There is no living person who is not aging (despite the occasional empty compliments we dispense to friends and loved ones). Every breath each of us takes adds seconds and minutes to our lives in journeys that vary greatly in terms of burdens, joys, and hopes. Our connections to other people keep many of us going to discover what life still has in store, despite the inevitable mix of happiness and sorrow that no one can actually predict from moment to moment, or day to day.
I sometimes become more conscious that I’m still breathing and that my life is ticking by like an old clock that still needs and enjoys a rewinding, with hope that golden chimes will continue their lovely and familiar music.
Our awareness in recollections of where we’ve been is as clear as a new windowpane, and we hold onto and appreciate immensely those for whom life’s goodbyes remind us still that we are allotted only so many heartbeats and that whatever lies ahead is part of whatever trek we’ve been making, since playing with rattles in our cribs.
Whatever awaits us after the cessation of those many heartbeats, may they somehow continue after the final winding of our worldly time pieces in a reunion with everyone we have loved. 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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