As a small boy, frail in body and spirit, Ed taps into lives that had been lived and lost long ago. They dig through him like lingering nostalgia for days he can’t quite recall. Pathologically sensitive, he feels what friends and family hide even from themselves. Depressed, overwhelmed, he’s afraid to reach out into life. Ed leaves for college as the Vietnam War deadens souls and riots tear cities apart. When he is drafted he refuses induction, knowing that if he ever finds himself in a paddy facing an armed enemy soldier, he wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger. Hitching a ride west with a strangely wise cowboy, he is pulled ever more deeply into the bizarre and the impossible. Meeting healers and miracle workers, he sorts through his own darkness and power, learning from experience that death is only temporary. Ed teaches massage school in southern California, his life spilling over with unbridled passion now of a more erogenous sort, but even bliss comes with challenges. Sometimes we must be destroyed to be reborn. This is not wizards and hobgoblins. There is magic in the Real world for all of us. As Ed discovers in our story, sometimes we search long and hard for it only to find it’s been inside us all along.