Scenes from my brother's wedding

At first, the bride was worried that the Boston
Red Sox were going to win the World Series on her wedding day.

This was not an unreasonable concern. A year ago, the groom -- my
brother Dave -- had been on the verge of proposing to her when he ran
into former Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo. Dave and Bronson ended up
talking all night, and the ring sat in my brother's pocket for another
week.

Lindsey had chosen Nov. 3 as their wedding date in hopes that the
baseball season -- the center of my brother's universe -- would finally
be over. But with rain or snow delays, it was entirely possible that
my brother's favorite team would be playing in the Series on his wedding
day. And that hardly seemed fair. After all, the Red Sox had only
waited three years since their last world championship. Lindsey and
Dave had been dating for 13.

Of course, it was baseball that had brought Dave and Lindsey together
in the first place, as Dave explained during the rehearsal dinner. Dave
had been a senior on the baseball team, and one of the younger players,
Keith, had asked for a ride to the school's annual semi-formal dance.
Dave agreed -- but only if Keith helped Dave get a date with a sophomore
soccer player named Lindsey.

Relationships that start in high school have a hard time surviving
under the best of circumstances, and Dave and Lindsey had a lot stacked
against them. Dave went to college in Chicago. Lindsey left, two years
later, to go to school in Providence. Dave's friends stayed single,
traveled the world, stayed up all night drinking and playing fantasy
baseball. Lindsey's friends married soon after college (it seemed as
though Dave and Lindsey were going to a wedding every weekend). Even
when Dave and Lindsey moved in together, in an apartment where Dave was
allowed to paint one room the color of Fenway Park, it sometimes seemed
the two of them were living in different worlds.

It was easy to miss the subtle ways they reinforced each other: how
Lindsey brought Dave food and kept him going during his long months of
studying for the bar exam, how Dave grew closer to Lindsey's family
during her grandmother's illness, bringing her grandmother an autographed
photo of her favorite Red Sox player, Johnny Damon (she didn't live to
see him betray his fans). They were different people, and it was
impossible to pin Dave down whenever anyone asked him about marriage.
But it was always clear that with Lindsey was where he wanted
to be.

The Red Sox won the World Series just about a week before the
wedding, holding their victory parade on Tuesday, before most of the
guests arrived. Tropical Storm Noel wasn't as thoughtful.

The weather -- which had been unseasonably warm and sunny for the
week before the wedding -- broke loose that morning, pounding the
church with waves of rain, sending branches crashing into the flooded
streets and causing the power to fail, for a moment, during the
ceremony as a blast of purple lightning lit up the sky through the
stained glass windows. Plans for outside photos had to be scrubbed,
and those of us in the wedding party wished we'd borrowed one of the
duck boats from the Red Sox parade for the trip to the reception,
rather than the Plymouth Rock trolley that had to weave its way
along the debris-strewn road.

But everything came together in the end. The reception hall,
which had lost power that morning, regained it just before the wedding
party arrived. All of the guests arrived, despite a tremendous crash
on Route 95 the previous evening that shut down the highway for four
hours. Even my cousin Mike, whose ship had still been at sea the day
before, came in on a redeye flight in time to deliver his reading at
the church.

True, the hotel where Dave and Lindsey -- and quite a few of the
wedding guests -- would be staying that night had no electricity.
According to Dave, however, arriving at the hotel on his wedding night
and finding the room illuminated with flickering candles wasn't the
worst thing in the world.

The next day dawned cloudless and bright. Lindsey and Dave said
goodbye to their guests and prepared to leave for their honeymoon,
where Dave promised he would go to only one game of the Hawaiian
Baseball League. Lindsey didn't seem concerned. They were on the
same team at last, and in love, as in baseball, there are no time
limits.