Wedding reboot: Forgot the ring

My wife and I will be celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary later this month. Following our wedding, I wrote about some of the more memorable moments and posted them on a blog that no long exists.

As our anniversary approaches, I’ve decided to re-post some of those wedding memories here as a means of preserving them as well as sharing them with readers.

Here is the next of these posts:

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It’s 6:49 and I was sitting in the Bradley Airport terminal, headphones on my head, listening to music through my laptop and playing poker online. Elysha and I were less than 48 hours married when she came running up to me from the direction of the restrooms.

“Did you hear? They just paged you at security.”

I had not heard the page but knew exactly what was going on.

Our friend Tom and Liz had arrived at our apartment earlier that morning, armed with a coffee for Elysha and a pair of smiles, ready to take us to the airport.

It was 4:45 and they were the only two smiling. Elysha and I had gone to bed about three hours prior to their arrival.

Why pack ahead of time, right?

About fifteen minutes from the airport, while sitting beside my bride in the backseat of Tom’s truck, I gasped in horror, realizing that I had left my newly-christened wedding band on my desk at home. After enduring the angry glare of Elysha, Tom and Liz (in an effort to save my marriage) agreed to return to our house, pick up the ring, and ship it overnight to Bermuda.

Less than an hour later, Tom had arrived at the security checkpoint with my wedding band in hand and another smile on his face. A door was cracked open by airport security personnel and Tom was allowed to pass his hand through in order to give me the ring.

As we were walking back to our gate, Elysha said, “Tom and Liz are two of our nicest friends.”

It’s true. We have a great many wonderful friends in our lives, and many of them would have been more than willing to pick us up this morning, and most would have gone the extra mile (about 30 miles actually) to save my ass by delivering my wedding band just moments before I needed to board the plane.

But Tom and Liz routinely do these things without complaint.

Without grumble.

Without looking for anything in return.

It makes them an odd and baffling pair of friends, and we sometimes wonder if they originated from some other planet, but it also makes them two of the nicest friends we have.