Bennet found the map on some city tourism PDF from 2023, and he printed it, and then — this is the part that matters — he laminated it. At home. Before we left. He has a laminator. I did not know this about him until tonight, and I think it explains a lot.
We got to Main Plaza at 6:47, which he described as "tactically early," and which I described as "we're standing in the humidity while the vendors are still untangling extension cords." The sky was doing that July thing it does in San Antonio, where it looks perfectly fine and also like it's quietly building a legal case against you. Eighty-one degrees at seven p.m. is not a temperature. It's a personal failing of the atmosphere.
Bennet consulted the laminated map.
The laminated map did not have the stage on it. The stage, which was very large and directly in front of us, was not on the map because the map was from 2023 and the layout had changed. Bennet looked at the map. Bennet looked at the stage. Bennet looked at the map again, as though the stage might apologize and move.
"It should be over here," he said, pointing confidently to a section of the plaza that was, in the present moment, occupied by a woman selling handmade earrings and a man eating a corn dog with great focus.
I said the stage was right there. I pointed at it. I used both hands.
He said he just wanted to understand the flow first.
The flow, as far as I could tell, was: music was happening, people were walking toward it, we could simply do the same thing. This is not a complex system. Bennet treated it like a complex system.
He spent eleven minutes working out the optimal path to the food trucks, which were arranged in a line and accessible from any direction, including directly walking up to them. He ruled out two of them based on line length estimations that he made with his eyes while squinting slightly, which he called "reading the queue." He selected a truck serving birria grilled cheese, which I want to be clear was an excellent call, the one genuine tactical success of the evening, and which he announced with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has just defused something.
We found a spot to stand near the back. The Saga Cathedral Light Show was maybe an hour away. The clouds were getting theatrical. Someone near us was watching World Cup highlights on their phone with the volume fully up, and Bennet started trying to narrate the match from memory, which — he's not a soccer person. I know this. He knows this.
At some point I checked my phone and there was a thunderstorm watch going into effect at nine. I showed Bennet. He looked at it. He looked at the sky. He looked at his laminated map, which does not contain weather information.
"We have time," he said.
We did not fully have time. We had partial time. We had enough time for the light show to start and for the first twenty minutes to be genuinely beautiful — the cathedral all lit up in moving color, the plaza smelling like rain-is-coming and someone's kettle corn — and then the sky made its decision and it made it decisively and we walked very fast back to the car and got moderately soaked in a way that I think Bennet found secretly thrilling.
In the car, he unrolled the laminated map and dried it off with a fast food napkin from the cupholder.
"Good event," he said.
And here's the thing. Here's the whole thing about Bennet Vale. It was. It was a good event. The birria grilled cheese was correct. The light show was genuinely pretty for the time we had it. He was enthusiastic about every single moment, even the wet ones, in a way that is either exhausting or sort of wonderful depending on which direction you're facing.
He refolded the map carefully and put it back in the glove compartment.
For next time, he said.