The Doctor's Son

I grew up in a small town in northern Vermont1.1

| suppose it's a typical small town — a few houses,

lots of trees and a business district consisting of a dozen stores, two restaurants, three service stations and a doctor's office. Like most villages in rural Vermont, Enosburg is a community where neighbors greet each other by name. Even now, although I've lived elsewhere for nearly twenty years, the residents of Enosburg still welcome me <a href="http://www.rep1ica.com/GoodsBrand/Replica-Hublot-Watches-44.html">Bulgari Replica</a> with a smile. "Doctor Eppley's son is back," they say.

My parents moved to Vermont when I was still an infant. A soft-spoken2 man, my father settled qui¬etly into his medical practice. Within a few months the people of Enosburg accepted him as one of their own. Word passes quickly in small Vermont towns. They know good people when they meet them. Around town the neighbors greeted my father as "Doc Eppley." And I soon learned that as long as I lived in

Enosburg I would always be known as "Doctor Eppley's son."

On the first day of school, my classmates crowded around me because I was the doctor's son. "If you're anything like your father, you'll be a smart boy," my first-grade teacher said. I couldn't stop beaming3.

Throughout the first years of my life, I never tired of letting others know that my father was one of the town's most respected citizens. Somewhere in the midst of my teenage years, however, something changed. I was sixteen years old and the neighbors still called me "Doctor Eppley's son." They said that I was growing up to be an honorable and industrious4 young man, living an honest life just like my father. I groaned5 whenever I heard their compliments.

I wondered how I would ever fit in with my teen¬age friends. Having a popular father worked to my advantage when I was younger, but now that I was in high school my father's good name seemed like an ugly shadow that followed me wherever I went. And so when strangers asked me if I was Doctor Eppley's son I replied emphatically6, "My name is Harold. And I can manage quite well on my own." As an act of rebellion7,1 began to call my father by his first name, Sam.

"Why are you acting so stubborn8 lately?" my father asked me one day in the midst of an argument.

"Well, Sam," I replied, "I suppose that bothers you."

"You know it hurts me when you call me Sam," my father shouted.

I survived my last years of high school until finally I turned eighteen. The next fall I enrolled in college. I chose to attend a school far from Enosburg, a place where nobody called me "Doctor Eppley's son" because nobody knew my father.

One night at college I sat with a group of students in the dormitory as we shared stories about our lives. We began to talk about the things we hated most about our <a href="http://www.bestwatches4u.com/omega-c-340.html">Cartier Replica Watches</a> childhoods. "That's easy," I said. "I couldn't stand growing up in a town where everybody always compared me to my father. Just once, I'd like to be known as someone other than 'Doctor Eppley's son.'"

The woman sitting next to me frowned. "I don't ,understand," she said. "I'd be proud to have a father

who's so well respected." Her eyes filled with tears as she continued, "I'd give anything to be called my father's child. But I don't know where he is. He left my mother when I was four years old."

There was an awkward silence, and then I changed the subject. I wasn't ready to hear that woman's words.

I returned home for winter break that year feeling proud of myself. In four months at college, I had made a number of new friends. I had become popular in my own right, without my father's help. My parents marveled9 at how much I had changed.

For two weeks I enjoyed being back in Enosburg.