Books
The Story I Wasn’t Supposed to Read
“The Diving Fool” wasn’t written for readers like me. I loved it anyway.
When I was 10 or so, I chanced upon a short story that changed my life, at least for a while. Its title was “The Diving Fool,” and it was published in an anthology of sports stories that, as I remember it, my father had found at a school-library giveaway, which was how much of my family’s tiny library arrived in our house.
There was no good reason for me to read “The Diving Fool.” I’d never heard of the author, Franklin M. Reck. The title was no metaphor: the story was about diving, a subject that up to that point had held little interest for me. Not only did I not know how to dive, but I was terrible at every other sport as well.
What’s more, I was a 10-year-old unathletic girl and all of the characters in “The Diving Fool” were college-age boys (plus their adult male coach). Not a single person who “looked like me,” as we now say.
So I must have been extremely bored, or feverish with the flu, when I first picked up “The Diving Fool.” By the time I came to the story’s end, my heart was pounding. I read the story again. And again. And many times over the next few years.
