In a year capped with innumerable losses, this one hurt less. After all, Beverly Cleary was 104 (104!!!) when she passed away three days ago on March 25th. The cause of her death is being reported as “unknown” (the fact that she was 104 might have something to do with it?!), and my only hope is that she was not one of the hundreds of thousands who died alone and terrified. I know from her memoirs that she had a much-loved husband, Clarence, who Wikipedia tells me passed away in 2004, and boy-girl twin children, the inspiration for the oft-forgotten Mitch and Amy. I know that her career as a writer was exceptionally successful, that she received multiple accolades and outpourings of devotion from generations of fans.
I haven’t begun reading all the hot takes of how much she meant to everyone; it is already gospel that she basically invented, in the 1950s and ’60s, realistic fiction for school-aged children and the trope of the “spunky girl” in Ramona Quimby. Most of us who love Cleary’s books especially love Ramona: her ferocity, her imagination, her loudness and messiness. We also love how the Quimby family is decidedly lower-middle-class, worried about paying for car repairs and child care, both parents juggling work and household responsibilities. But Cleary’s genius, in my view, was in conveying the inner lives of children with knife-sharp accuracy. We all remember this scene from Ramona the Pest:
“Why don’t you turn on the dawnzer?” Ramona asked, proud of using a new word.
Beezus looked up from her book. “What are you talking about?” she asked Ramona. “What’s a dawnzer?”
Ramona was scornful. “Silly. Everybody knows what a dawnzer is.”
“I don’t,” said Mr. Quimby, who had been reading the evening paper. “What is a dawnzer?”
“A lamp,” said Ramona. “It gives a lee light. We sing about it every morning in kindergarten.”
A puzzled silence fell over the room until Beezus suddenly shouted with laughter.
“She-she means—” she gasped, “The Star-Spangled B-banner!” Her laughter dwindled to giggles. “She means the dawn’s early light!”
Adult readers, instead of being amused by Ramona’s malapropism or charmed by her kindergartner’s logic, are right there with her, feeling her pride at wielding new vocabulary words, followed by her furious embarrassment when she realizes her mistake.
I was six years old when I visited my relatives in Korea for a month with my mother and brother — a month that seemed like a hundred years. I still remember almost every word of the books I brought with me and read over and over: three Judy Blumes translated into French, Ramona the Brave, and Ramona and Her Father. I was a bookish child, neither loud, messy or spunky, but I related so much to Ramona’s emotions and reactions: her outrage when Susan copies her paper-bag owl (and then gets praised), her fear at seeing her father unemployed and hanging around the house smoking too much, and her embarrassment at having to wear rabbit-patterned pajamas in the Christmas pageant because her mother was too busy working to sew a sheep costume.
Now that I am a parent, with kids who were in kindergarten and then Grade 1 and Grade 2, re-reading these books is even more of a gift. I can feel tremendous empathy for the Quimby parents, who are always stretched and often tired and irritable, and even more for my young sons. We forget that childhood is often not a carefree and magical time, but rife with confusion, worry, injustice and humiliation. So thank you, Beverly Cleary, for seeing us as children and reflecting us so accurately and lovingly in your books, and for helping us to see our own children.
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Only the death of such a kidlit giant would have pushed us (well, me) out of hiatus after six (6!!!) years. While Polly was posting pretty regularly in 2016, my last post, shamefully, was in 2015, when my kids were 2 1/2. Now they are 8, they can read to themselves, and it’s all Harry Potter, all the time. I can’t promise to make up for last time, but am planning to be here a bit more often.
Vicky and Polly 