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, a J.C Higgins bicycle. I think that the bike brought me closer to God (twice in heavy traffic) than the Bible did, but I continued attending church and Sunday school almost through my senior year in high school, enjoying it in almost the same way I enjoyed science fiction. I kept under wraps all my questions and misgivings about religion so as not to reveal that, in reality, I was a heathen within a family whose religious devotion seemed authentic and where saying “I don’t really believe in all this God stuff” would have created in our home at least two cases of cardiac arrest.
When I was in high school (sophomore year), I finally confessed to not being able to believe literally (as my parents did) in the Bible as anything more than a long and wordy guide to not being a bad boy. The panic this caused my dear parents was cosmic, to say the least. Every Thursday evening for several weeks, I was driven by Dad to the office of our pastor (also my uncle), where I expressed all my doubts with unanswerable questions that could have won me an automobile on any game show run by other non-believers. My uncle’s retorts and explanations to all my questions still have the ring of “Once Upon a Time” in their very remote connections to what I saw as the “real” world. The experience took me back to earlier times when my parents would read us fairy tales at bedtime, except that in those stories, I never actually thought I was going to be punished by the giants and big bad wolves that kept the stories popping.
I still attend church (a much more liberal one) for the glorious music and the simple message to love one another. If there are pearly gates after my death, I’m not certain what the ID card will be to get in. I’m counting on the angels having kept careful records of my best self.
For years afterward I attended more liberal churches than those of my parents. It was eloquent, broad-minded messages of hope and beauty that kept me going back. I have no more idea than anyone else of what lies beyond the grave. No one else does either, really. That’s what faith is. The only message that always rings true to me in all the clutter of religious threats is, “Love one another.” 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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