Wedding Toast From a Grandmother (Short, About 2 Minutes)

The speech

Good evening. I'm Dorothea, Beatriz's grandmother, and I am eighty-four, so I have been asked to sit while I say this. I will stand for the toast. Nobody has stopped me yet.

When Beatriz was ten, she stayed with me for two weeks in July while her parents moved house. The first morning, I came into the kitchen and she had set the table for breakfast. Two places. The good plates, the ones from the cabinet with the glass doors that we used at Christmas and never otherwise. I told her those were for company. She looked at me like I was slow and said, "It's just us. That's still company."

We ate off the good plates for fourteen days. I have not put them back in the cabinet since.

That is my granddaughter. She does not wait for an occasion. She decides this is one, and then it is. She has done it for her brother, for her friends, and for an old woman in a kitchen who had forgotten you could.

Then there is Lisandro. His first Thanksgiving at my house, there were fourteen of us, and Beatriz, naturally, used the good plates. At eleven that night I came down for water and found him at the sink, drying them one at a time, because she had mentioned once that they could not go in the dishwasher. She had not asked him. He had just heard her.

Lisandro, she has spent her whole life making everyone else feel like company. You are the first one I have seen do it for her. Thank you.

Now I am standing up. Everybody, please raise a glass. To Beatriz and Lisandro. Use the good plates.

Why it works: The story is small and exact, the good plates come back twice, and the groom is welcomed for a thing he did when he thought nobody was looking.