Best Man Speech for a Groom in His Fifties (Heartfelt, 3 Minutes)

The speech

Good evening. I'm Aurelio. Godfrey and I met in September of 1996, in the parking lot of a hardware store, when he helped me tie a ladder to the roof of a car that had no roof rack. He did a better job of it than I would have, and he has been doing that ever since.

I want to tell you about his canoe.

In 2004, Godfrey bought a canoe. Green, sixteen feet, two seats. He kept it on sawhorses behind his garage, and for twenty years he took it out on the reservoir most Saturdays in summer, alone, sitting in the back, with the front seat empty. His friends had opinions about this. I had opinions about this. I told him more than once to sell it and buy a kayak, something built for one. He always said the same thing: "It's a two-person boat. I'm not going to pretend it's something else."

I think about that line a lot now. He was not waiting around. He had a full life. He built a business, he coached his nephew's team for six seasons, he showed up to every one of my kids' birthdays with the wrong size gift and the right attitude. But he never once pretended the empty seat was the plan. He just kept the boat in good shape and went out on Saturdays.

Then, three summers ago, I drove past the reservoir on a Saturday morning, and there were two people in the green canoe. And the one in the front seat was paddling harder than he was.

Fenella, I do not know what you said to him on that first trip out, but he came back a different shape. He stands differently. He calls me on weeknights to tell me nothing in particular, which he never did in thirty years. He laughs in the middle of his own sentences now. I had hoped for a long time that someone would come along who could see what the rest of us saw in him, and then you did, and you saw more.

Everybody, please stand and raise a glass. To Godfrey and Fenella. Front seat's taken.

Why it works: It treats the long wait as a choice rather than a sad fact, the canoe does the work a paragraph about love would do, and the bride gets the last image.