Time is a kind of abstraction. It’s not something you can hold in your hand (a watch doesn’t count) or save in the physical sense the way we save coins in a piggy bank. Nor is it something most of us ponder, except in celebrations of holidays (especially New Year’s Eve) and particularly on birthdays, blowing out candles that represent our current success at still being around and counting the years, like almost forgotten treasure.
As we age, the years accumulate memories that, even without physical presence, are saved up and brought back, like lovely old Christmas ornaments we dust off and display in December. Memories (good and bad) represent who we are, what we’ve done and what we’ve experienced. Signposts along the way remain in memories of weddings, births, deaths, our shining moments of achievement and regret. We are all living, breathing autobiographies, generally unaware of when our days here will cease, almost like very long movies of epic proportions with a great number of memorable cast members.
The elements of greatest power and importance remain our connections to other people who love us and whom we love. Every life is an epic of varied length and varied cast of characters that is hoped to merit some level of applause when at last the curtain comes down and we can look back at our lives with the words, “I really enjoyed that.” 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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