The Injustice of It All . . .

It was, quite possibly, "The Mouse and a Motorcycle" that caught my interest.

Probably in Mrs. Barrett's third-grade classroom, where I had the best desk in the house -- right next to her collection of books.

I remember that school, Lincoln Elementary, fairly bursting with books. There was a shelf in each classroom. The center of our building -- the school was like a little campus, with two, then three buildings for us to roam in -- was also stuffed with books. The main building, which I was in for the second grade only, housed the library. But everywhere you went, there were books.

But it was Ralph the mouse, making the little "pbbbbbbb" sound has he rode Keith's little motorcycle around, that caught my attention. Of course, like many other Beverly Cleary fans, I soon wandered into other books: Ribsy, the dog with the weird name, and the many tales of Ramona.

I'm revisiting that world, bit by bit, as I read Cleary's memoir, "A Girl from Yamhill," a lucky find at my alternative library -- our local Deseret Industries thrift store. I'm enjoying her story, and recognizing that Clearly modeled the feisty, injustice-seeing Ramona on herself, unashamedly.

In her memoir, she captures attitudes reflected in Ramona: Why do words like mamma and kitty have that extra M or extra T, when clearly one will do? And how dare adults pass judgments on children, calling them too short to be a lilac in the school performance, or passing them out of first grade "on trial" when they couldn't see the obvious, like pillows being hot, just like wood stoves? I seem to recall identifying with Ramona and Cleary's other characters as they caught these adult idiosyncrasies that Just. Weren't. Fair.

From the book:

From a country child who had never known fear, I became a city child consumed by fear. . . An uppity Bluebird [an advanced reader in her first-grade world] in the neighborhood made fun of me for naming my doll Fordson-Lafayette after a Yamhill neighbor's tractor and the town where Grad-grandfather Hawn had settled. Dolls were supposed to have nice names like Alice or Betty. Nobody named a doll after a tractor. When children discovered I still believed in Santa Claus, everyone laughed at me. I had never endured ridicule in Yamhill. When I asked Mother about Santa Claus, she smiled and admitted there was no such being. How was I to know, alone on a farm where I believed so much that Mother told me? I did not mind disillusion in Santa Claus, but I felt that Mother had made me the butt of other children's derision.

Ramona, of course, lived in and squirmed in and tried to understand that world where things adult said weren't always reliable, not out of malice, but out of tradition or necessity or whatever. We should be careful to help our children -- and ourselves, for that matter -- navigate a world where the things we're told aren't always reliable.

So trust, but verify, might be Ramona's credo. And it's wonderful to peek into what made her world as I read this book.

Reading further: A young Beverly hears her parents' after-bedtime, whispered and urgent conversations about money and not having enough -- another theme repeated in the Ramona Quimby books.

Cleary, like Charles Schulz of her same era and Richard Thompson or our current era, really understands and can communicate the youngster zeitgeist like no others.