What a Way to Start a Life Together!

What a way to launch their life together—a Toronto couple canceled their swank wedding reception, got married at City Hall, then donated the money saved to sponsor a Syrian ‪#‎refugee‬ family of four, while encouraging friends and family to donate, too. Most of their goal has been met, and now, it being so public, I’m sure they’ll go way over the top. A true feel-good story on the CBC website.

This story is meaningful to me for many reasons, even beyond the generosity the happy and handsome couple have shown to people in need, and the example they’ve set for the rest of us. In 1991, when my wife-to-be and I were deciding how we’d be married, we had some money provided to us by our families, and instead of holding a big reception we used it to travel in Italy for six weeks, a honeymoon for the ages. We backpacked and took trains up and down the country, from Bergamo in the north down south to Rome, with stops along the way in Florence, Arezzo, Siena, Padua, Perugia, Verona, Venice, and places too tiny to remember. Kyle is a painter, and spending so much time seeing Renaissance art and architecture was a veritable graduate course in seeing for her, and for me, too. Here we are during that long honeymoon of ours.