For two years, an infatuated Sheldon John Bell drove his teammate to their ultimate Frisbee games, painfully aware that she had a boyfriend and visibly jealous on the one occasion she accepted a lift from someone else. Then, one day in the summer of 2000, after her relationship ended, she was walking to his house for her customary ride and bought him a candy apple on an impulse.
"I think that was a turning point," Zayna Alice Khayat muses today. "I had changed the way I looked at him."
That Labour Day, on a group camping trip to Elora Gorge, she decided that "he had everything I was looking for, and I went after him."
Their new status was confirmed with a $150 speeding ticket, which Mr. Bell received while rushing to meet her at the Toronto Ferry Docks for their first date. (The occasion, appropriate for two ultimate players, was a game of Frisbee golf on one of the Toronto Islands.)
As the two became more serious, Dr. Khayat found herself with some explaining to do during a 2001 family visit to Lebanon. She had cordially answered an enthusiastic "yes" to what seemed like an innocuous question from her aunt.
"My Arabic is not that good. I thought she was asking if I liked her house," recalls Dr. Khayat, who soon realized she had agreed to marry a cousin the coming Sunday. She then received a dowry of sorts from her aunt's family: a box of apricots.
After the imbroglio was resolved, she shared her relief with Mr. Bell by e-mail. "People there marry cousins because everybody in the village is probably a cousin," she explained.
When she returned to Toronto, "he was waiting at Pearson with a ribbon-tied box of apricots -- the best he could find -- and my parents were sold on him," she says.
"I'd have had my father plant his two hundred acres [of farmland]with apricot trees if necessary," he says.
Winner of the University of Windsor's president's medal, Dr. Khayat was completing her PhD in biochemistry at the University of Toronto when she met Mr. Bell, who is now a project manager for the TD Financial Group. "She was a big proponent of my going back to get my MBA," he says. "She has an energy and passion that pushes me."
Her passion extends to her volunteer work with Come Together, a Toronto organization that seeks a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by bringing people on both sides, including world leaders, together. Intensely involved since her friend Roy Eitan, an Israeli immigrant, started it, Dr. Khayat soon introduced Mr. Bell to the cause. "Before my exposure to Zayna, I had little understanding of the issue, but we now share a lot of social values," he says.
With an exotic blue diamond ring tucked away in a pocket, Mr. Bell envisioned a Thanksgiving, 2003, proposal in Sunnybrook Park, where they had first met playing Frisbee, but blustery weather intervened. By the New Year, he was still waiting for the right moment. He seized the opportunity on Valentine's Day, at Grandview Lodge Resort in Muskoka.
The prospect of nearly freezing left Dr. Khayat reluctant to traipse out into the starry night, so he sensibly compromised with a chat by a cozy fireside table, where he proposed.
Dr. Khayat, who is employed by Boston Consulting Group as a strategic management consultant, spends most of her time with U.S.-based clients. The work draws on her "brains and problem-solving skills," she says, as well as her time. "It's 80-hour weeks, and Sheldon and I have had a weekend-only relationship the last few years," she says.
Their wedding took place at the 200-year-old Knox Flos Presbyterian Church, adjacent to the Bell family farm near Elmvale, Ont., with Rev. Margaret Robertson officiating.
The evening reception at the Steam Whistle Roundhouse was a spirited, albeit non-alcoholic, affair. Guests, including their entire Frisbee team, received gift bags with custom-designed memento Frisbees. Two bands offered a contrast. One performed with Lebanese belly dancers, while the Janice Hagan Jazz Band had the newlyweds, prepped by lessons, swinging.
The couple, both 30, live in Toronto. They honeymooned in the Middle East -- a trip that included a visit to an ancient Lebanese cedar tree where the bride years earlier had carved her initials.
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