More about Far Walker!
An interesting thing happened on the way to a beer one summer sunday a couple of years ago.  Larry Leonard stopped in to have a cold one on a hot day.  The tavern was in Banks, Oregon.  The previous year, he had done the same thing, and a man and his wife had approached him, saying, "We heard that you are the author of a children's book.  Our son is sick.  We would like to buy a copy for him."
    Larry gave them a free copy for the sick boy.
    Now, a year later, the same couple walked up to him.
    "You probably don't remember us," said the woman.
    "Sure I do," said Larry.  "Your son was sick.  How is he?"
    "Alive," said the woman.  "The doctors said he had no chance, that he was going to die, but we sat by his bed and read Far Walker to him, and he got well.  The doctors said it was a miracle, but we knew it was your book."

    Well, an author who has sold more than sixty books told Larry that he would trade all of them to hear that about just one book of his.
    Larry says it wasn't the book ... that it was the love of the parents that healed the child.  That was the miracle, as it always is.

How Far Walker happened, and why:

    This is the way of it.
    Years ago, a friend of Larry's called him and said the following: "I think my son David is getting into drugs.  He might listen to you about this, so would you write him a letter?"
    This friend was a once powerful, high-ranking executive who at the time of this call was slowly drinking himself to death on Portland's Bum's Row.  Larry started the letter, then pulled the paper from the typewriter and sat staring out the window of his small home office.
    "I love this kid as if he were my own," he said to himself.  "A letter isn't enough.  The mind of a kid isn't like the mind of an adult.  I'll give him the advice he needs in a form that he won't reject.  I'll write it in a book!"
    He inserted a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and wrote: "His name was David, and even the day he was born he struck the other lemmings as most unusual."
    Larry says he didn't write the story ... he read it!  It came out in a two day, around the clock rush, as though it had always been there in his mind, just looking for an excuse to come out.
    So now you know.  Far Walker is an anti-drug allegory (or parable, if you prefer) for kids.  Its message, hidden beneath the entrancing story, is as follows:

"You will be told to say 'No' to drugs.  That advice is good, but incomplete.  What you won't be told is that to do the right thing sometimes is very costly.  In this case, it may result in the rejection of you by foolish peers.  You must pay this price if you wish to survive!"

    The father is dead, now, and Larry never got word if the boy even received the book that was written for him.

    But, thousands of others have benefited from it.

    And, so could a child you love.
 
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