All of us have brains filled with various databases of our past experiences, hopes and dreams. It surprises us that we can remember vividly many experiences from fifty years ago but can’t recall where something is that we had only two hours before, or birthdays of family and dear friends. We puzzle at being introduced a second or third time to an acquaintance as we stumble awkwardly to recall his or her name. Younger people sometimes marvel at such apparent ineptitude, and can imagine our brains as chalkboards that are too easily wiped clean.
It seems, therefore, of some major importance that we work at concentrating on new experiences in terms of visual and verbal resolution, while also bonding more closely with audio and visual cues that sometimes register only briefly.
I believe in nurturing small groups of friends who are in their twilight years and sharing a sympathetic, patient bond with one another in an atmosphere where verbal difficulty is gently forgiven and where a sense of affection and humor prevail rather than division and criticism.
Fellowship and forgiveness mean everything as we age. If we can connect with each other in an atmosphere of acceptance instead of judgment, we’re liable to have a stronger comfort zone, one that includes us all with loving patience and good humor, rather than a zone of fake silence and judgment that only encourages it with no love or sympathy to pull us back into our continuing relationships with friends and family. 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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