From the Editor — Local Culture 8.1

Below is the introductory essay to the new issue of Local Culture. If you subscribe in the next week, you’ll receive this issue in your mailbox. You can whet your appetite by perusing the complete table of contents.

Brave pastime, Readers, to consume that day,
Which, without pastime, flyes too swift away!
— Francis Quarles, Emblemes i.x.41

There go the ships, and there is that leviathan, whom thou has made to take his pastime therein.

— Psalm 104:26 (Coverdale)

place, n. In Old English < post-classical Latin platea; subsequently reinforced by Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French place (c1100 in Old French; also in Anglo-Norman as plas, in Old French as plache (northern) and plasce, and in Middle French as plasse; French place) space, locality (c1100), room, available space (c1100), town square (c1200)

— OED

In my childhood town the road going south from the sole stoplight and the Sinclair gas station jogged by an open field and an old white barn before climbing up and over the railroad tracks. If you looked east from the top of the bridge you could see five tennis courts below. Nearby and fronted by a large field stood the middle school. Come autumn the field would be partitioned off into several flag football fields. Shivering parents and grandparents stood or sat in lawn chairs along the sidelines with their thermoses of coffee and their thoughts of returning posthaste to their warm houses. We boys who played the games arrived on our bikes well ahead of our parents and didn’t know until many years later, when it was our turn to shiver on the sidelines, that most of them weren’t having very much fun.

Another quarter mile to the south stood the high school, which once upon a time had the words “rural agricultural” in its name. The novelist and poet Jim Harrison was a graduate. He and his one good eye and his immense appetite went on to matriculate at the nation’s first land-grant university about five or six miles away. The row of houses across the road from the high school pretty much came to an end when it reached the southernmost edge of the school property, where lay another five tennis courts for the multitudes who in those days disported themselves in this Franco-English pastime. On Sunday afternoons my dad and uncle often had to sit and wait a good hour until a court became available.

For another mile south there was nothing but beautiful undeveloped fields full of sunlight. But then, at another four corners, the road slammed into something fairly new under the sun and all too common now: a shopping mall complete with movie theatres for the especially bored and unimaginative.

The district’s shop teacher lived across the road from the high school. His son Tim and I were classmates and would remain classmates all the way through college. But in the open fields and the high grasses behind their house we were explorers. One day when we were about seven years old we found a large rock that looked like a fossilized dinosaur head, so we decided that it was a fossilized dinosaur head. In his report to his parents that evening, when we finally came back to the house, Tim claimed—not without exaggeration, I thought—that we had slogged through “prehistoric tar” to get to the remains of the dinosaur.

“Prehistoric.” Wow. I had never heard that word before. I felt a slight smart. I was going to have to read more to keep up with my brainy fellow explorer.

My family lived about a mile and a half from the prehistoric tar—neither a long nor a dangerous bike ride on a Schwinn Stingray, though years later Tim, returning from my house, would get hit by a car on that very route and sustain a scary but remediable head injury.

We too had open fields behind us, and a pond, and beyond it a lake circumscribed by a dirt two-track, later a paved road lined by condominiums and a nine-hole golf course. There was a lot of room for BB-gun wars in the fields and along the lakeshore, and we prosecuted them. Now and then a concerned but meddlesome grown-up would catch us and make us stop, but our ceasefires, like those beyond the world of pretend, would be temporary.

There was also about an acre of pine forest behind us. These pines were planted in rows, and their branches went nearly to the ground. This meant you couldn’t move about in them very easily, though all of us in the neighborhood knew the best entries and the best routes through them. You’d sometimes find the remains of someone’s missing cat on the soft pine straw floor. If you were especially bold you could sneak into the pines and smoke a cigarette. I never had the guts to do this, but my neighbor Jeff did. His rebellion was impressive. He used to sling his bangs out of his eyes in the manner I was not allowed to. Flaunting long hair in those days was one sign of a troublemaker. Another kid named Mike also did this, but he was an exception to prove the rule: he went on to become a good fly fisherman and a fairly successful “nature” painter.

The pines also served as the right field home run fence to our makeshift diamond in the vast elementary schoolyard behind our houses. This was one of three elementary schools in the town, and all of them had baseball diamonds and basketball courts. In the summers you might have to ride your bike to the school farthest away for one of your Little League games, in my case about two miles, ball glove dangling from my handlebars, but always there was a game; always there were the parents and their varying degrees of enthusiasm, always the chatter, and always the mystery of other boys’ ball gloves.

