Calder announced his plan at 5 PM with the confidence of a man who had recently read one sentence about Madison's food scene and felt personally transformed by it.
"The Night Market," he said, scrolling nowhere in particular on his phone, "is tonight. Downtown. We'll grab a drink on a patio after. It's just going to be this whole thing."
I asked if he'd looked up what time it started.
"I don't need to look it up," he said. "It's a night market. It's vibes-based."
The Night Market is on May 14th. Today is not May 14th. I know this because I had looked at the Visit Madison website approximately four days ago when I was thinking about fun things to do in May, like a normal person who uses a calendar. I did not tell Calder this yet. I wanted to see how far the vibe would carry him.
It carried him to a parking spot on a block that was half-consumed by construction equipment, which he navigated around with the focus of someone who believes inconvenience is a sign you're close to something good. "This is actually great," he said, about a detour. He said this about two more detours.
When we arrived at the correct general area of State Street and found zero market stalls, zero vendors, and one very confused dog, he stood very still for a moment.
"It might be around the corner," he said.
It was not around the corner. It was around the corner in approximately two and a half weeks.
We walked the Capitol Square anyway because the evening was still pretty and the farmers' market energy was ghosts but pleasant ghosts. The temperature had dropped about twelve degrees since Calder had declared the night warm, which he had done at 2 PM while standing in direct sunlight next to a brick wall. I had the backup cardigan. He had a t-shirt and the firm belief that confidence generates heat.
"Okay," he said, recalibrating with the agility of someone who has recalibrated many times before, "we go find a patio."
Three patios were full. One had a forty-minute wait. One was technically a patio in the sense that there were two chairs outside near a heater that was not on, and a hostess who seemed personally sorry about everything.
We ended up at a place on the isthmus with good beer and a partially-covered outdoor area where Calder sat with his bare arms and absolutely refused to acknowledge that he was cold. His jaw did a small involuntary thing that I have learned to identify as shivering being suppressed by pride.
"This is exactly what I pictured," he said.
"Is it."
"Yeah. Just downtown, good drinks, no plan, just—" he gestured at the general situation, which included a construction crane visible over the roofline and a guy near us reading something on his phone about what appeared to be a lifestyle trend involving noodles— "you know. Out."
Here is the thing about Calder. He was not wrong that the evening was good. The beer was genuinely excellent. The Capitol dome was lit up over the roofline and the air smelled like spring finally deciding to commit. We sat there for two hours and talked about nothing important and laughed about the parking situation and he kept saying "see though" every time something was nice, like he was building a legal case.
On the way back to the car, we passed a sign for the Madison Public Market construction — big hoarding panels, renderings of what it'll look like this summer, a small notice about upcoming tours. Calder stopped and read the whole thing with great interest, as though he had known about this all along and was simply checking in on it.
"We should come back for that," he said.
"We should look it up first," I said.
"I'll look it up," he said.
He will not look it up. He will remember vaguely that there is a market, somewhere, sometime, and one day in July he will announce it as a plan with the energy of a discovery, and I will put the cardigan in my bag before we leave, and it will be fine.
It is always, somehow, fine.
I gave him my cardigan on the walk back. He said he wasn't cold. He put it on immediately.