Ruined By Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Author:Lynne Sharon Schwartz [Schwartz, Lynne Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7100-7
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1996-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

She starts skipping at that early age—just the age I learned to read—and her fame spreads throughout the country, for she is a born skipper. The fairies soon hear of her, and she becomes the protégé of their skipping master, Andy-Spandy. Every month at the new moon, fast asleep, she joins their midnight skipfests on Caburn Hill, where Andy-Spandy teaches her the magic skips. She can skip high and low, fast and slow, she can skip over the moon or to the earth’s core; she can skip through a keyhole and land on a blade of grass as lightly as a drop of dew.

Andy-Spandy is the source of art, imagination given shape; as his apprentice, Elsie Piddock follows all he says without question. When her training is done he licks the wooden handles of her rope and they become Sugar Candy and French Almond Rock. “You shall therefore suck sweet all your life,” he tells her, and though I was too young to know the links between Art and Eros, I must have known somewhere, as I knew about death, that they were holographic, sliding into each other depending on the slant of light and the tilt of the mind contemplating them. Elsie Piddock can return at any time to the tool of her craft, touched by the lips of imagination, to find solace and nourishment. After a lifetime of skipping, “when times were hard, and they often were, she sat by the hearth with her dry crust and no butter, and sucked the Sugar Candy that Andy-Spandy had given her for life.”

Years later, when Elsie Piddock has become a legend, a great Lord, a prototypical industrial magnate, decides to fence off the skipping ground at Caburn Hill and build smoky factories. The village girls, their mothers and grandmothers who grew up skipping there, are heartbroken. But what good are feeling and tradition against the march of industry? Suddenly an old woman appears, tiny as a child, and bargains with the Lord for one last moonlight skip. Only when everyone from lithe girl to achy crone has skipped till she stumbles, the Lord agrees, will he start building his fence. He waits impatiently. Just as it seems over, the tiny old woman reappears: Elsie Piddock, one hundred nine years old. “When I skip my last skip,” she announces, “you shall lay your first brick.” But she never does skip her last skip. She goes on forever. She is skipping even now. Thanks to her moonlight dreaming sojourns among the fairies, she has become immortal. Her art will outlast the greed of entrepreneurs and the machinations of city councils and the carelessness of parliamentary decrees. It will last as long as the hill she skips on and the moonlight she skips under.

Here was a story for me to lean on, and live on. It said that the things I loved were not foolish or frivolous. Elsie Piddock may have been dreaming when she apprenticed herself to Andy-Spandy, but in the end art is not only dreaming but action.

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