Graham texted me at 8:14 in the morning. "It's basically summer," it said. Just that. No context. A period and everything, like a statement of fact he needed witnessed.
It was 41 degrees outside. I could see my breath from the window. But I also knew what he meant, because the sky was doing that thing it does in late March in Eau Claire where it comes out swinging — full sun, blue like it means it, the kind of light that bounces off the last gray piles of sidewalk snow and makes your brain go yes, absolutely, flip-flops — and Graham's brain is not equipped to resist that kind of propaganda.
By 9 AM he had a plan. He was going to, and I want to be precise here: grill.
Not "maybe fire up the grill." Not "thinking about grilling later." He had already texted his roommate Devin about borrowing a propane tank, had already identified that the brats at Festival were on sale, and had already, somehow, started a group chat called SEASON OPENER that contained six people who had not consented to this.
I asked him what the high was supposed to be. He said seventy-three. I said what about Tuesday. He said he wasn't "Tuesday-brained." I wrote back "that's not a thing" and he sent me a voice memo of himself saying "it is now" while what sounded like a sliding door opened in the background.
He was already outside.
So we had a cookout. In March. On a Monday. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where four days later there would be a genuine forecast mixing snow, sleet, and freezing rain — a forecast that I screenshot and still have — but on this particular Monday the sun was doing its level best and Graham was standing on Devin's back patio in a t-shirt with his arms sort of open like he was accepting an award from nature itself.
He'd made a playlist called "May" even though it was March 30th. He had bought the brats and also a bag of limes for reasons he couldn't fully explain. He had, at some point in the morning, convinced himself that if people walked down to Water Street after, they could get cookies from the new Insomnia place "as a closer," which, fine, that part was actually a good idea, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't.
There were nine people there by noon. Nobody had planned to come. Graham had just texted with the same energy as a man who'd discovered fire and everyone, despite themselves, showed up. Devin's neighbor Carol brought out a folding chair without being asked. A dog appeared. Nobody knew whose dog it was. Graham gave the dog a piece of brat. I said "you can't just feed a random dog brat" and Graham said "I think he needed it" and I genuinely didn't have a response to that.
At one point I checked the weather app and the little Tuesday icon had a cloud with what was clearly a mixed-precipitation symbol on it, and I held it up and showed Graham and he looked at it for a long moment like a man receiving a certified letter he was choosing not to open.
"That's Tuesday though," he said.
"I know it's Tuesday."
"It's Monday right now."
"Yes."
He looked back at the grill. He adjusted something that didn't need adjusting. "I feel like you can only control so much," he said, in this very calm, very reasonable voice, like a philosopher who has decided the philosophy is just grill.
And here's the thing I keep coming back to: he wasn't wrong, exactly. It was warm. The sun was real. We stood on a concrete patio in the last of the afternoon light and ate brats and Carol told a very long story about the Farm Show and someone threw a frisbee and the dog, whoever's dog it was, seemed genuinely happy.
Tuesday it dropped back to normal. By Thursday the sleet was doing exactly what the forecast said it would.
But for one Monday, Graham looked at a 73-degree day in a month that had no business producing one, decided it was a personal gift, and gathered nine people around a grill to receive it with him.
I hate that this is what I find so unbearably charming about him.
He still has that group chat active. It's called SEASON OPENER and it has not been used since. I think he's saving it.