This speaker had a folder of dad jokes he'd been collecting for a year. He used exactly one line from it, and cut the rest.
Dan was nine the first time he fixed something and didn't tell me. I found the old alternator belt on my workbench with a note that said, this was making the noise, I ordered the new one with my allowance, don't be mad I used your tools.
I wasn't mad. I sat in the garage for a while, looking at that note, because something had just happened that I hadn't seen coming. My son had noticed a problem, worked out what caused it, fixed it himself, and the only reason I found out was a note left so I wouldn't wonder where my socket wrench went.
That's still exactly who he is. He doesn't announce that he's noticed you're struggling with something. He just shows up already halfway through fixing it, and he leaves you a note so you're not confused later.
You've all heard about the phone call. Two in the morning, a dead car outside Bakersfield, and Dan on the road by half past midnight with two gas station sandwiches. I want you to know that wasn't him being a good friend for one night. That was the alternator belt, twenty years later, at a bigger scale. He heard about a problem and he was already moving before anybody asked him to.
What I didn't expect, and want to say plainly, is what happens to that instinct when he loves somebody the way he loves Amara. I watched him, last spring, notice she'd gone quiet at a family dinner about something nobody else had picked up on. He didn't ask her in front of everyone. He got up, refilled two glasses, and sat back down next to her instead of across from her. Twenty minutes later she was laughing again and I never did find out what was wrong. He didn't need me to.
I mentioned it to my wife afterward, and she said something I haven't stopped thinking about. It wasn't that he'd fixed the evening. It was that he'd done it so quietly that nobody else at the table registered anything had been wrong in the first place. That's Dan's whole method. He doesn't want credit for the fix. He wants the problem to have simply stopped existing.
Amara, he will fix your car, your evening, your whole week, before you've finished explaining what's broken. I hope you let him. And I hope, when it's his turn to be the one with the flat tire, you're already halfway there.
So if you would all raise your glasses. To the note on the workbench, and to the sandwich in the parking lot. To Dan and Amara.
End of speech. Two more father of the groom speeches from the same chapter are named below.
