Funding My New Book about Racine,WI
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Racine, Wisconsin is the central player in this drama of middle class life during the period I lived there, when there was a shared commonality among its people that we took for granted, because it was simply who we were. This book then is a cherished remembrance of a time lost but of a life and time that yet remains through cherished memories—proving that the past, too, is alive, to be re-experienced for what it can tell us about ourselves: how we lived and who we were, with our experiences imperishable because they are part and parcel of each our Being, telling us who we are today, because of who we were then, determining where we are still in spirit—that part of us that time can only enhance if we remain faithful to the truth that is ours.
This book is a celebration of our lives in a particular place, and what that place meant to us as the cradle that held us and rocked us into maturity. Our childhood and the city are ever inextricably bound together, making one impossible without the other. This is not sentimentality, but obeisance to a force that embodies as it is embodied, in the way that flesh cannot endure without spirit, or the spirit without the events and experiences needed for its own slow maturation over eternal time.
We lived in a time when we as a people were secure enough to go about our lives without the fears of a sudden erosive disruption, when we were participants in a way of life that remains imbedded in us as an emblem, to be held to, no matter what the future held for us as we moved out and away, as so many did, and also for those who stayed, to preserve their memories as undisturbed treasures, that life could never tarnish with time.
I have written many books about Racine, largely childhood and young adult experiences of my years there, but this book is demonstrably different in that the artifacts of the place are placed front and center, with what each fact and event meant in terms of its meaning and importance to the city and its people. Each Chapter or Item is named and defined, followed by my work in a variety of literary genres—being personal experiences personally experienced over my childhood and young manhood years in Racine, a typical small town in middle America, that will touch anyone who grew up anywhere in America mid twentieth century, one of the great periods in the history of our nation when we were free to grow and learn and pursue our dreams.
10 YEARS LATER
Standing on the leafy bank
on my first day back,
overlooking hills & ravines
and the river I fished,
I knelt, reached back over
the years, and threw a stick
that tumbled a wild green apple.
One bite and it all came back.
David Kherdian
This book is a celebration of our lives in a particular place, and what that place meant to us as the cradle that held us and rocked us into maturity. Our childhood and the city are ever inextricably bound together, making one impossible without the other. This is not sentimentality, but obeisance to a force that embodies as it is embodied, in the way that flesh cannot endure without spirit, or the spirit without the events and experiences needed for its own slow maturation over eternal time.
We lived in a time when we as a people were secure enough to go about our lives without the fears of a sudden erosive disruption, when we were participants in a way of life that remains imbedded in us as an emblem, to be held to, no matter what the future held for us as we moved out and away, as so many did, and also for those who stayed, to preserve their memories as undisturbed treasures, that life could never tarnish with time.
I have written many books about Racine, largely childhood and young adult experiences of my years there, but this book is demonstrably different in that the artifacts of the place are placed front and center, with what each fact and event meant in terms of its meaning and importance to the city and its people. Each Chapter or Item is named and defined, followed by my work in a variety of literary genres—being personal experiences personally experienced over my childhood and young manhood years in Racine, a typical small town in middle America, that will touch anyone who grew up anywhere in America mid twentieth century, one of the great periods in the history of our nation when we were free to grow and learn and pursue our dreams.
10 YEARS LATER
Standing on the leafy bank
on my first day back,
overlooking hills & ravines
and the river I fished,
I knelt, reached back over
the years, and threw a stick
that tumbled a wild green apple.
One bite and it all came back.
David Kherdian
Organizer
David Kherdian
Organizer
Marblehead, MA
