Frank says there’s a Stanley Lewis show in Terre Haute and I say we should go. Then I insist it will take less than two hours to drive there from Chicago. I’ve driven past Terre Haute a million times en route to Boston, I say. I’m 100% sure of this. When I get home I look it up and realize I’m thinking of South Bend. Notre Dame is not in Terre Haute, it turns out. The Old Timers’ is really starting to kick in. Wherever it is, I wanna go.

Lewis came to Chicago when Frank and I were at the Art Institute at the beginning of the 90s. He and our teacher, Dan, led a tour of the museum. They debated the space within a Courbet for many minutes. Then there was a drawing trip where we focused on Indian sculptures. Lewis was an intense, red-faced man who communicated a rabid desire to catch whatever was in front of his eyes in marks on paper. His quest was a ceaseless trying rather than any true hope of success or endpoint. It felt completely true and relatable to me. When he looked at my sketch, he said something like Oh, you’re like me.

The drive takes three hours but it’s a breeze. We listen to music and gab. We’re friends nearly thirty-five years so it’s second nature.

The show is amazing. Reproductions don’t begin to do these pictures justice. The big drawings, especially, are like topographical maps up close. I say to Frank that if you rollered ink over the topmost level and lay down a piece of paper, you could pull a pretty good print.

They’re all about a ceaseless hunger to catch the everyday with eyes and hands. Lewis’s subjects are always humble and ordinary but his attention makes them a miracle.

I know very few pictures that communicate moment-to-moment living in quite this way.

On the drive back we wonder why the Art Institute doesn’t have shows like this. Sometimes you have to go to Terre Haute for the real thing.

Mallory made me watch a really boring folk-horror flick that reminded me of Xena, Warrior Princess.

I talk with artist/writer Maggie Umber about her nearly-wordless book, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves.