The years manage to creep by, leaving a trail of memories, some of which are crystal clear (even from childhood) while others, like trying to recall the brief grocery list I neglected to jot down, zoom into outer space. Many incidents from childhood are still vivid in all their exhausting detail, while locating my cellphone can require using the housephone to track it down.
I sometimes imagine my mind to be a large collection of rooms in a massive house, where daily routines are still intact until less important surprises invade my comfort zone with issues that involve remembering where I laid my wristwatch or the glass of wine that I was drinking just minutes before. Friends my age say that these changes in our powers of recollection are quite common and simply require a routine which allows as few details as possible to create surprises.
Such military strictness seems too robotic for me to live like a mouse trying to master a maze. Routine is certainly essential on some level, providing some kind of comfort zone of familiarity, but if there’s a ray of hope in my memory having to face annoying little glitches, it’s that I’m not alone in forgetting some daily details, and that my old friends and I still recall the shared happiest days of our childhood and youth together without the roadmap sometimes needed to find a nailfile or toothbrush.
As usual, old friends who know our gaffes without smirking, are the bulwark of shared times and even hope for the future. 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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