Declan found out about the free World Cup Final watch party at Tropical Park on a Tuesday and by Wednesday he had a spreadsheet.
Not a list. Not a note in his phone. A spreadsheet, with columns for arrival time, parking zone, shade radius, and something he labeled "snack deployment window," which I am still not fully ready to discuss.
"It's the Final," he said, as if this explained the spreadsheet. "Brazil versus Spain. At a public park. For free. In Miami. We have to do this right."
I told him that "doing it right" historically meant showing up and watching the game. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has said something sad without realizing it.
By Thursday he had printed the spreadsheet. Two copies. One laminated.
I want to be clear that I did not ask him to do any of this. I also want to be clear that I am still going to the watch party with him on Sunday, because I love him and also because the laminated copy has my name on it under a column called "Confirmed Attendees," and I feel implicated now.
His main strategic concern is the thunderstorm. Every afternoon this week has had one — you step outside into what looks like a perfectly beautiful day, the kind of sky they photograph for tourism brochures, and within forty minutes the clouds stack up and the whole sky turns green and reminds you that you are in South Florida and it does not negotiate. Declan has been tracking this. He has a radar app. He has a backup app for the radar app. He sent me a voice memo Thursday night that was seven minutes long and concerned entirely with the window between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., which he called "the danger zone," which I think he got from Top Gun and not meteorology.
"If we get there by four-thirty," he said, "we're pre-storm. If we get there at five, we're in it. If we get there at five-thirty, we're either fine or completely wet and it's chaos."
I said that sounded like just going to a thing outside.
He said, "Exactly, which is why we plan."
The other issue is the food situation. He has opinions about what to bring versus what to buy there, and those opinions are structured. He wants to bring a cooler. A real one, the big kind, not a soft bag. I suggested the soft bag. He said the soft bag "lacks commitment." I wrote that down because I feel like it reveals something about him as a person.
He also — and I respect this even as I am exhausted by it — looked up whether the Arts at Play programming running this summer had anything overlapping with the watch party logistics at Tropical Park, because he wanted to know if there would be "additional foot traffic variables." There were not. He seemed both relieved and faintly disappointed, the way he gets when the chaos he prepared for fails to materialize.
The thing is, I have been to public events with Declan before. I know what happens. We get there, the spreadsheet immediately becomes irrelevant because something small goes sideways — a road closure, a full parking lot, a line that exists for a reason no one can name — and Declan pivots so fast and so cheerfully that you almost forget there was ever a plan. He loves the plan. He also, I think, loves the moment the plan breaks, because then he gets to improvise, which is what he wanted to do anyway.
Last month at the Fan Festival at Bayfront Park, a lightning strike shut the whole thing down for an hour. Declan had a contingency. Of course he had a contingency. He pulled out his phone, found a place nearby with good AC and bad TV placement and somehow talked us into seats directly under the screen anyway.
He texted me this morning: laminated copy is in my bag. you're in charge of the soft cooler since you believe in it so much.
I told him I'd bring the soft cooler.
He sent back: noted. updating the sheet.
Sunday is going to be ninety degrees and there will be a storm at some point and approximately ten thousand people at Tropical Park and Declan has a laminated document and I have a soft cooler and honestly, I think we're going to be fine.
I think we're always going to be fine.