Books > Cricket Man

This is really weird, but the idea came to me one summer day in the pool when we owned a house. It was a very plain in-ground pool--no diving board or anything--but I loved to swim in the early morning, and once I'd turned on the filter, I'd spend the first ten minutes or so rescuing all the crickets that had fallen in the water overnight. Some would be clinging to a leaf or a twig, but all were moving slowly toward the leaf catcher, and I'd see if I could reach them before they ended their lives in filter hell. I'd stretch out my finger, like God extending his hand to Adam in the Michelangelo painting, and at first the cricket would always leap away, floundering about on the surface of the water. But the closer he got to extinction, the better my hand must have looked, and finally he'd trust me enough to cling to my finger, and I'd flick him to safety. Funny thing was that some of them, after they'd dried off a bit, would hop right back in again, which says something about the IQ of a cricket. If I were a 13 year-old boy, I thought, amused, I'd probably come out here each morning thinking, "Okay guys, you're saved! It's Cricket Man, to the rescue." And that's the way the book begins. Except that in Cricket Man, the book, Kenny ends up a saving a lot more than crickets.