Game, set, match

My senior year of high school, my friends and I went to a cool and kinda hidden coffee house above a record store to hang out. We were good and nerdy kids, so we often hung out at places like coffee houses, Denny's, or our parents' houses. I know how incredibly boring that might sound to some of you, but we always had a good time.

Anyway, at this particular coffee house, we were pleased to see that they had board games available. The first couple of games appeared to be missing some crucial pieces, so I grabbed one I'd never heard of called "Acey-Deucey." I brought it back over to the group and sat down with it. "Do you know how to play that?" Lisa asked. "Yeah, it's a lot of fun," I said, even though I couldn't tell you at that point a single thing about it. Lisa, who's normally quite good at detecting my bullshit, missed it somehow and seemed genuinely excited for me to teach her this new game.

So I did. Over the course of the next half hour or so, we "played" Acey-Deucey. To paraphrase Holden Caulfield, I was laying it on thick. I made up rules left and right. "We start at opposite ends of the board," "If you roll a 6 on your first turn, you have the option of switching sides," etc. "What about that stack of cards?" she asked, about ten minutes into the game. "Oh, that's for advanced play only," I told her. On this went for way longer than I expected, until finally I confessed that I had no idea what I was doing.

Lisa's very bright, but not a single time did she stop me to consult the directions or ask if I was making it all up. This bothered her in retrospect, so she would bring it up fairly often over the course of the next several years. For the record, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acey-deucey

Fast-forward about 11 years. My wife and I were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant with Lisa and her husband. We had some margaritas, shared some laughs, and then Lisa asked, "Hey, do you have any single Jewish male friends?" She was inquiring for a friend of hers who she really wanted to see happy and in a good relationship. I told her about my co-worker, the only one who came to mind right then, and we decided that we were going to set up her friend and my friend. Neither of them knew about it, but we'd convince them that it was a good idea.

Setting people up on a date is always tricky business. In fact, not much has ever come from my past attempts. I introduced Dusty and The Mills, and they've been happily together for years, and I introduced Dave and Twilight who have been married for about a year and a half. In neither case did I set them up on a date though. I was just the center spoke on the Wheel of Cool People, and they took it to the dating level. Don't get me wrong, I remind them often that I'm responsible for their happiness, but I can't say that I sized them up and thought they'd be romantic matches. (As a side note, writing "romantic matches" gave me a vision of something that could be in the "adult section" of a novelty store. I'm not sure how they would work, but there would have to be bad puns about "the fire in my heart" involved. And I would have to make bad jokes about seeing a doctor if the burning sensation lasts for longer than four hours. Maybe it's a good thing these matches only exist in my head.)

Back to the set-up: After the first date, my friend said it went very, very well. He offered to buy me lunch the next day, and I jokingly told him, "Just get me a nice groomsman's gift." After a couple of more dates, Lisa joked that should those two ever get married, our heads wouldn't fit at the same table. Every time I saw Lisa over the next couple of months, she would ask, "How are our little lovebirds doing?" I'd tell her that everything seemed to be going extremely well, and we'd shake our heads in pleased wonder at how this was turning out. Then the lovebirds moved in together, and Lisa and I started practicing how we would dance at their wedding. And then last week, he proposed and she said yes.

Lisa and I are so giddy it's obnoxious (and our spouses agree). We think we might actually be good at this matchmaking gig. We've even joked about quitting our jobs and starting a matchmaking service to showcase our unmatched talent at finding true love for others, even though we started it spontaneously and without any background in the field. The company's name? You guessed it: Acey-Deucey.

Happy Monday, everyone. Now get back to work.