I remember that during childhood, the word “goodbye” had a most melancholy effect when it was used to leave the homes of my grandparents, especially during the Christmas holidays when I, my siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered for Christmas dinner followed by live music from fiddles, guitars, a violin, piano, and octet of vocals by my parents, aunts, uncles and family friends. The adults sometimes danced while we kids played board games and ate Christmas cookies.
Such memories are truly sensory and accumulated until I was in my mid-thirties. I still recall the music, the aromas of wonderful food, the sound of delightful laughter, most of which has since been silenced in the grave. Even several of my younger cousins are no longer with us, and the joyful cacophony of those years still comes back to me when I hear holiday carols or any Hawaiian guitar music that recalls our dear family friend, Bill Aronson, who always played it on his own instrument with my relatives singing along. Grandpa played the double bass, Dad played the guitar, and uncles played other instruments, including the piano. The other adults sang along as they all drifted quietly from Christmas carols to Hawaiian hula music, which made me think that Santa was somewhere frowning about that sacristy on the birthday of Baby Jesus.
Even now when I hear Hawaiian music, instead of thinking about palm trees and hula dancers wearing grass skirts, I remember the very vivid sound of carols played on those sliding strings…and I can smell Grandma’s pineapple upside down cake, pumpkin pies, and hear the joyful voices of my extended family singing and chatting while icy winds blew outside, usually until the wee hours of the morning, when Dad, Mom, my brother David, I and my sister Connie ventured out to the car and pretended that our steamy breath was from cigarettes. We would all then sleep until noon the next day.
Now, almost everyone else has passed away, even cousins much younger than I. I wonder every year what memories others my age or younger have of their family yuletide gatherings. My recollections are all still quite vivid during the season, especially on Christmas Day, when it all comes back to me, like forgotten buried treasure. 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
View all posts by John →
