LARGETONY Blog

“I was told that as the Best Man, I would be responsible for the toast. I looked at the guest list and thought to myself, ‘ that’s a lot of loaves of bread.’…I apologize for that. I was also told that the toast should include a joke. That’s the best I could come up with, so I figured I would get it out of the way from the start.

It seems like just yesterday that J told me he found the girl he was going to marry. That’s an exagerration. It was more like the day before yesterday. I’m joking, of course. It’s true that J and C began dating a little less than a year ago and in only a few months, they have pledged their lives to each other. But love is both swift and eternal and therefore neither it’s speed nor it’s duration can be truly be measured against the turning of a calendar or the ticking of a stopwatch. Love is measured only by the beating of the heart.

Think back to when you were a kid at the doctor’s office and the first time he let you hear your own heart beat through his stethoscope. Remember the joy and excitement you felt, which only made your heart beat faster, which only made you more excited? I doubt that a feeling as great as that can even halfway compare to the feeling J and C must have felt when they first heard their hearts beating perfectly in time with one another.

I won’t make any jokes about J and C playing doctor. Not in mixed company, anyway. Besides, this shouldn’t be a time for jokes, but a time for joy. And each of us, by being invited here today, has been given a special opportunity to listen in on that stethoscope and share in the experience of their excitement and joy.

To J and C, may your hearts beat strong, beat lively in times of joy, beat steady in times strife, in times of adversity beat to your own drum, and beat with love until both hearts beat no more…but always beat as one.

Everybody raise your glass…to J and C.”

So, that was my little speech for the toast at J’s wedding reception on Saturday. I didn’t write it until a couple of days before and I read it from a piece of paper. I had to do it on a microphone, so you could probably hear the paper rattling in my shaking hands. But, I think it went pretty smooth. I did stumbled over “stethoscope,” but it’s my own fault for picking that metaphor. But I didn’t make a fool of myself, so I guess that’s all I could ask for.

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