In April of 2001 my brother David died of lung cancer. A man of great insight, sensitivity, and intelligence, he also possessed a terrific sense of humor and was always able to become a child again on Christmas mornings, on birthdays, the 4th of July, and on the roller coasters that he loved so much. I still believe he was a musical genius, not because he was my sibling, but because he had an extraordinarily inventive nature that created complex and brilliant new worlds of sound from the simple strings of his Humming Bird acoustic guitar. I still miss him terribly.
FAREWELL TO A BROTHER
Summer is over,
And I’m walking on the layers of it,
Like geological sediment
Pressed down hard by time.
The self I used to know
Lies deep under layers of memory,
Where wholeness lurks just out of sight,
To be studied (if discovered) and cataloged
For later use, then tested for truth
And redeemed without coupons, commas,
Or dead leaves that cluster ‘round its center.
One whom I love lies there too,
Buried among goodbyes of
Tears now hard as granite.
The earth spins on that stick
My third grade teacher called an invisible axis,
And gravity keeps us from being flung
Into outer space,
But inner space is what I mean…
With that moment of farewell,
Never to be removed,
But only built upon,
Irrevocably,
A petrified recollection
Of such density, that it remains embedded
Forever in the deepest parts,
Like some hopeless fossil
In that substratum
Of an early April morning,
Perhaps someday to be found
And polished into something else,
A stone for a ring
Or an agate for a cameo
Over someone’s heart.
JB
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
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