Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes we celebrate holidays! Sometimes we leave the house! Sometimes we celebrate holidays by leaving the house!

With Valentine’s Day on a Saturday this year and our schedules cleared, my wife Anne and I made plans to grab an early breakfast before the rest of the world woke up and packed every restaurant in central Indiana for the next eighteen hours. We put our heads together, looked up places that we hadn’t been to before, and loved where we wound up. We didn’t cross-index our search results for sightseeing options in the vicinity, but were pleasantly surprised to wander into some. We ended up taking many more pics than we’d expected that day.

The two of us are lifelong Indianapolis west-siders and don’t hang out in Carmel too often, that most prominent among the the well-to-do cities and suburbs up on the northeast side. At times the relationship between Indy and Carmel bears more than a passing resemblance to the Pawnee-vs.-Eagleton rivalry (as it’s always seemed to this class-underdog, anyway), but the fact remains their non-chain culinary creators outnumber the west side’s by roughly 10,000-to-1. We made reservations, made the half-hour drive, and made ourselves at home at Goodness Gracious Kitchen & Cupboard, a breakfast-and-lunch spot that celebrated ten years of coziness last year.

We figured that’d be the end of our expedition and we’d be heading straight home to binge some King of the Hill or whatever. Au contraire: Goodness Gracious is in the heart of the Carmel Arts & Design District, which overflows with each and every item in its name. Temperatures had risen into the 40s and the two-week-old suffocating snowstorm blanket had mostly melted away throughout the week. This happy couple took advantage and took ourselves a nice stroll to walk off those breakfast carbs.

Last time we were in this specific neighborhood was some 15-20 years ago when we visited Bub’s Burgers & Ice Cream for my birthday and I had my very first elk burger. Bub’s is still rockin’ on, but Main Street Carmel has built up a lot around them since then. Their stretch was revamped into the Carmel Arts & Design District, with public art on just about every block and the Monon Greenway trail blazed north-south through one end for pedestrians and bikers to enjoy to their hearts’ content.

The art assortment includes 23 statues by a single artist: J. Seward Johnson II, grandson of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson (whose “no more tears” shampoo was a childhood household staple I endured under protest), whose son J. Seward III was one of BuzzFeed’s co-founders. Under the aegis of their previous mayor, the city purchased the statues between 2005 and 2023, the last one installed after Johnson himself passed away in 2020. These entries from his “Man-on-the-Street” series, dispersed across multiple localities, illustrate a sort of throwback community mostly conforming to a “Forever Small-Town 1950s” motif. Carmel hasn’t been a small town in decades, and definitely didn’t spend like a small town to acquire these. The Indianapolis Star compiled a complete list of locations, dates, and price tags.

If we’d known we would be in the middle of all this, I might’ve done the legwork so we could track down all 23. On our own without any online guidance, we approached 16 of them in all, in the following order:

A selection of works by the outnumbered other artists:

We couldn’t resist one last stop along Main Street before returning to the car: a round of snacks from Tous les Jours, a chain of French-Asian bakeries that originated in South Korea and have apparently been around since 2004. We’d never heard of them till last year, when we had breakfast at one in Huntsville, Alabama, on our 2025 road trip. (Someday I’ll post those pics too. Someday! Lord willing!) Until this very Saturday we didn’t know they have at least three Indiana locations. We had no idea because of course none of them are on the west side. This Valentine’s Day was just full of learning experiences for us.

…and then we returned to our malnourished side of town, ran errands, went home, exchanged gifts, and enjoyed the rest of our weekend except for the part where we didn’t stumble across any more surprise gourmet delicacies.