Christmas for me never comes to an abrupt ending. I have friends who take down their holiday decorations on December 26, while I keep mine on display until Epiphany (January 6). One of my former students (Dan Novakowski) kept up all his elaborate Christmas decorations (including several full-size indoor yuletide trees, covered with hundreds of beautiful ornaments) throughout the year. I unabashedly milk the season too (though not to the extent that Dan did) for every drop of joy it can provide, including its music and cookies. The warm glow of the season lingers after the last candy cane is consumed and the final tree ornaments with the front-door wreath are taken down.
This shouldn’t sound like bragging or puerile behavior in me or anyone else who embraces that season with similar ardor. Rather, it should sound like what it really is, a melancholy reluctance to let go of a true warmth, social receptivity and benevolence that seem to fade all too soon after the last ornament is packed away in the attic. We all know better, but the speed and impatience of “modern” life always seem to return, like the Grinch sneaking back after the glow of the season fades, and the frantic pace creates a kind of blur in our lives until the next yuletide glow returns next year. 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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