Without Ramona, Where Would I Be?

I am newly obsessed with looking back on my childhood and trying to pinpoint events or even cultural landmarks in my life that made me who I am today.  There’s one thing I almost always come back to:  Ramona Quimby.

From the ages of seven to thirteen, I would wager, I Ramona weaved in and out of my life.  I listened to Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” books on cassette tape to go to sleep almost every night.  I feel bad for the other kids in the New Albany/Floyd County area who might have wanted to listen to those tapes, because I almost always had them checked out of the library.  I also owned all the books.  I especially remember “Ramona Forever,” which was perhaps my favorite.  My copy of it was slender and narrow, and it fit in my back pocket perfectly.  I carried it around everywhere.

Ramona appears in twelve of Cleary’s books, first starting out in the Henry Huggins series as Beezus’s annoying little sister, and then growing into her own series of novels.  In order, they are:

Henry Huggins (1950)
Henry and Ribsy (1954)
Beezus and Ramona (1955)
Henry and the Paper Route (1957)
Henry and the Clubhouse (1962)
Ramona the Pest (1968)
Ramona the Brave (1975)
Ramona and Her Father (1977)
Ramona and Her Mother (1979)
Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981)
Ramona Forever (1984)
Ramona’s World (1999)

Tuesday was Beverly Cleary’s 95th birthday, and the New York Times did an awesome piece on her to celebrate.  One of the things Cleary set out to do with her children’s novels was to write books that she would have wanted to read as a child.  From the NYT article:  “‘I longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood,’ Cleary wrote in one of her memoirs, My Own Two Feet.”  Cleary treated the children she wrote about the same way she treated the adults, and I think that’s important.  It was almost revolutionary in children’s literature at the time, and maybe it still is.  The problems that characters like Ramona and Henry Huggins and Beezus had were very real; she never passed judgment or trivialized them because they were children and “children shouldn’t have serious problems.”  She realized that kids aren’t stupid.

When Beezus and Ramona’s father is unemployed, it affects everyone in the family.  Ramona and Beezus are all too aware of it, trying to make things easier on their parents, stressing about the situation as much as mom and dad are, and attempting to ignore their own wants and needs, feeling they are a strain on their parents.  I think these are sentiments most children can relate to.  Hearing my parents argue about money caused many of my adolescent stresses and concerns.  Cleary scarcely differentiated between adult problems and child problems, and as a kid, it was refreshing to read that maybe me and my worries and opinions mattered more than I was originally led to believe.