gone but not forgotten

beverly cleary died today, and this death hit me harder than any of the celebrities that died this year, or maybe ever. she was such a huge part of my childhood and the adult that i grew into and the one that i aspire to be. 

i don't remember a time that i didn't love books. my mom is a reader, and we were raised on them. there are many books that stand out to me when i think of my early childhood - from picture books that every child in the school was obsessed with to obscure titles in our little bookshelf in jeddah that we'd read every summer without fail. but the first author i loved, that was beverly cleary. for years, any book that i read for pleasure was one of hers. we had used copies with yellowed pages and covers so precariously attached you were almost afraid to touch them. i got copies, shiny and new, for birthdays and major holidays. i distinctly remember opening up a present that included ramona and her mother, ramona and her father, ribsy, and socks. muggie maggie is the first book that i remember choosing for myself in a bookstore. i can't listen to the national anthem without thinking of ramona. and it should come as no surprise that when, a couple of years ago, i started reading chapter books to my kids, her books were ones of the first that i turned to. and seeing my kids fall in love with ralph s mouse, henry and ribsy, socks, beezus and ramona, ellen and otis, mitch and amy, and emily with her runaway imagination was like falling in love with them all over again. she might have been my most read author in 2020. and while it was special to read to my kids from the same copies that i had first been introduced to these characters with, i also loved all of the reprints we got from the library with interviews with the author at the back. 

beverly cleary books were the ones that made me a reader. i'm so grateful for her and them and the fact that i can share them with my own children, and that they're still as enjoyable to read in my 30s as they were back in 3rd grade. (which also happened to be the first year i had already read the book we read in class. my teacher had told me he liked henry more than ramona and i thought he was crazy, but reading them again last year and seeing how much my son loved henry definitely endeared him to me.) 

*I'll See You Again - Westlife