Every January first morning I sit for a while in my favorite wingchair with a glass of Mimosa (orange juice with Champagne) looking at the Christmas tree while contemplating the previous year. That experience has a cleansing effect that helps me open doors to the year ahead, recognizing my mistakes along with triumphs and hoping the mistakes will be fewer in the new year, ready for fresh views of the world, both good and bad.
Part of this emotional “journey” is for visiting that year in retrospect, admitting to errors and celebrating whatever triumphs there may have been. Each year increases the chances of goodbyes to family and friends who have passed away. That’s one of the painful parts of aging and something we must all endure until the world says goodbye to us too.
I believe the best and most important part of our saying farewell to the previous year is to widen our acceptance of whatever new experiences and people enter our lives. Old doors close, but new ones open to widen our views. Our willingness is a marvelous vehicle for change as well as the gift of those wonderful friends and family who remain and who continue with us on continuing journeys through joy, beauty and sorrow that we need never face alone.
Now I raise my Mimosa glass to the past, toast to the future and to continued life among dear family and friends with whom life becomes a miraculously shared journey. 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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