Many times, I have heard people say, “…but John, spiders are our friends.” Despite all the good things I have heard and read about these creatures, their friendship is something with which I am not the least bit reluctant to part. In the end, they are one of the taboos of my existence. The mere sight of a spider, however small and harmless, causes a chemical reaction in my body so that I become The Incredible Hulk, capable of great speed and tremendous feats of strength. I believe I could toss a grand piano across the room if I thought it would help fend off one of the eight-legged invaders.
My paranoia knows no limit regarding spiders. Sometimes I imagine the particularly large varieties of southern regions carrying hobo sticks and hopping freight cars just to come north right to my house. They don’t need maps. They ALL know where I live, and I can hear them saying, “Hey, you guys, let’s go down to Bolinger’s place in Florida. We can scare him out of town and take over his house without even a mortgage.”
When I was in Mexico, I was in constant fear that at night a scorpion or tarantula would slip into my luggage to lay eggs just to colonize the whole town when I go back. After I got home, I checked my shoes every day for weeks and shook linens out before bed each night. Even a plastic spider can make me convulsive. The only therapy I can accept is something I came up with on my own. I would gradually become accustomed to spiders by beginning with pencil drawings of cartoon quality. The next year, color drawings could be shown…then black and white photos. Color pics could be introduced when I’m in my nineties. That’s as far as my imagination would allow me to go with it at present, but the fear has spiraled over the years and certainly goes back to childhood. 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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