I remember as a child wanting so much to be a teenager, like the ones in our neighborhood who sometimes got to drive their parents’ cars and were allowed to stay out until ten in the evening. My J.C. Higgins bicycle made me feel older and wiser than the kids on our street who were still riding tricycles, but that was hardly compensation for me to feel truly independent and free of the constraining label of being a “kid.”
When in my twenties (to which I had looked forward as a teenager), more responsibilities to which I had never given much thought, added to my newly supposed freedom the burden of taxes, rent, insurance for my car (along with the expense of fuel and maintenance for it and my home). The busy, even if “grown-up” conveyor belt taking money from my increasingly starving wallet hummed its way through my forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies so that now I have finally accepted the fact that staying alive and comfortable involves multiple monetary obligations that I have finally accepted as the inevitable and unending entry fee to a life of relative comfort in a world where my not having money would render me far unhappier, even though as an official codger, I claim the right to fuss about things if I need to. I’ve earned it.
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. That’s what being an adult is. Also, I have learned that the sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to “catch up.” 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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