Here's the lengthy backstory of my history with Matt. He went to Garfield, while I attended its rival school Roosevelt. We met through various mutual friends at several underage drinking fests. He was huge and never beat me up. So I liked him.
How Matt ended up at my house was equally simple. I ran into him at Danny's (Week 11) birthday party at the Stoop in Ravenna. I was eagerly booking away slots on my phone's calendar, and Matt was there with his lovely wife Heidi, and they were big and they didn't beat me up. So I invited them over for dinner.
With not much more than a handful of pleasant run-ins, I wasn't sure how this dinner would pan out. Especially since I didn't even have Matt's cell phone number, and I was watching him "check-in" to San Francisco area establishments on Facebook the Monday before our date. I sent him a message with my number and told him to text me about the meal. My phone was acting up, due to a lack of storage space, and thus I didn't get his return text until the day prior to the date.
And with the late-arriving text came the second hitch: clams. Matt is Catholic and enduring Lent at the time. Lent, for all intensive purposes, means one cannot eat land creatures for a short period of time. This date was within that window, thus Matt proposed we do clams.
I have never eaten clams. I have an unhealthy fear of seafood, mostly that it might be unhealthy (the food, not the fear). I wasn't sure how to even approach clams. But Matt said he and Heidi would bring over the clams and prepare them. So I decided to give clams a try for the first time in my life. I chopped up some onions and garlic prior to their arrival, but other than that, I got to kick back and wait for the company, which was great.
The turn in my expectations occurred immediately upon their arrival. They pulled up in style, dressed awesome, with flowers, booze and food in hand. Matt was sporting a Chicago Bears wool vest over a button-up shirt and Heidi looked glamorous with a fedora tilted to the side on her head. My nerves subsided and we cracked open Matt's drink of choice to accompany us on the tour of the house. That drink of choice was Olde English "800" (<---why is the 800 in quotations marks?) which my wife mistook for fancy beer. It is malt liquor.
The tour of the house was the first tour I got to partake in. Normally, I am in the middle of cooking something poorly. But this time, I got to do the walk through and when I returned to the kitchen, I got to sit back and watch Heidi doing some cooking.
To prepare the clams, Heidi cut up two sticks of butter into a frying pan, joking that she was Julia Child (a tall chef who used lots of butter). She tossed the onions and garlic in, followed by the clams, then simmered them until the shells popped open. Then we just ate them standing the kitchen, straight out of the shell. I had not one, but two, and was rather pleased.
Then I whipped up some basic pasta with red sauce, which I must say (and apologize for) was the blandest meal I ever cooked. But my shortcomings as a cook didn't weigh heavy on my mind, as I was deeply involved with the conversations taking place at the table.
Matt and Heidi are extremely social people from large families, both in size and numbers. They know how to double date. They are natural, calm, engaging and interesting. My backup plan, created out of my lack of exposure to them up until this night, was to go through all the Table Topics and weed out the bad questions. I figured this would give us something to do if it got awkward and we ran out of things to talk about. That might have worked, if Matt and Heidi weren't so awesome. The problem that popped up was this: even the lame questions would spur superb ten-minute conversations, each revealing the morals and values of everyone at the table.
It was in the middle of this process that I realized how great Matt and Heidi are. They have huge hearts, and not just literally. I stumbled into some rant about my irrational hatred of hobos and beggars, only to find Matt helping me gracefully rephrase my thoughts so I didn't seem like such a douchebag. We covered a ton of touchy subjects, from abortion to theft. And each answer Matt and Heidi gave was laced with good intentions and rational thought.
More interesting than the who-you-are game was the how-you-got-this-way stories leading up to it. Matt told us about his Polish Chicago-based family, with generations of first letter M-named people. Heidi told us about the proposal, both hers and his. We learned about their jobs, their meeting, and their future plans. Although Matt and Heidi will not be added to our No Kids Couple list, they are certainly a fantastic new option for us to couple off with. Erica and I both enjoyed getting to know them much better via this date.
With the reservations I had coming into this date, I am now a changed man. I no longer fear ingesting clams. I no longer believe everyone bigger than me is going to beat me up. And best of all, I am looking forward to every single date I have booked now because this one went so well.
The date with Matt and Heidi was one of the best, and certainly the perfect example of how an ideal DD should go. There's only one way to follow it up... GO BIG.
Next week we have our third POWER COUPLE coming over and our first out-of-state visitors: Rob and Kathryn Ried from Denver, Colorado. And they are coming with their adorable children Jeff, Will and Matt. It is going to be a full house and a fun time. You'll certainly be hearing about it. Cheers.
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