Gideon had a whole system. That was the thing. It wasn't that he didn't plan — it was that he planned with the full confidence of someone who had never once been wrong in his own head.
"The construction is actually helpful," he told me on the drive in, which is a sentence that has never been true anywhere on Earth. "It reroutes traffic in a way that opens up a whole different grid." He said "grid" like he had a map. He did not have a map. He had vibes and a working theory about Omaha's downtown streetcar project that he had developed entirely between our apartment and the interstate.
It was Monday morning. It was 44 degrees. He was wearing a short-sleeved linen shirt because he had checked the high — 79, breezy, classic Midwestern April trap — and had simply elected to begin the day already dressed for that version of it. I had a jacket. He had opinions.
We were going to Gene Leahy Mall because I had read that there was a Holi Festival coming up and I wanted to walk around and look at the tulips and eat something and have a normal pleasant spring morning. Gideon had added several layers to this plan without telling me, including a breakfast spot he'd heard about, a specific fountain he wanted to show me, and what he described as "a shortcut through the development zone that actually makes total sense if you think about it spatially."
I did not think about it spatially. I followed him.
The shortcut took us past two closed-off blocks, a very polite construction flagger who waved us back the direction we came, and a sign that I am almost certain Gideon read and simply chose to reinterpret. "It says pedestrian access is limited," I said. He nodded. "Right, limited, not eliminated." He stepped around a cone. I stepped around the same cone because at this point my options were limited too.
The breakfast spot was real, to his credit. It was also not open until eleven. It was 8:50. He stood in front of the door for a long moment, reading the hours posted on the glass with the expression of a man encountering new information that he intended to argue with. "That seems like a soft open situation," he said. I asked him what that meant. He didn't answer, which means he didn't know.
We got coffee somewhere else, which was fine, which was actually lovely, and walked down to the riverfront where the playground equipment was already collecting kids and the whole place had that specific early-spring feeling of a city remembering it has a body. The fountains were on. Someone was flying a kite badly and persistently. The tulips at the garden beds were doing their best. By ten o'clock the sun had burned through enough that Gideon's linen shirt started to make sense, which I think he felt, because he stood up a little straighter.
"See," he said, gesturing at nothing in particular. The river. The skyline. The Mutual of Omaha tower going up on the horizon like a slow civic promise. "This is what I was talking about."
I looked at him. "You got us detoured twice and we couldn't eat at your restaurant."
"But we're here," he said. "And it's beautiful."
And the infuriating thing, the completely unfair thing, was that he was right. It was beautiful. The Missouri was doing that flat silver thing it does in April light. A text from Visit Omaha had just appeared on my phone about live music later in the week and tulip season at Lauritzen Gardens and something called Blue and Green Day at Lewis and Clark Landing, and the whole city felt like it was being gently turned toward the sun like a houseplant.
Gideon was already walking toward the swings.
Not to use them, I thought. And then he sat down in one, coffee in hand, and started swinging, slowly, with the satisfied expression of a man who had successfully navigated a complex morning.
The wind picked up off the river. It was still cold enough that I could see his arm hair standing at attention, but he didn't say anything about it. He just kept swinging.
I sat down in the one next to him.
"You're going to be freezing by lunch," I said.
"The afternoon will handle it," he said.
It did, eventually. It always does with him. That's the terrible part.