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It all worked out for once. I was able to find babysitting at the last moment (Thanks Allison!). We had a way to get Girlzilla home from swim practice (thanks Cindy!). And our evening calendar was otherwise clear. So we went on our first real no-kids-along date in a few months. Wahoo!

We ate at a neighborhood Italian Cafe called, unassumingly, Italian Cafe. The food was great. The atmosphere was just perfect — it had that homey, mom-and-pop feel that Heidi and I love. We like to go to places and have four-star food but we like to be able to enjoy it wearing shorts. Anyway, we shared a stuffed artichoke as an appetizer. It makes a great appetizer because it is green and therefore gives you the illusion that you are starting out with a healthy vegetable dish. Made me feel as if I had earned my respectable if not spectacular bowl of al dente pasta with spicy Italian sausage.

Then we went to see a movie. I know, not very imaginative. But hey, going to see a movie without at least one kid along is a rare treat for us these days. I’d chosen About a Boy because it had gotten good reviews and was based on a book by the guy who wrote High Fidelity which is a favorite of mine. We were both pleasantly surprised. Not only was it a serviceable date movie, it was a damn fine film by any standard. It made me want to go out and buy Nick Hornby’s new book and dig out my old Badly Drawn Boy CD.

The jewel of the night, besides the carefree time with my darling wife, was the takeaway moral of the movie. Without giving too much away, the central conflict is the seduction of a carefree, controlled, but ultimately empty life of adult autonomy vs. the chaotic, inconvenient life of being connected to others. You can guess which side I am for.

At the end of the film, the main character’s narrator voice says something like, “Being a couple isn’t enough. You have to have back up” as a disparate group of friends, lovers, and family members prepares for a meal together on the screen. That was the jewel moment for me.

I thought of Allison and Cindy, our “back up” that made our night possible. I thought of us last Sunday Night, sitting down for dinner with extended family and an invited friend. I had visions of future dinners, holidays, and gatherings that I knew I wanted to make happen, just to build that same kind of community feeling I was seeing on screen. I get that same kind of feeling (at times) when I go to my Church, but why should that feeling be confined to Church or any other institution for that matter?

Making that kind of thing happen — bringing people together — is Heidi and my strong suit. It’s what we do. And it’s definitely our future as well.

Being a Church person, I hear much lamentation about the decline of the nuclear family. This is ironic to me because the advent of the nuclear family — a married couple and children — was decried at the time as being a degradation of family values itself. The isolation that came with the nuclear family structure and the rise of the suburbs, especially for women, was a driving force in the social changes that led to its ultimate decline. What got left behind by the nuclear family was the extended family, the community, the neighbors. Seduced by promises of autonomy, privacy, and personal prosperity, families lost their “back-up.” We need to get it back.

I have a new vision of family values. I want to recover the old extended family, community, neighborhood model of family only updated for the times. Kind of like an unholy marriage of the “family” structures found on the TV shows Friends, Cheers, and Seventh Heaven. I hope that in the future we don’t go for more than a week without having a non family member at our dinner table. I hope that we can use our gifts to make our home a gathering place, however much of a pain in the ass that can be at times. So now I am certain I know what I want for Christmas this year. I want an air hockey table. And eventually, a hot tub.
A few things that might make our house a more desirable place to be, especially for our kids’ friends when they are teenagers.

I also realize now that I need to develop some male friends. Not at-work friends, not other-half-of-couple friends, but just a guy or two to do stuff with. Usually, having guy friends involves a fair amount of time to “hang” and I don’t currently have much “hanging” time. But it’s something to shoot for. All I know is that I have a renewed resolve to seek — and to *be* — back-up.