From the Editor—Local Culture 7.2: Work and Leisure

Skip to main content Skip to footer From the Editor—Local Culture 7.2: Work and Leisure Wading in a river and lumberjacking in the woods are at once work and play, play and work, and in this they resemble anything we might do for instrumental ends and yet,… Jason Peters December 12, 2025 Below is the introductory essay to the new issue of Local Culture . If you subscribe in the next few days, you’ll receive this issue in your mailbox. You can whet your appetite by perusing the complete table of contents . In preparing to pass along to my younger son a Subaru with 270,000 miles but no bumper stickers on it, I discovered I had some work to do to make the car at least partially reliable. This Outback, aged 17 years, was passing oil as if oil were wind and the engine a flatulent old man. If you’re clogging up your catalytic converters every 30 or 40 thousand miles, you’ve got issues—plus a really slow car. And there were several other oil leaks as well. I found two relatively inexpensive catalytic converters, front and back. I put the car on jack stands, took an advance on my remaining fund of swear words, crawled under the car, and went to work. If I had a dime for every time someone has said to me, “you don’t have to do that; get someone else to do that,” I could afford a car with only 100,000 miles on it. But back of what I want to say here is not that I don’t want a car that new, which I don’t, but that sometimes a man at work is also a man at play. Suppose I am in a hospitable place, like my barn. Suppose the Detroit Tigers are on the barn radio. Suppose the barn fridge is amply supplied with a right proper assortment of Michigan beers. Suppose all that. Why, I ask you, would I not indulge myself in such delights as auto repair? About month into his junior year of college my son reported to me that the Subaru was overheating. Of course it was. Oil leaks can corrupt the cooling system, not to mention the timing belt. Picture me, then, professor of English and a senior member of the faculty. I am in a dorm parking lot. The Subaru is once again on jack stands. The bed of my 20-year-old pickup truck (280,000 miles) is full of tools. It is a Wednesday afternoon. An undergraduate whom both my son and I know walks by and asks me if I need help. I thank him for his kindness but, doubting his capacity to help, assure him that this is a one-man job. Plus I am a man at play and I don’t want my play disturbed. By the next day the new radiator has arrived. I had left the car on jack stands overnight, because why wouldn’t I invite inquiries from campus security? My son and I...

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