Racine, Wisconsin

If I was forced to say anything positive about the city, I would say that I was glad that I moved away from it. A couple weeks before my 13th birthday, my mother uprooted my sister and myself from Brooklyn New York to what my grandfather's cousins convinced her would be a better life.
It was a nightmare. An awful one, and for a shy kid like me, with a very bad speech impediment, it was worse than awful, so when I go back there to visit my mother, I have no feelings of nostalgia there. When we moved there, I knew that I would leave from there as soon as possible.
This week while I was here, I drove through the city. I drove by the first place we lived, and my junior high school. When we lived in Brooklyn, I attended Broooklyn Tech High school; high school starts in the 8th grade in New York. When we moved to Wisconsin, I had to go back to junior high school because in Wisconsin,  High school started in the 9th grade. Already a nervous kid, my already severe stuttering at the time, was exascerbated by the stress involved in moving to a new place and starting a new school mid-year. And cousins that informed us we had quickly overstayed our welcome.
I drove by my old high school to take pictures. I had wondered if I missed it. I wondered if there would be at least a little twinge of nostalgia, but---nothing. Not  a thing. Even though I knew my way around the city, it was as if I had never been there. There were no memories attached to anything. I do think about Mrs. Roland from time to time. She was my first writing teacher. She was the one who convinced me to continue writing. I think about Mrs Grover from time to time. She was my guidance counselor. Despite my having straight A's and dreams of being an architect, she convinced me that I wasn't going to succeed and to consider a less ambitious career. My esteem was low at that time and so I believed her.
I still have dreams of being an architect.
I drove by  The Rose Of Sharon, Church of God In Christ. This was the church that took us under their wing. The pastor thought his daughters were too good to hang out with my sister; he informed my mother that my sister was too 'fass' (he doesn't know his youngest daughter had 4 abortions before she turned 16 and my sister hadn't even had sex yet). His son and the other boys in church didn't like that I stuttered and so they made fun of me all the time. When I escaped Racine and went to college in Tennessee, the pastor told my mother that I wouldn't survive college. She informed me of his opinion after I had graduated college with a 3.8 GPA. He is now in a retirement home, with both legs cut off, due to diabetes.I visit him everytime I come to town.
Perhaps I think of Racine as being one of Wisconsin's armpits (the other being Beloit) because of my experience growing up in the city. I'm a bit of a snob when I meet someone  my age who chooses to live there. But then again, now that I think about it, we all are products of our environment, and that life is what we make of it. I love Los Angeles, for example. One might think of that as a nightmarish place to be from.  If I had a great childhood with friends and a happy family, growing up, then perhaps I would see Racine through rose-colored glasses the way other people here do. But I didn't have any friends here. And I have always hated the city that's stuck in the 70s: Racine, Wisconsin.