I loved this little book! It takes us through the journey of a high school student, Owen Daniels, who cannot read and is failing all his classes. What will happen to him? Every chapter offers another opportunity for us to cheer him on and hope he will not let his low self-image derail him on his quest to learn to read.
A substitute teacher plays heavily in his growth, and his uncle, mom, smart sister, and a side character who owns the “Taco Slab” (cool name) all aid in keeping us guessing at the ending. The book’s format is designed to be read by youngsters in Owen’s exact position. And the author, Russ Thompson, as a high school principal for years, is just the person to write this story. He firmly believes that if people of any age set their mind to do something, they can. Read. This. Book. Give it to a friend who needs some motivation. It won’t disappoint.
Hand it over. Step across the little gap, and climb aboard the future. You’re on your way.
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The top portion of the faded boarding pass peeked out from the old book. Curious, I pulled the novel from the shelf. I could just make out the destination on the boarding pass. Salt Lake City. No date. No context. I did not remember the trip at all. In fact, it may not have been my boarding pass. No name. And yet,
the cosmic sense of those words— Boarding Pass—gave me pause.
And here we are. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to board whatever will take us away from our world. It sounds easy. But it’s not nearly as simple as buying a ticket, getting the boarding pass, and flying away. In fact, the idea of escape is often clouded with the means that we use to achieve it. Drugs, alcohol, habit, denial, excuses, and tickets to faraway places, of course. We keep ourselves in a tethered state as if our feet had grown cement bricks around them, or our elephant selves had learned to define the total of our available space by a tiny string attached to a six-inch stake in the ground. Because someone trained us to be ‘this’ or do ‘that’ or toe some line, real or imagined.
But wait.
We hold the boarding pass. We are here at the gate. We are in line. We are due on the airplane in a moment, any moment. We can see the aircraft waiting. The pilot is in his place. The flight attendants are standing by. We are clutching the means by which we can do this thing. We need not look back. There is no line behind us. The past is gone. Forever. We see the future stretching before us. We simply have to hand the boarding pass to someone, maybe it’s a higher power, call her God. Or Buddha. Or the Universe. Or whatever. Let it go.
We step across the little gap, or maybe it’s a big gap, and we climb aboard our purpose. We need to let go of the fear of being wrong, failing, or worst of all, choosing incorrectly. The Boarding Pass is just a piece of paper. It’s a little like Dumbo’s feather. He didn’t need the feather to fly. We don’t need boarding passes to change. We just need to be brave. We need to believe in ourselves. And in the Universe.
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Kathryn Atkins 