October 27, 2018:

What drove his transformation? From bad boy to farm boy.

Three years and one month. Blink, you'll miss it.

Thick swept-back hair with leather jacket, the bootlegger look. Thin hair with glasses on a tractor with fiancée, the let's-get-married look.

Could it have been the conflict with his family? Over the baby daughter they insisted he abandon?

Or is that surmise my own retrospective moralizing? Granted I know the outcomes.

It seems to have been the first of his two great mutations, over the course of only seven years. The second as we seem to have established was his experience of the war, which left him taciturn, vigilant, pacifist.

What was the first?