EPILOGUE

 

The Mirror, Face of Boyhood, "Get Up and Move On,"

Fifty-Three Years Married, The Progeny

 

 

          Writing, I find, is self-revealing.  In recalling episodes from years on the farm and in school, I have encountered qualities of the boy that, if not hidden, were at least not heretofore willingly revealed.

 

          It is the sensation one experiences when walking on a sidewalk, unexpectedly confronting a mirror, and not immediately recognizing the frowning, unprepared face that looks back.  How quickly we rearrange our features.

 

          In writing these chapters, I saw the face of boyhood in near poverty.  It was not enough that one had sufficient to eat, for there was in self a need to stand level with one's fellows, to have the confidence to say, "Mine is as good as yours."  With holes in our shoes, and knowing farm and home were slipping away, we felt a void that would never completely fill with a new house or property at some future time.

 

          Looking today over the fields of Beech Hill Road, I sense that it probably never will.

 

          We boys decided that it would not be so with us and individually resolved that in every situation we would not be failures.  That resolve, and work habits we had learned on the farm, gave us a degree of success in life and in our careers that I will attribute always to the lean years and parental example: "When you're down, don't stay there.  Get up and move on."

 

          I've written all of these pages with a presence in the kitchen and living room, maintaining quiet, preventing distractions, providing nourishment, suggesting answers, making inquiries and giving encouragement.  Yet because of the pre-set limitations on subject matter her name is rarely mentioned.

 

          I waited for 32 years to fall truly in love.  We have been married for 53 years and have parented six children (one of whom we lost at birth in Japan).

 

          She, too, is a Vermonter, though we did not meet until I took a graduate course at the University of Vermont in 1949.

 

          With pride I use this opportunity to tell the largest possible readership of my gratitude and love for Elizabeth Louise Delaire Poulin, wife and mother and devoted helpmate through a full military career and beyond.

 

          Also omitted, though definitely not forgotten -- and sometimes peering over my shoulders and into my thoughts -- are our five surviving children: Mary Martha, 1952; Jerry Paul, 1954; twins, Katherine Teresa and Jeffrey Gilbert, 1956, and David Michael, 1958.

 

          Their childhood, school years, marriages and careers have been sources of parental pride, delight, trauma and enlightenment that would no doubt provide bountiful material for other books, should a generational author emerge from among them.

 

          During our years of active military service they attended some twenty different schools in four states and on two continents, despite which they have been outstanding students, scholarship recipients and honor graduates.

 

          They, with their delightful progeny, remain our greatest joy.