Come to think of it, I myself was a bit of a mystery. Not many boys threw right but batted left. I had the very great distinction, which I was quick to point out, of being just like Jim Northrup of the Detroit Tigers, a farm kid who hailed from tiny little Breckenridge, Michigan, whither he returned in 2011 for interment in the beautiful and cedar-bemused local cemetery.

Of course there were some minor differences between us that I did not publish as eagerly: I refer not only to the fact that the Silver Fox was an outfielder, whereas I was a shortstop. (“Short’s the best position they is,” as one of Tobias Wolff’s characters confidently asserts.) Northrup was also a five-sport athlete at little Alma College, the school nearest his hometown, and he hit his fifth grand slam of the ’68 season in game six of the World Series. Assuredly a similar future awaited me. Assuredly a similar fate awaited all of us. We were all as mettlesome and dashing as Lord Byron.

Sometimes you could find a door ajar or unlocked in the elementary school behind our house. You’d go straight to the gym to shoot baskets, free of the all-havoc-wreaking wind, until a janitor kicked you out.

There was a pop machine in the gym, the kind with a narrow vertical glass door, and for a dime you could pull a bottle of grape soda out of the galvanized rollers and get a whiff of that old-style refrigeration.

A small parking lot “for teachers only” came right up to the east wall of the gym. You could hit tennis balls against it if you couldn’t find anyone to play tennis with. A ball hit on the roof was not an inconvenience. We all knew how to get on the roof and back down again without getting caught.

The engineering marvel of the neighborhood was an A-frame treehouse that my dad and uncle built. It rested between two walnut trees in our backyard. There was not a single nail in either tree. It had a deck on two sides of it and an 8-foot ladder that you could use or not use for access and egress. For the latter I would mostly disregard the ladder and jump, an ill-advised practice that explains some of the ailments afflicting me in my dotage.

You could run a few extension cords to the treehouse and take a small black-and-white TV up there if you wanted to watch scary movies or the NBA on CBS. My neighbor Joel and I would order pizzas and talk about girls, and in the morning we would sling our golf clubs over our shoulders and ride our bikes to one of the two nine-hole golf courses nearby. One is still there; the other, a little farther away, is now a Costco. From it you can almost see an empty Rite-Aid sitting forlornly where, in better days, the second green backed up to the soup and the cattails behind it.

Such also was the fate of the white barn aforementioned in that open field near the bridge over the tracks: it was torn down to make room for one of the ugliest shopping complexes I’ve ever seen. After only three decades it was hollowed out and then, after four, demolished. We’re all waiting to see what abomination is aborning.

These reminiscences and the search for lost time I witness in others suggest to me that the means of passing the long days of a child’s American summer varied little from place to place. What differences there were owe to the places themselves, which all play and all pastime, whatever their similarities, must suit themselves to. And this is as it should be: let the place decide. Our pond in the field out back meant skates and hockey all throughout the winter. The elementary school on our side of town sat on a good-sized hill, and so when the snow fell we went sledding—all day long and into the night if we could get away with it. (You were king of the hill in those days if you owned a Brunswick Snurfer.) We sailed homemade boats in the cold tempestuous ponds of March and April. The place decided—as much as we did—what we would do, though what we did in our place was apparently being duplicated wherever climate, landscape, and imagination permitted.

Christopher Lasch once suggested that nostalgia is a falsification of memory. My quibbles with Lasch are few, maybe next to nil, but here I must dissent. If for the moment we leave aside the complicated business of memory—and I am not alone in taking the Augustinian view that memory is, inter alia, the human faculty that reveals divine intention in the world—we are nevertheless obliged to treat nostalgia with some strictness of expression. Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. Odysseus is nostalgic for Ithaca. The wild civility of Ogygia and the island goddess won’t do for him.

Those who would avoid a proper understanding of nostalgia have the usual routes available to them: a careless and slovenly use of the mother tongue, the lethargy of custom, a weak capitulation to convention, an indifference to the rich history in words that waits patiently, like a genie in a bottle, to be set free. (There are wishes that that rich history fain would grant.) What I have so far been recounting, what I have been remembering, certainly qualifies as nostalgia, but it is not nostalgia in the sense that its future-mad naysayers mean by it: a “longing for a past that never existed,” which is a phrase nearly as idiotic as “the right side of history.” Nostalgia provides occasion for the attentive man, thinking back on his past and on his pastimes, to be a worthy pupil of his recollections.

