Beverly Cleary died this week at – how old? 104 is a long time to be alive, longer than I could ever fathom. She could have lived to 114 or 124 as far as my mind is concerned, for she was always kind of a fixture of time immemorial. After all, Ramona Quimby appeared for the first time in literature circa 1950, and the last book I read that featured her was 1984’s ‘Ramona Forever’. I was born in 1982. Those 34 years were compressed into one or two summers for me, and I was an early reader compared to my peers, so her body of work felt like it was a continuous serial. (In Cleary’s scholastic hierarchy, I would have been a Bluebird.)
When the person dies before the memories do, it’s a sign that a body of work will have generational staying power. I have read every Beverly Cleary book at least twice, including her memoir ‘A Girl From Yamhill’. It was in that book that I began to take inventory of the Oregon she grew up in, versus the Rose City analogue that was a thinly-veiled homage. Paying attention to the street names in the quadrants of Portland becomes a revisit to those childhood summers of reading every Ramona book in consecutive and hurried fashion, an anchoring of your childhood that has resurfaced in your post-collegiate nomadism.
When I moved to Portland for a few years, it was always such a treat to discover places like Quimby Street and Klickitat Street and to know that these were merely off-the-shelf borrowings from Portland’s colorful municipal naming conventions. I arrived in Oregon already fully aware of Cleary’s geographical sourcing. Halsey Street was where she lived during the Depression, and Lombard Street is the road where Henry Huggins gets stuck in traffic with Ribsy. One could even dig deeper and learn that there is a SE Tebbits Street and a SE Spofford Street (the last names of two of her less popular characters.)
While I can barely remember the squiggly illustrations that passed for likenesses of Beezus and Ramona, I will never forget the joy of ‘specials day’ in 3rd grade, when we were treated to the Canadian miniseries ‘Ramona’, with Sara Polley.
Much like Kate Bush was channeling the 1967 BBC teleplay and not the novel for “Wuthering Heights”, to me, Ramona will always be that low-budget, sun-saturated CTV sound stage that made Mississauga magically become Rose City for eternity. To me, this will always be one or two summers in my happy distant childhood memory. You will be missed, pieface!
