Wren had a plan.
This is always how it starts with Wren. He had a plan, and the plan had a printed component, and the printed component had been folded into quarters and tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket like a man who had read a novel once about a man who knew what he was doing.
The plan was to get to Mass Street by 7 for Midsummer Night on Mass — late shopping, restaurants with sidewalk specials, that whole thing. It's June in Lawrence, the air had been weirdly perfect all afternoon, that cool not-quite-summer feeling before the heat remembers its job. He'd been texting me about it for four days. Four days. For a thing that is free and outdoors and requires no reservation.
"I found parking," he said, pulling up what I initially assumed was Google Maps.
It was not Google Maps. It was a PDF he had downloaded from the city's traffic updates page, which he had then annotated in red pen, which he had then photographed, which he had then printed from the photograph, which meant the resolution was approximately that of a ransom note.
"Wren," I said.
"Bob Billings has a lane reduction," he said, in the tone a general uses when confirming enemy positions.
I want to be clear that Bob Billings Parkway was not on our route. It was not near our route. It was not adjacent to anything we were doing. Wren had simply located it on the map, identified it as a threat, and incorporated it into his risk model.
We took a detour around Barker Avenue — where, yes, there is construction, good job Wren — and then a second detour because the first detour passed within visual range of the Greenway Circle stormwater work, which Wren had also flagged in red. "Flagged" is maybe generous. He had written "?" next to it and then circled the "?" and then drawn an arrow from the circle to a note that said "check Friday." It was Friday. He had not checked.
We parked six blocks further than necessary because the lot he wanted was "too close to the chaos zone," which is a phrase he used without irony.
Here is the thing about Wren: we got there. The street was beautiful. Someone was playing guitar near the corner. The restaurants had their doors open and everything smelled like summer and garlic and whatever candle situation the boutiques have going. He got a sandwich from a place with the specials written on a chalkboard and he stood in the middle of the sidewalk and looked genuinely, completely happy.
"See," he said. "Planned correctly."
I did not point out that his route had added twenty-two minutes, that the chaos zone was a perfectly normal intersection, or that the PDF was printed sideways and had been functionally illegible the entire time. I did not point out that he'd also printed a second page — a KU baseball schedule, unrelated, also annotated, folded into the same pocket — and that at one point while consulting the map he had briefly been navigating us to the Hoglund Ballpark.
He was so pleased. The evening was so nice. Someone further down the block was doing something with fire poi, which felt like a reward for surviving the detour.
Later, he told me he'd also looked into Score Lawrence HQ — that World Cup viewing spot they've set up on Mass — because he wanted "options." He had not written anything down for this. He had simply remembered it. His brain, apparently, has tiered storage, and "things Wren found interesting" loads faster than "the correct road home."
On the walk back to the car he pulled out the map one more time to "reverse-engineer our exit vector," which I'm still thinking about.
The thunderstorms they've been forecasting are coming later this week. Hot, humid, disruptive. I've already told him not to check the traffic updates.
He's already checked.