Theo had been planning the fair since August.
Not casually planning. Not "oh, we should go" planning. I mean he had a note on his phone — shared with me, without asking — called "SCIF Logistics," which stood for Spokane County Interstate Fair, which he had decided needed an acronym. The note had arrival time (9:45 AM, "before the crowd builds"), a prioritized list of exhibits ranked by estimated walking distance, and a separate subsection titled "Food Strategy" that began with the words corn dogs are a first-thing food, not a reward.
I want to be clear that I love him.
We left late because he couldn't find the portable phone charger, which he had packed specifically so we wouldn't have to worry about battery life while using the app he'd downloaded to navigate the fairgrounds. There is an app. He had downloaded an app.
By the time we got there, the sky was doing that Spokane thing where it looks gentle and overcast but the wind is actually ripping through everything and your lip balm evaporates on contact. Theo was undeterred. He had dressed in layers, he said, because he'd checked the forecast and knew it would warm up. He was wearing a flannel, a vest, and a look of deep professional confidence.
The first thing he wanted to do was find the agriculture pavilion.
"We'll loop back to the corn dogs," he said. "I want to anchor with something substantive."
I have never in my life needed to anchor with something substantive at a fair. But I followed him, because I am a person who makes choices.
The agriculture pavilion was great, actually — he got genuinely interested in a display about heritage grain varieties and asked the volunteer three questions and I could see the volunteer light up because nobody ever asks three questions. This is the thing about Theo. When he locks in, he really locks in. He took a photo of a wheat sample to "look into later." He will look into it later. I have no doubt.
Then the app crashed.
The fair app, the one that had the map and the wait times and the optimized corn dog routing, just closed. Theo stood in front of a funnel cake stand looking at his phone like it had personally let him down, which in a sense it had. He reopened it. It crashed again. He went quiet in the particular way that means he is recalibrating.
"Okay," he said. "We go analog."
What going analog meant, apparently, was that he approached a fair employee and asked if there was a printed map. The employee gave him a paper trifold. Theo studied it for a full ninety seconds while I ate a sample of kettle corn that a woman was just offering freely, with no strings, as God intended a fair to work.
He mapped a new route. On the paper map. With his finger.
The corn dogs were good. I'll give him that. He was right that they were a first-thing food, and we were now having them at 11:30, which is arguably still morning, and they were excellent. We ate them near the ride area and watched a kid absolutely lose his mind with joy on something spinning and Theo said, genuinely warm, "that's the good stuff," and I remembered why I came to the fair with a man who made an acronym.
We did the rides. We saw the 4-H rabbit competition, which Theo narrated under his breath like a nature documentary. We got to a concert that was already in progress and stood at the back and he put his arm around me against the wind and I thought, fine, this is fine, this is actually very good.
On the way home he mentioned that next year he would build in a buffer for the app potentially crashing.
"Or," I said, "we could just show up and walk around."
He considered this with genuine openness, the way he considers everything.
"I could build a backup system," he said.
The paper map is still in his vest pocket. I know because he smoothed it out when we got home and left it on the counter "for reference." The fair runs through the 20th. He is already thinking about going back.
The wheat thing is also, I checked, open in a browser tab.