We’ve All Been There
No one has a “perfect life.” There is simply no such thing. All the people whose lives I think are “better” than mine never broadcast their grief, sadness, disappointment in life, their sense of loss or regret…but they ALL have these things in varying degrees. One thing I’ve learned is to look at the good things in my life and to shun the regret and self-pity that I could so easily have quite often about deaths of family and friends, not being rich, not being a famous author, not having health insurance, etc. Such thinking would render me a manic depressive…or worse. Every morning when I wake up, I ponder briefly just before getting up what and whom I have in my life that makes getting out of bed a good thing. I have woes, like everyone else, but dwelling on the absence of what I think might make life more heavenly is a waste of time and yields only a nonproductive melancholy that has no purpose in my getting on with things. One of my favorite quotations is, “Life is filled with doors to open or close….and rooms we cannot go back to.” Thinking too much about those doors we can no longer open or the “rooms” we can’t go back to serves no purpose except to create a ponderous sense of regret that impedes living in the present with whatever good things are there. I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but these thoughts help to keep me at times from being put into a padded cell at Shady Pines. 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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