This is the story of fear, the diving board and the escalator

This is a story about fear,

a diving board and an escalator.

Celeste Holt

December 10, 2020

I stand on the one meter board, shivering in the morning shade as our early dive team practices were not yet graced with the sun’s warmth. My coach is a robust, over tanned, gray haired woman who rarely smiles. She must be an excellent coach because she keeps coming back to our small neighborhood swim club pool each year. I think her name was Coach Spore? It doesn’t really matter because I know I am not important to her and I am infuriating her. I am probably eleven years old. I love to look at, be in, be near, be beside, be on my way to anything to do with a swimming pool. This diving adventure has become a new addiction. I love it and I hate it. I can’t quit thinking about being on that diving board. I think about being on the diving board when I go home, when I am watching tv, or riding my bike or falling asleep. I cannot quit thinking about the joy I will feel if I “get” (successfully perform) two specific dives. I can’t quit thinking about the terror I feel about attempting these two dives.

Now, I can pretty successfully pull off a few dives. My jackknife is my personal best. I can take the one, two, three step approach, swing my arms straight up for great height, bend at my waist touch my pointed toes, pull back into a front dive, and enter the water with barely a drop of a splash. May I also add, that my tummy passes very very close to the one meter board after I stretch out. This dive feels natural, even great and I am proud of it. My front flip is equally high, as I have said, that lift after the one-two-three approach is the key and foundation for forward dives. My simple back dive has improved this summer. I walk to the end of the board, take a dramatic turn, face the steps and give a serious bounce using both feet, lift my arms straight up and with a slight, but exact, tilt back with my head at the top of the lift, I arch slightly back and voila a back dive. My back dive also brings me very close to the board. I have nicked my heels twice on this dive but it also seems to consistently be my best backward dive. If you throw your head too far back you can end up doing a back layout flop, not even a backflip, just a layout flop. A backflip is easy enough as all you need to do is to pull up your knees and again rotate that head back more. Diving, like many things, is all in your head. The position of your head and the horror in your head.

I have not shown Coach Spore my back flip during practice but she must have seen me playing around with friends. I do not want to compete with a backflip or the dreaded inward at next Thursday’s meet. I just want to do my front jackknife, my back dive, and my front flip on the low board and my jackknife and one and a half flip off high board. Thank you so very much Coach Spore. That is all I am ready to bring to the Sequoia Swim Club diving team.

But today, Coach Spore, who never stands from her folding chair, does stand and says, “It is time for you (she does not use my name) to learn an inward dive and an inward front flip.” I. Am. Horrified. “Just try it,” she says from her comfy perch, in that lawn chair in her customary white sleeveless blouse snd navy blue shorts. “Does she have any other clothes?” my rebellious mind thinks, “Who is this woman? Was she such a wonderful diver in her own day that she earned the position of terrifying young girls into doing tricks that could split their heads open? Also, where even are the lifeguards if I do split my head open? Our practice is so early the pool isn’t open yet and no one is sitting in the lifeguard chair. Is this larger than life, demanding woman going to jump in and save me when I split my head open and sink to the bottom of the pool? Of course she won’t be able to see me because of all the blood that will immediately fill the pool as I sink to the bottom. Plus my mother will not know that I have been forced to try a trick that I am loathe to do and the result is a dead diver daughter.

Do you know what an inward dive is? Let me explain the mechanics of an inward. First, You walk to the end of the board. Next, you turn around so that you are facing the stairs you just climbed. Then, you carefully place your toes on the end of the diving board and take a few practice springs straight up. When you feel like you are properly “warmed up” and ready to “dive” you spring straight up, simultaneously jumping back, just ever so slightly, and THEN you bend at the top of your spring and jack knife into a dive so that the back of your body is now within cm’s or more preferably mm’s of the diving board. Once again, you should enter the water free of any splash. Body pencil straight. Toes pointed. That is, unless your heels hit the board, or you lift your head AT ALL to look at said board and actually do a face-plant on the end of the board, which of course would result with before mentioned blood and pain and floating/sinking to the bottom of the pool where you have no lifeguard and are not really sure that your demanding coach can swim.

