On Tuesday, Beverly Cleary, the celebrated children’s author of books like Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby, turned 100 years old.  New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof wrote a beautiful piece about her with snippets of her work.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/happy-birthday-beverly-cleary.html  

If you want to see a woman looking great at 100, click on the link above.

Beverly Cleary has special meaning to me.  I came to the United States when I was almost six years old.  The Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby series were some of the first books I read.  Funny, but I’ve never read a series since.

I didn’t think anyone else knew Beverly Cleary.  After all, Judy Blume seemed more popular.  People didn’t talk about her in children’s literature the way they talked about other authors, like Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak.  Maybe it’s because Mrs. Cleary’s books were thicker and are more for the eight year old than the five year old crowd.

I didn’t read any of her books besides the Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby series.  I fell in love with them both.  I bonded with their childhood antics.  They were real to me, even though my family’s culture came from thousands of miles away.  Somehow after reading them, I didn’t have space in my imagination for a mouse on a motorcycle (another one of Mrs. Cleary’s books.)  I just wanted to hold on to Henry, Beezus, and Ramona.  As an only child, they fed my imagination.

And who knew, as a young girl in Philadelphia, that I would end up living in the Pacific Northwest, where Mrs. Cleary was born, raised, went to university, worked, and which she set as the backdrop for her characters.

One particular passage in Kristof’s tribute struck me the most.  He writes, “Cleary says that when she goes back to Yamhill, everything seems the same as ever — except that now the kids aren’t playing in the streets but are inside watching television.”  I too grew up playing outside, often until the sun went down or we couldn’t see anymore to play.  It struck me as very sad how digital today’s children have become.  As a child of the 80s, I connected with Henry Huggins, who was from the 50s.  I wonder if children now can so easily connect to that world as I did, or whether it will become a period piece like the Victorian era.