Merritt found the TikToks on a Tuesday, which should have been my first warning. By Thursday he had a color-coded document. By Saturday night he was texting me things like "the shade migration pattern near the pavilion stage peaks around 1:40, which is actually ideal for the cultural immersion portion of the afternoon," and I want you to understand that I responded with a heart emoji because I did not yet know what I was agreeing to.
The African-American Heritage and Multicultural Festival at Gypsy Hill Park. September 20th. A beautiful event. A celebration. A thing that exists in real life and not inside a laminated spreadsheet.
Merritt had a laminated spreadsheet.
He showed it to me in the car. He had printed it, then laminated it, then brought a highlighter to mark our progress in real time, which I think technically made it a living document. There were columns for estimated crowd density, snack acquisition windows, and something called "romantic cultural immersion" which he abbreviated as RCI and which appeared seven times. I asked what RCI meant and he said "you'll feel it when we get there" in a tone that suggested he'd rehearsed that line.
It was already 84 degrees at 11 a.m. The forecast had said partly cloudy. The sky looked like a lid.
By noon we were behind schedule because Merritt had not accounted for the parking situation, which he called "a variable I've flagged for next year," and I chose to let that sentence exist without response. By 12:30 we were behind on snacks because the line he'd designated as our "low-friction acquisition point" was, in fact, the longest line at the festival by a significant margin. He recalculated. He actually stood there recalculating with the laminated sheet against his forearm while the man behind us sighed so hard it moved Merritt's hair.
The chair happened around 2:00. I'm still not entirely clear on the sequence of events, but there was a moment where Merritt offered to "hold this for one second" for an older gentleman who was navigating the crowd, and then the man simply... continued navigating. And Merritt, who will apparently carry a stranger's folding chair to the ends of the earth before admitting he doesn't know what to do, just kept it. He carried it through the drum performance. He carried it past the food vendors. By 2:14 he was holding the chair, the laminated sheet, a bottle of water he hadn't opened because it wasn't in the hydration window yet, and what remained of his dignity.
I got him to drink the water. He checked the sheet first.
The thing is — and this is the part I keep coming back to — the festival was genuinely wonderful. The drumming was extraordinary. We found the most perfect jerk chicken, which was not in any column of the spreadsheet but which Merritt ate with the focus of a man experiencing something he did not plan for and cannot categorize. A little girl nearby was wearing a dress the color of marigolds and spinning in circles and Merritt watched her for a long moment and forgot to check the time.
"This is the RCI," he said quietly.
"Is it," I said.
"Yeah." He folded the laminated sheet in half. First time all day. "I think I've been optimizing the wrong variable."
I did not point out that you cannot fold a laminated sheet in half without it springing back open. I did not mention that we were dehydrated, off-schedule, and in possession of someone else's chair. I just stood there in the humid September air while a steel drum played something that sounded like it was made for exactly this moment, and I thought: this is the most Merritt thing that has ever happened, and somehow I'm still here.
We found the chair's owner eventually. He was delighted. He offered us two of his daughter's festival kettle corn as a thank-you, which Merritt accepted and then whispered to me that kettle corn wasn't "structurally appropriate for this hydration phase."
He ate three handfuls before I finished mine.
I'm keeping the laminated sheet. Partially as evidence. Partially because "romantic cultural immersion" made me laugh for three days. Partially because I think, somewhere between the drum circle and the stranger's folding chair and the kettle corn he definitely wasn't supposed to have, Merritt Vale had a genuinely perfect afternoon.
He just won't be able to prove it with data.