Publisher's Synopsis
For all of us who came of age during the time of Woodstock, hippies and Vietnam, our paths into adult life were more perilous than they might have been a few innocent years earlier. In 1966, although I had never heard a gun fired in anger, I was among the walking wounded of those days of political, intellectual and moral conflict. I was a fresh-faced, eager high school graduate about to embark on my journey of college, choosing a profession, and marrying my steady girl. No matter their sincerity, all of those dreams were broken and shattered. I faced difficult choices. I bore guilt I'd never imagined. I realized I had never learned how to give up. I Promised You Daisies is the second volume of my trilogy Imperfectly Ordinary. As a sequel to A Gift of Dreams, this is the story of my attempt to make sense of life during the disrupted decade that followed my boyhood in a contented traditional New England village. I recount meeting studious, serious-minded Karen Sandstrom, our discovery that we shared just about every opinion in life that mattered, and our student marriage. We were convinced our mutual support would enable us to accomplish more good things in the world than we might have managed on our own. We did not understand that questions we had not yet learned to ask and the emotional baggage we believed we'd each discarded were going to make our life together rougher, steeper and more perilous than the lives we'd traveled alone. When we met, Karen was studying to become a Registered Nurse; I was about to return to college to qualify as a public school teacher. In the end we achieved our goals, but our life together was frighteningly different from the one we'd dreamed of sharing.
