Ron, both better looking and more nervous than groom,
at Houston and Geri Spencer's wedding.

GENEROUS RONNIE
On the run up to my wedding day, I already felt in Ronnie’s debt from years of his generous friendship. He gives to both my wife, Geri, and me continually. It’s little things, he claims, requiring no effort at all. The dozens of cases of wine I keep in his Sydney basement occupy space he’s not using, anyway. Right. The bed of his that I sleep in when I’m in Sydney is one that would otherwise be empty—regardless of the fact that the week I stayed with him before my wedding was the only week he might have gotten his house to himself between two months of family visits. He cut an extra set of keys for Geri.

But he’s right. That’s nothing. . . .compared to the rest. When we asked him to be our MC for the wedding, he demurred, uncomfortable with a big speaking part. So, we said, look, we just want you close by, Ronnie. We want you to hand us the rings, and we want you there when we’re signing the bits of paper that say we’re married, and we want your name on them, too. And we want you at the dinner table with us, so we can smile all giddy at you. Okay, he said, so long as the only talking he had to do was to introduce others. He’d be much more comfortable just doing some organizing, you know, any way to make the day go more smoothly. To appease him, we said, yeah, okay, whatever. If there’s stuff that needs doing, we’ll send it your way. Of course, there won’t be much, because everything’s been pretty much taken care of, already. Yeah, right.

Well, the wedding being an “occasion”, and Ronnie being Scottish, he turned up in his kilt, as usual. Cut a damn striking figure in it, too, as usual. And, then, as things started getting under way, a hundred little details popped up needing to be taken care of. The caterer had questions; the DJ couldn’t find the disc; family members needed rounding-up for pictures. Whenever anyone approached either Geri or me with a questioning look, we just said, “Go see the guy in the skirt.” And they did. Any detail we remembered at the last minute, he had remembered already, right down to organizing taxis for our parents. At one point I even sent my sister to Ronnie with her malfunctioning digital camera. He laughed, put his hands on the camera, and it started working again.

And then. . .

And then it was all over. Geri and I, blissful and buzzing, walked into our hotel room after midnight and, there, smack at the foot of the bed was a large, flat screen: beside it, a portable DVD player, and a card with a message of love from some of our closest friends. Geri and I just looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Ronnie.”

We pressed play, and alternated between tears and giggles for the next two hours. Ronnie, along with a small crew of very good secret-keepers, recruited dozens of our family and friends to create a 2-hour DVD round-up of our lives. Thanks to them, and especially to Ronnie, that’s how we spent our wedding night: in each other’s arms, getting embraced, regaled, embarrassed, and loved from all over the world, courtesy of the guy in the skirt. We went from feeling like the two luckiest people in the world to feeling like the two most given-to people in the world.

Houston Spencer