Plainfield’s latest art installation The Dream Gazer, dedicated March 7th.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in between our conventions and road trips, sometimes my wife Anne and I find new sights in our own Indianapolis backyard. On this very Easter morning we discovered a new park in nearby Plainfield that we’d heard nothing about until I looked it up just now. In light of the ongoing saga of the ambitious Artemis II Moon-orbiting mission that’s been a promising endeavor and a welcome distraction from everyday headline hysteria, it was fun to spend a few minutes with a super-sized astronaut of sorts.

Four statues of the li’l hero are planned in all. Either we both overlooked the fourth one, or it’s still in the works.

Last month Plainfield officials unveiled the 25-foot statue in our lead photo — The Dream Gazer, the centerpiece of the newly dedicated Swarn Park. Still a work in progress, the park is located in the neighborhood of Hobbs Station, a $300 million mixed-use development resembling some of the upscale suburbs we’ve encountered in our travels, such as our very own Carmel up in Hamilton County. (Read: houses starting in the $400K range and up, apartments for $1400-$2500/month, etc.)

The park is a mile north of the outdoor mall that contains my usual movie theater and the only Barnes & Noble within 20 miles of our house — not too far from some of our usual haunts, on the residential side of US 40 away from the commoner chain restaurants and big-box stores. Its namesake is one Lemuel Swarn, a Black man who was born into slavery in North Carolina, moved to the area after the Civil War and became a landowner with a large family before his death in 1937.

Much of Swarn Park was muddy after a fairly rainy Saturday. Little avalanches of unfinished landscaping covered some of the sidewalks.

The subject of Swarn Park’s largest decorations is a character named Aku, the creation of retired pro baseball player Micah Johnson. Born here in Indy, Johnson played second base for the White Sox, the Dodgers, and the Braves before retiring and changing career tracks to become an artist and storyteller. For a time his affairs involved NFTs and blockchain (firmly not among my areas of interest), but lately he’s focused on the plucky spaceboy whose first children’s book Aku: Journey to Ibra was just published by Penguin Random House last month. The book’s illustrator Durk van der Meer previously debuted Aku in print on a 2022 Time Magazine cover for a feature about the Metaverse, though Time apparently credited Johnson for the work.

I don’t know if the other three statues have their own names like The Dream Gazer does. Sadly this Aku’s visor is already chipped.

We discovered Swarn Park using the same method that’s brought us pleasant surprises in other past travels: by Googling “breakfast restaurants” and accidentally wandering into it. Anne and I attended 8 a.m. Easter services at our home church and decided to have brunch afterward. (Neither of our families does anything special for Easter anymore ever since our nieces and nephews got too old for Easter egg hunts. Or if they do still hold Easter soirees, we aren’t invited.)

After much vetting and hemming and hawing, our winner among the many nearby search results was Another Broken Egg, a midsize chain with locations mostly to the south and/or the east, from L.A. to Philly, as far north as Cleveland. We’ve been to one or two of their central Indiana locations before, but we didn’t know they’d established a Plainfield beachhead and were pretty sure the menu featured new items, or at least new to us.

Their building mostly features a parking garage and empty storefronts to be filled in the future, including a creamery coming soon next door.

We figured this location was new enough that it wouldn’t have an hours-long wait for a table like a lot of older restaurants likely did that morning. We know Easter is a big holiday for morning outings. Back in my restaurant management days, the cycle was pretty predictable: extremely busy in the morning, dead as a graveyard by nightfall. Sure enough, the place was consistently busy during our visit, but I never saw a crowd impatiently sitting in the lobby.

Sign up for their email list like I did and get a free order of biscuit beignets served with honey marmalade.

(Our beignets were not fresh out of the fryer, but as freebies, we couldn’t complain.)

For Anne, the cookie dough waffle! The waffle itself was ordinary, but the cookie dough bites were the star of the dish. She didn’t even need pancake syrup.

For me, the Cajun shrimp and crawfish omelet, topped with tomato hollandaise and too many diced tomatoes.

We kept our walk short because it was chilly outside, we were looking forward to napping after such an early service, and the park isn’t quite packed with art installations yet. I’d expect that to change in the months and years ahead if all goes well for their plan to transform the area into Carmel Southwest. We couldn’t possibly afford to live in Hobbs Station, but we’d love to visit again sometime. The brunch menu had other dishes we’d like to try, we do love a good creamery, and it bugs me that we’re missing the fourth Aku.

Cute touch: the ABE off US 40 — a.k.a. The National Road — has its own location-specific coffee mugs. CAUTION: Mug not suitable for use on space missions.