So here's what happened. Eamon looked at his phone on Saturday morning, announced that Sol Summit "starts in like forty minutes," and then acted completely surprised when I pointed out that we were still in pajamas and the parking situation downtown on a festival weekend is historically unhinged.
"I looked it up," he said.
I want to pause here and talk about what Eamon means when he says he looked something up. He means he glanced at a screenshot someone sent him in November. He means he held his phone near his face for approximately four seconds and then formed a confident conclusion. He means he did the emotional equivalent of research without any of the logistical content.
"There's a lot by the plaza," he said. "We can park there and it's a short walk."
I asked how short.
He did the thing where he tilts his head and makes a face that is technically an answer but contains no information.
We left the house at 9:47. It was cool and gray, that particular El Paso gray that makes you think you're somewhere else for a second, like maybe Portland if Portland had better breakfast burritos and a Juárez visible from the highway. I grabbed a jacket. Eamon said he didn't need one because it was going to warm up. He was wearing a t-shirt that said CAMP on it in block letters, which I think he bought at Target, not a camp.
The parking lot he had identified was closed. Not full — closed. A chain across it with a sign that had clearly been there for months.
"Okay," he said. "New plan."
I asked if there was actually a new plan or if he was going to drive slowly and call it a plan.
He drove slowly.
We eventually parked fourteen blocks away from where he'd originally said we'd park, which meant the short walk was now a long walk, which meant we were outside in the gray morning for twenty-five minutes while Eamon narrated his own experience of being cold.
"It's actually pretty chilly," he said.
I know, Eamon.
"I should have grabbed a layer."
I know, Eamon.
"The forecast said seventy-one though."
The forecast said the HIGH was seventy-one. The high. As in, the warmest it would be, later, after the morning. I have explained this meteorological concept to Eamon before and I will probably explain it again before we die.
By the time we got to San Jacinto Plaza the festival was genuinely beautiful — vendors set up along the edges, music already going, the kind of El Paso morning that reminds you why people who live here don't really want to leave. We got tacos from a truck immediately because Eamon's planning may be aspirational at best but his instincts around food trucks are, I will admit, usually correct.
He was warm by then. He had borrowed my jacket and was wearing it unbuttoned in a way that I think he thought looked casual and I thought looked like a man wearing his girlfriend's jacket because he'd ignored the forecast again.
"This is great," he said. "Aren't you glad we came?"
And the thing is — yes. I was glad we came. We stayed for three hours. We heard two full sets. We found an art installation that was basically a wall you could write on and Eamon spent ten minutes writing something very sincere about El Paso that I wasn't allowed to read until he was done, and when I finally read it I felt terrible about every sarcastic thing I'd said in the car.
He got us a second round of food on the way back because he remembered, unprompted, that I'd mentioned a specific vendor last time we were downtown and he wanted to see if they were here.
They were here.
"Did the research," he said.
He was insufferable about it the whole walk back to the car. He was still wearing my jacket. There was salsa on the sleeve.
I did not say anything about the sleeve.