Heartfelt Retirement Speech for Dad From a Son (3 Minutes)

The toast

Hi, everybody. I'm Sanjay, the oldest. Most of you work with my dad, which means most of you have seen him at three in the morning, which is more than I can say. For thirty years, my dad left for work around the time I went to bed.

He baked overnight at this store. Bread, rolls, the cinnamon things you all buy on weekends and pretend are for your kids. He left the house at ten at night and came home a little before six, just as my brother and I were getting up for school. We'd come into the kitchen and the whole house would smell like the bakery, because he did, and there'd be a loaf on the counter, still warm, wrapped in a dish towel.

Every morning. I don't think he missed a day in all the years I lived at home. Some mornings it was a plain white loaf. Some mornings he'd been trying something, and there'd be a note: "Tell me if this is too much rye." We were eight and ten. We had opinions about rye.

I didn't think about what that cost him until I was older. He slept while we were at school. He got up in the afternoon, ate dinner with us at five, which was his breakfast, and then he went back. He came to parent conferences in the clothes he'd slept in. He saw maybe half my basketball games, and he always asked about the ones he missed like they were the important ones. To him, I guess they were.

When I left for college, the first care package he sent was a loaf of bread. It was crushed. It was two days old. I ate the whole thing standing up in my dorm room.

Dad, you've spent thirty years making sure this town had something good first thing in the morning. Mom says your plan now is to sleep at night like a regular person and find out what a sunset looks like. I hope you sleep in. I hope you see a lot of sunsets. And if you get bored, you know where the kitchen is, and you know two grown men who still have opinions about rye.

So would you all raise a glass, please. To my dad, and to the loaf on the counter.

Why it works: The whole speech hangs on one object the family saw every morning. The cost of the night shift gets one honest paragraph without blame, and the toast calls back to the bread.