Reuben decided he was going to "do the market" this Saturday, and I want to be very clear that I was not consulted on this vision. I was simply informed, at 7:43 AM, via a voice memo that started with wind noise, that he was "already kind of on his way."
The Saturday market runs seven blocks. Seven. There is a map on the city website. There is a map on three separate signs once you arrive. Reuben does not need a map, he explained later, because he has "a good sense of where things are going."
I met him at the corner of Water and Main at 9 AM. He was holding a tote bag he had borrowed from my closet — the canvas one that says "READ MORE" on it — and he had already purchased, in the twenty minutes before I arrived: a small gourd, a jar of something labeled only "HEAT," and a pinwheel. Not a decorative pinwheel. A child's toy pinwheel, blue and silver, which he was spinning thoughtfully in the wind while he waited.
"It was a dollar," he said, like that answered anything.
The wind was doing that thing it does in spring out here, where it's technically 53 degrees but the sun hits you and suddenly you're confused about your coat and your life simultaneously. Reuben had dressed for neither condition. He was in a short-sleeve shirt and also somehow already sunburned on one shoulder.
He had a list on his phone. I saw it briefly. It said: tomatoes (ask if heirloom??), something local, vibe check, maybe cheese, and then, lower down, in what appeared to be a different font, as though added at a separate and more ambitious moment: FIND THE GOOD STUFF.
We spent forty-five minutes in a section he described as "definitely produce, probably." He asked a vendor three questions about green onions that I'm fairly certain the vendor had never been asked before. He was very serious about it. The vendor was also, eventually, very serious about it. I watched them bond. I ate a free sample of something that turned out to be goat cheese with red chile and briefly reconsidered all my choices.
He did not buy the green onions.
He did buy: two ears of corn (it's April, I don't know, I didn't ask), a small pottery bowl because "it looks like it belongs somewhere," a bag of pecans, a second jar of something labeled only "HEAT" because he forgot he already had one, and a tomato. One tomato. Singular. Which he held for the rest of the morning like it was evidence.
At some point he stopped to watch a street performer and started giving me historical context about juggling that he had clearly just read off his phone ten seconds prior. I nodded. The wind pinwheeled his pinwheel. He looked genuinely happy in that unguarded way he gets when he's outside and moving and not yet aware that he's underprepared.
I thought about the ¡mira! festival coming up in a few weeks — drone show, lucha libre, the whole thing — and I made a private decision that I would handle the logistics for that one. I would do this quietly. He would never know. He would show up and think it was effortless and say "see, this is what I'm talking about, this is the kind of thing we should do more."
On the way back to the car he said, "We should come to this every week."
We. As if he had organized anything. As if "we" had not spent twenty minutes finding the car because he'd forgotten which block he'd parked on.
"Yeah," I said.
He spun the pinwheel in the wind. Both jars of HEAT clinked together in my READ MORE bag.
"Next time I want to find the cheese section," he said.
There is a very large, extremely well-signed cheese section. It runs an entire block. We walked past it twice.
"Sure," I said. "We'll find the cheese section."
He looked at me with total sincerity.
"I think it might be toward the back," he said.
I love him. I have four bunches of radishes he impulse-grabbed in the last thirty seconds before we left. I don't even know when that happened. I didn't see it occur. They were simply in the bag, like everything else: unplanned, a little chaotic, and somehow exactly right.