Plus, what am I even doing up here on this diving board? My older sisters are, well…. where are they? Why is this burden of performing this trick so important to me? Remember, my dad is so safety cautious he will not let us go outside when a neighbor is mowing their yard for fear we will get hit in the head with a rock. Plus, I am absolutely sure I have never even seen my Dad in swim trunks. Have I even ever seen my Dad’s legs at all? Did he have some horrible accident where he was burned in battle and now he is a humble hero yet ashamed to show his legs? When you are standing on the end of the board these thoughts rapidly twist and spiral through your head.

Let me also take a minute to let you you in on a secret. My interest in many, many things in my eleven year old life, exceeds my physical talent. There, I said it. I am full of desire, hope, wonder and often pretend confidence. My short body is not at all, lanky and automatically built for flipping or twisting in the air. I have to work harder than my fellow swimmers and divers to achieve half of their seemingly easy and very impressive success.

In fact, and here is another huge and personal confession, I am more than a little bit accident prone. But you may say, “How can this be? She is writing about diving!” Oh you sweet and simpleminded readers. You see as I am waiting patiently in my red, white and blue striped one piece team swimsuit for my turn of personal self inflicted torture on this one meter board, I am also sporting more than ten bandaids on my legs.

Over the past weekend (July 1970) the very first shopping mall, shiny and new, has opened in Nashville, Tennessee. It is called 100 Oaks. My mother, sisters and I made our pilgrimage to this vision of shopping glory late Saturday afternoon. Of course I was wearing shorts and my new white sandals. As we were leaving the mall, I stepped too quickly on the large escalator in the grand entrance. Suddenly, I realized my white sandal had caught in the edge of the escalator step. I began a forward face first descent down the new escalator steps. When I finally arrived at the bottom of this death escalator, my knees, shins and hands were bloody. My mom was there and all I could say to her between my tears was, “Don’t tell Dad I fell!” We stopped at my Aunt Widdie’s house on the way home. These many bandaids I am sporting are the ones Aunt Widdie helped me apply because, God in heaven above knows, Dad can NEVER know I fell down an escalator. All diving hopes would be off the table for me. The day after the escalator accident was Sunday, in the heat of the summer, in the south. I even wore heavy black tights to church to avoid any questions from my father about the injuries on my legs.

Also, one day, last fall, when I was just in 5th grade, I was hit by a car. Which you would have to surmise is the worst part of that particular story. But alas, no. During the week of the fateful car hitting me, my mother was in the hospital. I missed her dreadfully. My over protective father must have had a soft heart for me because he agreed to let me ride my bike to school. My bike was, of course, neon yellow and green with a banana seat and ribbons flowing from the handlebars. The sixties culture of love, flower power and bright colors was flowing freely into the seventies. That afternoon, I was excitedly pulling out of the school parking lot to zoom home with the other bike riders. Suddenly, Ricky Clark, that unfunny boy, swerved right next to me. In a flash, my bike swerved into the street of the oncoming cars. I flew forward, my hands and wrists scraping the pavement followed by my body and legs bouncing across the pavement. A large four door car stops on top of my right hand and arm. I am crying and yet conscious enough to tell the driver of the car, who is out of the car and standing over me, “Please quit yelling and please would you move your car back NOT forwards because #myheadwouldthenbeunderyourtire.” She is flummoxed and wringing her hands and I realize she too is crying! She finally moves the her car in reverse, praise to precious Jesus.

I realize I am being picked up by a man. He is a “dad” and he says he is a doctor.

“Where is your mother?” is his first and MOST difficult question.

I now burst into tears, “I can’t tell you!”

Man/doctor, “Why?”

Me, “They told me not to tell!”

And “they” did indeed tell me not to tell anyone that my mom was in the hospital. “They”, my parents, told the three of us, “your mom is going to Baptist Hospital for a few days. We don’t want everyone from the church to come. You know she has lupus and she just needs a few days to rest, and regain her strength with no visitors.”

So I keep telling man/doctor, “I cannot tell you where she is!”

