the one I felt that God had for me to be with."
Caron and her friend had been living with her friend's brother while they saved up to get their own apartment. They found one after about four months and Caron returned home to move some of her things from her mother's house to her new place, and she asked Eric to help load her things into a truck. He was working and couldn't help, but he gave her some advice.
"I told her when she was ready for someone to treat her right to give me a call," he says.
When she was back home for Thanksgiving that year, she and Eric talked for a while and she invited him to go to Dallas for New Year's Eve. They had planned to go out, but that didn't happen because Caron had the flu.
"He did come by," she says. "I think he even cooked for me."
Eric didn't stay long.
"She was sick and out of it," he says. "I had a brother-in-law who had a sister who lived in Dallas, so he rode down with me and my sister because I didn't want to go down by myself. When I came down and she told me to get away, at least I had some place to stay."
His visit, however, sparked many more conversations and he made up for that one botched trip with several others.
"That's when we started dating," she says.
A few months later, Eric asked Caron if she would marry him if he asked her.
"It probably wasn't the right way to ask," he says. "She made me to change my phrase from if I asked to say I was asking."
He hadn't exactly planned to propose.
"I had been praying about it," he says. "My prayer was that I wasn't falling in love with a memory, because Caron and I had been friends -- good friends -- and I liked her and my prayer was that I would see Caron for who she was that day, during that time, and not from a memory five or so years ago."
They exchanged their vows on March 9, 1991, at New Calvary Temple Church in North Little Rock, with three officiants -- Caron's minister, a Catholic priest and Caron's brother, an ordained minister.
They honeymooned in the home Eric's brother and his wife had just bought in San Diego while his brother and sister-in-law stayed in the home the newlyweds had just bought in Little Rock.
Eric and Caron, who is the assistant registrar at Central High School, have two daughters -- Janay of Dallas and Jessica of Little Rock.
"I've always kind of liked her," Eric says of his wife. "I remember one time I told my sister-in-law, 'Do you see Caron across the street? I'm going to marry her one day.' I just felt a connection with her. I felt she was the person I was supposed to be with. It just took her going all the way to ... Dallas before she realized she was supposed to be with me."
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High Profile on 01/20/2019