I generally watch and listen, with some degree of interest, to the decisions, actions, and shenanigans from our nation’s capital, and how those edicts are intended to affect the lives of all of us in every town, city and state of the union.
Many or most of those decisions and laws rarely funnel their way down to my neighborhood, my street, or my house. I vote in all local and national elections with the hope that our voices will be heard as majorities and minorities that show that all our hopes and voices matter, despite the extraordinary national division between our political parties over the past five years, as though China and Russia had created that separation in the most potent and stultifying ways.
I still believe in democracy over any other form of government, but I often feel now that I’m residing on a planet in some other solar system, where my interplanetary telephone is out of order. The result sometimes is that the years seem to be rolling by with greater speed so that, as Jeanne Robertson says, “When I lay my head on the pillow at night, I can hear myself wrinkling.”
The consequence is that though I will always vote in every election until my “upper floor” is no longer furnished, I won’t have such emotional reactions to things that won’t be changing life in my own town or in my own house. Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, where you stop your story.” 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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