The “best man” speech

More or less what I said last weekend:

My brother David is a remarkable young man. … He and I are very close — he’s the first child and I’m the second child — no, wait, I’m first and he’s second. … Well, we constantly compete against one another. We compulsively compete. But since this is David’s wedding-day, I’ve decided to treat him nicely. I’m going to mention a few things that he does better than I do.

First of all, David plays soccer better than I do. Some days ago, we had his bachelor party, and of course we played soccer; and even though no one showed David any favoritism, he still managed to score the most goals. David is a very aggressive soccer player. Actually, he’s aggressive at many things. He’s aggressive at driving … he’s aggressive in conversation … he’s aggressive at eating. Once, when he was very little — five or six years old — he ate fifteen pancakes in one breakfast. And not so long ago, he and a couple of the groomsmen each ate four Big Macs. (I wasn’t one of those groomsmen.) But even though he’s so aggressive, David has a gentle, patient side. He’s very good with animals (many of you know how much he loves Toby, the dog he’s going to live with). And he’s very good with small children … even better than I am. 

Another thing that David and I compete over, though we don’t say so, is reading books. Perhaps we tacitly agree that when it comes to reading books, neither of us is the winner. But in one respect David certainly comes out ahead, which is that he reads more books than I do. He’s read all of Harry Potter; I haven’t done that. And he’s read all of Twilight; I haven’t done that. Already this year he’s read twenty-five books. Just in the month of July, he read seven different books from beginning to end. And they were difficult books — philosophy books. And this was while David was busy watching the World Cup and preparing for his wedding.

OK, I should say something about the wedding (I’ve finished talking about competition). In his sermon, my dad said that when you choose whom you marry, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen. And I think that that’s right. But it still seems that some ways of choosing a husband or a wife are better, or wiser, than others. For example, it’s good to choose someone whom you can consistently put up with. Now, Ana and David are very unlike one another. But they’ve known each other for many years and in many different situations. They have as good an idea of what they’re getting into as anyone could have. What I’m saying is, I think they’ve made the best sort of choice; I think they’ve chosen wisely.

That’s all.