in good times, and bad

Fifty-nine years in the same house—he came home as a baby and never left. He even bought the house from his parents when they retired out of state.

Forty-one years at the same job—he got it right out of high school, proved his worth, and never looked back.

He was steady, and quiet, and predictable, and shy. Nothing ever really changed in his life; he didn't even rearrange the house when his parents moved nineteen years ago.

Then in she walked, three years ago. Highly educated, well-traveled, a temporary resident, she was tiny and quick and adventurous and foreign—all things that should have terrified him.

But they didn't.

He thought he loved her, he told my dad, as he mourned her visa-required home-going. He thought she was the one.

Go get your passport, my dad told him. Go after her, let her know you want her. Meet her family, get to know them, see her home. Show her this is serious—you're serious.

We didn't think he would. He'd never left the country in his life.

But a few months later, we got an e-mail with a photo of him, barefoot, on a bamboo raft in the middle of a Filipino river.

And that was when we knew that she really was the one.

Two days ago, he married her. He wept when she came up the aisle, and he trembled when he reached toward her.

But he held her hands, and he looked in her eyes, and he told her he loved her, and he promised—before God and all of us there—to love her and hold her and take care of her forever.

We all knew he meant those promises.

Today you're getting a kind, generous, faithful man, my dad said to her in the toast. My brother.

He was exactly right. He's right about most things, actually.

If a man truly loves a woman, he will find her anywhere and make her his.

I know this statement to be completely and irrevocably true. I need look no farther than my uncle
. . . and my now-aunt.

Mazel tov.