Author Archives: John

About John

About John John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes. Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018 View all posts by John →

Aging as a Journey

Each year requires a bit more energy to blow out the candles on one’s birthday cake. Though I don’t yet require an oxygen tank for that task, I do feel the increasing effort to accomplish physical tasks (no matter how … Continue reading

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How Will the Future Look Back Upon This Time?

I wonder sometimes how history will look back upon the era in which we’re now living. The lies and corruption may require hundreds of pages for Trump, whom future citizens may see (I hope) for who he really was without … Continue reading

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Love Versus Need

Love and need are related on some level. I’m not certain if or where there is a division between them except that we like to think of “pure” love as having little if any connection to necessity or expectation of … Continue reading

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A Search for Meaning

I was brought up (raised) by parents who believed in God through weekly church attendance and Sunday school. For my eighth birthday I was given a pocket version of the Christian Bible by my maternal grandparents and, from my parents, … Continue reading

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On the Outside, Always Hoping for Acceptance

As a “gay” man, I have watched for many years (since I came out at age twenty) the willing self-exposure of more and more men (and women) about who they really are in terms of their sexuality. There should be … Continue reading

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   Inland Steel, 1968, The Summer from Hell

Whenever I see myself as unlucky or depressed and just feeling sorry for myself, I think about the summer of 1968, when I worked at Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana. I have to say that the money I earned … Continue reading

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Friendships

The value of true friendships is probably inestimable. Lasting friendships anchor us in a world that is changing ever faster each year. Those friendships give us a shared history of experiences from good and bad times, because friends have seen … Continue reading

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August Afternoon

Thelma wore a shawl and rocked On the two crescent moons of her chair While the cat sprawled out Like an old fur piece at the screen door Henry lay on the back porch swing Reading a tabloid from the … Continue reading

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Washington’s Punch and Judy Show

I wonder often how and why our nation divides itself into its ideologies of Democrat versus Republican. That division is, to a great extent, symbolic in its views and energized by mountains of presumption along with an almost war-like determination … Continue reading

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Trump’s Festering Presence in America

Though Donald Trump is no longer president of our nation, his face and voice linger menacingly on almost every TV channel and in other media. He seems to have consumed way too much of America’s political oxygen through his outrageously … Continue reading

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