I want to be clear that I did not agree to five hours at Northwest Folklife. I agreed to "a couple hours, walk around, maybe catch one set." That is what was said. I have a witness, which is me, and I am very credible.
Owen had been talking about Folklife since Wednesday. Not in an organized way — not in a "here is the schedule, here are the acts I'd like to see" way — but in the way he talks about most things, which is a series of escalating declarations issued from the couch while something plays on his phone. "It's free," he said, as though he had personally negotiated this on my behalf. "It's like, the whole city just shows up." He said this like it was a secret he'd discovered and not a festival that has been happening every Memorial Day weekend since 1972.
We took the bus because he said parking would be "a nightmare situation." This was correct. He was very pleased about being correct. He said so twice.
By the time we got to Seattle Center it was barely noon and already it felt like the whole city had decided to be in one place at once, which, to be fair, it had. There were children in face paint. There was a man playing something stringed that I couldn't identify and Owen spent four minutes on his phone trying to Shazam it before giving up and just nodding like he'd always known what it was.
He bought a tamale from a booth before we'd been there fifteen minutes. He bought another tamale eleven minutes after that. "I'm supporting the vendors," he said, which is technically true and also clearly not the whole truth.
There was a moment around the second hour where I thought we might leave. We had circled back to the fountain area, the clouds had thinned out, and Seattle was doing that thing where it suddenly tricks you into thinking it was sunny all along. Owen tilted his face up at the sky like a plant. I should have started moving toward the exit. Instead I said "that's nice" and he took that as a vote to stay.
He found the Appalachian flatfoot dancing demonstration and stood at the back of the crowd with his arms crossed and this look on his face like he was watching something that was personally meaningful to him. He has no prior relationship with Appalachian flatfoot dancing. When I pointed this out he said, "I feel like I might have done this in a past life," and then didn't move for twenty-five minutes.
At one point I checked my weather app and saw it was going to be sixty-eight degrees by late afternoon and I thought: we are never leaving. A man is never leaving a free festival in sixty-eight-degree Seattle sunshine. This was simply not going to happen.
I was correct. We stayed until nearly six. Owen got a third food item — some kind of flatbread situation — and we sat on the grass and watched a folk duo that neither of us had heard of and he said "these guys are really good" with the sincerity of someone who had planned this specifically. We had not planned this specifically. We had stumbled into it because Owen had followed the sound of a banjo across three performance areas like a golden retriever following a scent.
On the bus home he was quiet in the full, satisfied way rather than the tired way. He leaned against the window and said, "We should do that every year."
I said, "We were only supposed to go for two hours."
He looked genuinely confused. "What? No. We said we'd make a day of it."
Reader, we did not say that. I have reviewed the record internally and we did not say that. But it was sixty-five degrees and I had a good tamale and a man I love was doing his thing where he treats a free folk festival like a spiritual pilgrimage, so I said, "Yeah. Every year."
He put his head on my shoulder. The bus smelled like festival and cool air and whatever that flatbread was.
Fine. Every year.