WE'RE GETTING MARRIED!

I was volunteering for the Lifeteen program at St. Mary's Church in Dedham. Jimmy was hired to start up the same program at a different church. On a quest for ideas for how to begin, he came to visit the best program in the archdiocese, and low and behold there I was, painting a mural on one of the walls of the Lifehouse he came to see. Months went by and Jimmy ended up volunteering in Dedham too. The powers at be must have seen it coming when they paired us together to lead the same retreat session. We quickly became great friends. With movie watching parties at the Hill, surrounded by our friends at the local watering hole, and late night drives it was pretty easy to tell where this was going. And I suppose the rest is history...

One of our favorite places to go is "beautiful Cape Cod", so to make it additionally special for us, Jimmy planned a grande proposal by the water. On New Year's Eve we have the tradition of heading to the Cape for what we endearingly call "Rob's Rocking New Year" after several wild parties to ring in the new year accompanied by our friends and family and hosted by Jimmy's uncle, Rob. In keeping the tradition alive, we had planned to go down the Cape and my parents, eager to see what all the fuss was about made plans to be there too. Jimmy, seeing that both our families were going to be together saw this as the perfect opportunity to propose. Unbeknown to me, Jimmy and our friends had been scheming for months on how this was going to unfold. The day before he made the trek down to set up a candellit path to a beautifully decorated Christmas tree adorned with an ornament I had handmade and nearby were our Christmas stockings and a family heirloom Nativity set. Jimmy had talked about seeing the beautiful Christmas tree lights the entire car-ride down so as soon as we got there we headed down the path to see them. The closer we got, the whole scene unfolded before me. He dropped to one knee and I answered with an enthusiastic, "yes!". It was then that I heard the clicking on the camera of our friend, Elizabeth, who had been hiding out behind a tree to capture the moment. But that sound was quickly drawn out by the pop of fireworks that had been set off by Jimmy's brother, Steve, and our friend, Peter. We made the walk back up to the house where we were greeted with cheers, smiles, hugs, and champagne by our family and friends who had been silently hiding out and anxiously awaiting. The night went on to be what my grandfather would refer to as "one hell of a party", and will go down in history as perhaps the most rocking of all of Rob's Rocking New Years.