I’d like to say that I’m aging gracefully, but I’m not entirely sure what that means. The years continue to roll by faster than I recall them spinning by when I was a child. Birthdays seem to come and go now faster than I can blow out the candles from the year before (OK, I’m not THAT old).
I do try to see the comedy in obvious changes to my memory, the glitches of which I wish could be dollar bills in my bank account. Aging is an odd journey for many of us, who are growing older at speeds that seem to be testing rocket fuel for journeys to other galaxies. One of the comforting characteristics of growing older is that we don’t have to age alone. The anchors of sailing into old age give us pauses on the voyage as we contemplate with dear friends where we’ve been and perhaps even where’ we’re going.
I go to bed at night, occasionally imagining that I can feel myself wrinkling as I drop off to sleep, but my heartbeat reminds me that the vehicle I call “life” is still running and that I have friends who, on some level, share my journey.
Florida is a place where the elderly can share the journeys of growing older. That bond is a powerful one, and that sense of experiencing together with friends and acquaintances the passing of time and the inevitable, sometimes harsh, changes in our personal and collective views of the journey, render the passage of time less scary with the feeling that we’re all in this together. Toasting each other occasionally with Champagne or Jack Daniels helps too. 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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