Consider for the moment Wordsworth’s proposition that the child is father of the man and that any one of us might wish our “days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Does it not seem that children—I mean children set loose into the given world, not into the world dominated by the devices and diversions emanating from hell and Silly Con Valley—does it not seem that they will perforce adapt their play to their places? This assumes, I grant, that they have actual places to be set loose into. I grant, further, that such places are rarer these days than no-hitters, academic standards, and frat-house virgins. But it is not only for children to honor the law of local adaptation. It is for children to father such men and women as are likewise capable of such honor.

And grownups are, or at least were, capable of it. Do you remember uncles and their horseshoe pits? Hayracks and hayrides? Rims and fan-shaped backboards tacked on garage roofs? Bike ramps made of plywood and a single log? Strawberries on your hips from sliding into second?

I remember not only the athletic contests of my childhood but the rich exhilarating culture of men’s fast-pitch softball that I watched as a young boy. I remember Big Herm Williams on the mound for Steve’s Amoco at a lighted park on US 10 in Scottville, Michigan, where all summer long you could see some really great battles. Across the road a boy could buy a stick of beef jerky at the Dairy Barn and pretend as he sat in the bleachers that it was chewing tobacco. What a marvelous local pastime this was; what possibilities for local cohesion it afforded that small community, land of my mother’s birth. The funeral games for Anchises were no more communal than these.

And, later, I remember magical nights of slow-pitch softball that lasted until the elbow on my throwing arm forsook me once and for all. I remember walkable city and municipal golf courses, local courses where in the clubhouse the clever and often hilarious banter among friends concerned the place in all its varied richness. The talk was nothing like what you hear across the immense distances separating strangers who sit at separate tables beneath television screens, each man at his beer, all of them having motored miles and miles for the dull privilege of driving over land-gobbling courses designed for legless humanoids.

I say nothing of the local theatres, the music scenes, nothing of that pastime whose absence has left an echoless cavern in the culture: men and women, neighbors and friends making music together in their homes. (Most of them could read music, and many could play by ear.) I grant that the contemporary college campus is a gathering place of itinerants, but what would it be without its choral and orchestral programs that afford the young an opportunity to honor the muses? In my own experience the practice extended beyond the formal structure of rehearsal and performance. It spilled into the weekend parties, where the singing would break out because nothing could contain it. It was a hearth of sorts, a campfire drawing people to its circumference and hence into its light and warmth. This is beauty itself as focus, and I mean that, too, in the etymologically precise sense: from the Latin root meaning “hearth, “fireplace.” How is a large “smart” TV tricked out for streaming Season 7 a better focal point for any living room—unless “living” is meant ironically?

In all things and in all matters the place decided. It decided ere the place-snubbing screens and smartphones came along to import a snobbish coastal monoculture, to banish meaningful pastime and elide the textured places we remember and practiced those pastimes in. These plug-in imps are a veritable scourge, lips dripping honey but tasting of wormwood. Let the upright turn away from them like pious Joseph from Potiphar’s slutty insatiable wife.

Although there are no seven-year-old explorers in that mile stretch between the high school and the shopping mall—for there are also no fields left for the sunlight to fall on—and although there is not a single baseball diamond remaining at any of those three elementary schools of my youth (an imposter known as “soccer” has evicted them), although indeed there hath passed away a glory from the earth, yet will we take heart:

I recall seeing my older son, now perpetually within earshot of all the culture’s many sirens, and like all of his peers and most of their sorry parents perilously skirting those sirens’ treacherous shores, with nary a mast to bind themselves to—I remember seeing him pull on a ball cap, pluck a stalk of green foxtail from the ground, put it in his mouth, and head down a trail out back of our house, making for the woods, BB gun in his hand and his dog a few paces ahead of him. Maybe he will remember this. Maybe the memory will save him for the given world. Maybe the child will be father of the man, his days bound each to each by a natural piety.

Maybe our cultural amnesia will not get us in the end. Maybe we will remember Robert Frost’s birch trees subdued by a boy

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Maybe (forgiving the slight jab at baseball) we will remember Frost’s woodsman and his

cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight—

and the speaker of this fine poem thinking

that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches,” Frost said. And one could do worse than be a woodsman artist given to fresh tasks, passing the time in a lovely and loveable place—that is, in a small patch of the given world.

LC is back on schedule after a regrettably tardy fall 2025 issue, which for various reasons got delayed until January of 2026. As always I am grateful to readers for their patience and loyalty.

And once again the excellent work of Erin Kulmatycki adorns the cover of LC. Soon you will be able to see more of her work for LC, as well as the artwork of other contributors, including our equally excellent designer, Carolyn Howell, on the FPR website under “Local Culture.” Who knows but that you might be moved to make a purchase?