Reggie had a theory about the Hilldale Farmers Market, and the theory was that you had to walk it counterclockwise.
"That's how you see everything before you commit," he said, already walking clockwise. I pointed this out. He said that counterclockwise was actually what he'd said, and that I must have misheard him, and then he stopped in front of a honey vendor and picked up seven different jars in a row, reading each label with the expression of a man defusing a bomb.
We did not buy any honey. We moved on.
The morning was perfect in the specific way Madison does perfect: sixty-something degrees, that first-week-of-June crispness in the air where summer is technically here but still being polite about it. The kind of morning where you feel good about being outside, which Reggie took as cosmic endorsement of his entire system.
The system, as it was explained to me across several corrective clarifications, had three phases. Phase one was reconnaissance. Phase two was acquisition. Phase three was, and I am quoting directly, "eating the thing we already decided to get."
Phase one took forty minutes. Reggie reconnoitered with great seriousness. He noted a bread vendor for phase two. He noted a new jam person. He nodded at a flower stall in a way that suggested he was filing it for later consideration. He asked me if I wanted coffee and when I said yes he said "noted" and did not get coffee.
We looped past the newly opened Chocolate Shoppe nearby and Reggie said we'd come back to that "at the end of phase two, as a reward," and I said okay, and he said "as a reward for what" and I said I had no idea.
Phase two collapsed almost immediately. Reggie had decided during phase one that he wanted the sourdough from the bread vendor, but when we got back to the bread vendor, Reggie saw that they also had focaccia, and this was apparently new information that phase one had failed to capture, and we needed a moment.
"The system assumes a static inventory," he said, with real grief.
I bought the sourdough. I also bought jam from the new vendor, because I am a person who is capable of doing two things. Reggie watched me do this with the expression of someone watching a building get demolished in a city he used to love.
He rallied. This is the thing about Reggie — he always rallies. He found a vegetable he didn't recognize, asked the farmer about it at tremendous length, and bought it without fully understanding what it was. He seemed very proud of this. He held it like he'd caught it.
"We can figure out how to cook it at home," he said.
"Do you want to look it up now?"
"That's phase four."
We got ice cream. This was technically phase three, which had originally been described as "eating the thing we already decided to get," but Reggie reframed it as "an adaptive phase three" with the confidence of a man who had been in charge of phases this whole time. I got a scoop. Reggie spent four minutes at the counter and got two flavors he'd never tried "for research."
On the way back to the car, he said the system had basically worked.
I was carrying both bags, the unidentified vegetable, and my own cone. He was carrying his research ice cream with both hands, very carefully, because he'd gotten too much and the structural integrity was a concern.
"Next time," he said, "we go counterclockwise."
"You said that at the beginning."
"Right," he said. "And I think we'll see better results."
It was nine-forty in the morning. The sun was getting warmer. Somewhere across town, East Main was still torn up and would be for weeks, and the Terrace was open for the season, and the city was doing that thing it does in early June where everything feels like it's just getting started. Reggie had vegetable homework and melting ice cream and a conviction that the system was sound.
I really do like him. That's the whole problem and also the whole point.