Exasperated man/doctor asks, “What about your father?”

Me, “Oh he works downtown! He is a civil engineer. You can call him at 615-…..:::….. Man/doctor calls my father and a plan is made to meet my father at Baptist Hospital. I will ride in man/doctor’s car and my dad will meet us. Little does man/doctor know that this is the very hospital where mom is! He is taking me to get checked out but all I can think about is he is taking me to my mom. Heaven.

So, as you can see, I am only eleven and yet I have compiled quite the accident history. These events all run through my mind as Coach Spore actually STANDS UP and yells to me from the side of the pool, “Either do it or get off the board!” I look at her, and am so surprised that she has risen from her chair that I teeter on the board until I stumble off back into the pool. Geez. So harsh! I get back in line to wait my turn and I am now even more terrified. Suddenly we hear a whistle and a yell from the lifeguard, “10 a.m. Pools open!”

Praise the God of all things. I am literally saved by the whistle.

As I begin to walk away from our 9:00 a.m. practice Coach Spore stops me. “Tomorrow is high board practice and I want you to get that front flip. Also, if you cannot do the inward on the low board tomorrow just don’t come back.” And that’s that. I don’t go back.

I am red with shame and embarrassment. She knows I worked hard to get a one and a half flip off the high and I have that trick now. But a simple front flip is crazy hard. There is so much time after you spring approach and flip off the three meter board! If you keep rotating into a dive after the flip this takes up that time and voila a one and a half! One flip into a dive. But just one perfect flip off the three meter board is not my jam and she knows it. You flip and then you have about four months of time in the air to face-plant.

Why is this so important to me? Why do I think about this morning noon and night? How to execute each of these dives obsessively permeates all my waking hours that summer. My parents are not pushing me to do this. My sisters? I don’t even know where they are. They are teenagers so maybe the two of them are rolling their hair on orange juice cans and getting a tan with baby oil and iodine? I know Kathy loves books not athletics. She played in one church softball game, rounded second base, vomited and that was the end of her athletic career.

This is not for a grade and I don’t even know the other girls very well. (Although, I plan on being EXACTLY like the tall, beautiful and graceful sixteen year old Nancy S who is Sequoia’s blue ribbon diver, when I grow up.) I just really really want these two dives. I want them for me. Not for Coach Spore or the Sequoia Barracudas. I don’t want to just be the accident prone girl who hides her scraped up legs from her dad. I want this but I am scared.

This story has emerged in my mind as a result of Covid cleaning. As I was cleaning out our attic I found a box of my daughter’s diving trophies and photos. Kathryn, now a psychotherapist with a daughter of her own, was and continues to be so full of confidence. I have not ever seen her let someone in an authority position rattle her like Coach Spore rattled me. I am full of wonder at how we all react so differently to challenges and self imposed resolutions. Kathryn, as pictured above, could do an inward dive with ease! None of my angst was passed on to her and I am grateful for this genetic miracle.

I do often wonder how my “just quitting” and walking away from Coach Spore and the Sequoia Dive Team has affected my life. Did quitting become an easy road for me to take? Or was quitting the smartest and safest thing I ever did? When I left a private all girls school after one year in the seventh grade did I leave behind opportunities or did I enter a world of new opportunities at my public junior high? When I left a marriage after less than two years, did I give up due to emotional laziness or had I simply entered into the story of another person’s life instead of entering into my own life? Our choices to quit are not smiled upon. We are taught to “Stay the course!”,
“Stick it out!”, and you know this one, “When the going gets tough the tough get going!”

In my advanced years, this is what I do know. The shame I felt for leaving the board without doing the inward was self-imposed and only through writing about it have I started to “give myself a break”. Also, this is YOUR story. If you find yourself on a board and you want to just play and not do an inward, that is okay! The inward may not be a chapter in your story. It certainly wasn’t in mine but my daughter was able to conquer that inward easily. It is a true miracle that I didn’t pass my fear on to her. Finally, if you are even a little bit accident prone, try to just move a little more slowly through your day especially if you get to ride your bike to work!