Let me be clear about something: I did not want to go inside.
We were supposed to be doing the White Street Studio Walk. That was the plan. I had looked it up, I had saved the map to my phone, I had worn sensible shoes for the hills, which, if you have never been to Eureka Springs, is a decision that requires advance thought and a certain amount of humility. The town is basically a staircase that has opinions about itself. You do not survive it in sandals.
Riordan had also worn sensible shoes, which I mention only because it is the last sensible decision he made that afternoon.
We passed the community center and he stopped. Just stopped, right there on the sidewalk, while a family of four walked directly into his back.
"What is that?" he said.
"Tibetan Sand Mandala," I said. "It's been running all week. Monks make it grain by grain and then at the end they destroy it as a lesson about impermanence."
He looked at me. He looked at the door. He said, and I want you to hold this in your memory, "That sounds fake."
I told him it was extremely real and had been a practice for centuries and we were going to be late to the studio walk if we didn't keep moving. He said the studio walk "would still be there" and that he "just wanted to take a quick look."
The quick look lasted forty-three minutes.
I know because I was tracking it. I sat on a bench just inside the door and watched Riordan stand approximately four feet from the mandala table with his arms crossed and his head tilted at an angle I can only describe as reluctant reverence. He had the look of a man whose worldview was being quietly reorganized and who was not sure how he felt about that.
At minute twelve he came over and whispered that it was "actually incredibly detailed."
At minute nineteen he went back for a closer look.
At minute twenty-six he found a volunteer and asked a question I couldn't hear, and the volunteer talked to him for a while, and Riordan nodded very seriously like he was in a meeting.
At minute thirty-one he came back and told me, in a hushed voice, that the whole thing would be ceremonially swept away at the end of the event and the sand released into moving water as an offering, and that he thought that was "kind of devastating, honestly."
I said I had mentioned the impermanence part before we came in.
He said it was different seeing it in person.
Outside it was one of those Ozark spring afternoons that feels warmer than it has any right to be — sixty-two degrees by the weather app but walking up those hills earlier had me peeling off my jacket by the second block. The kind of May day that tricks you. The whole town was doing its soft-festival thing, tourists with gallery maps and live music bleeding out of somewhere nearby and the general sense that everyone was slightly enchanted and slightly lost, which describes Eureka Springs at basically any point but especially this week.
We did eventually make it to two studios on White Street. Riordan bought a small ceramic thing that he said "spoke to him" and could not further explain. He carried it the rest of the afternoon like it was something fragile and important, which, to be fair, it was.
On the walk back he was quiet for a little while and then he said, "I think I've been thinking about permanence wrong."
I asked him what that meant.
He said he wasn't totally sure yet but that he thought the sand thing had "opened something up" for him and he might need a few days.
I said, great, while you're processing your spiritual reorientation, can you pick a place for dinner.
He picked a patio bar with live music, obviously, because that is the only kind of place he ever picks. We sat outside in the cooling air and he put the ceramic thing on the table between us and kept glancing at it.
He is, I want to say, genuinely one of the best people I know.
He also said the sand mandala was "just some colored sand" seven minutes before it changed his whole afternoon.
I'm filing this for the record.