Tag: toast

My brother was married last month; I was the best man. I wanted to give a really good toast, so worked long and hard writing it. I think it came out well; here it is:

Hello, everyone; for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jonathan, Ben’s brother. I’d like to tell you a story about how Ben asked Lynn to marry him, and what happened afterward.

When he first proposed, it was incredibly romantic. They were at Blackwater Falls, which for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a beautiful forest-and-river park near here. They were watching a waterfall, and when Lynn turned around, Ben was down on one knee with a ring in his hand. Water rushed through the falls on one side of them, warm July sunlight filtered down between the leaves on the trees on the other, and Lynn burst into tears and said yes.

Unfortunately, the rest of Ben’s close family (me, and our stepfather Charlie) didn’t find out about all of this for a full nine days. And when we did, it was in a way we never expected. At the time, I was living in Arizona, and Ben and I stayed in touch by calling each other around once a week. We were actually talking about something completely different, and then Ben said, totally offhandedly, “Oh, yeah, by the way, I’m engaged.”

“What?!” I said. And then, of course, I wheedled all the gory details from him: when, where, how, sunlight-filtering, water-falling, etc. And after that, I called Charlie and told him the great news. But I was still in shock. Ben! Engaged! And a week and a half ago!

I was very surprised he had waited so long to tell us: he knew we’d be fully supportive, and we all thought he and Lynn were great together. Why, then, the delay? To this day, Ben himself tells me he’s not sure. Here’s what I think, though: after long months of plotting and planning, Ben had just proposed marriage to someone, and she had said yes! At the time, then, he probably had more important things on his mind than telling his family about it.

So in the end, I was glad he had waited to tell us. Personally, I like to think of the delay in telling us about the proposal as a testament to the resulting wedding’s importance; its “rightness”. Please join me, then, in a toast to the marriage of Ben Mack and Lynn Harden, in hopes that he’ll wait to tell us things like this for many years to come.

Congratulations Ben and Lynn. :)