Some 25 or 30 years ago I met a young girl, Ramona. For years my wife and our two daughters spent more time with her than any relative or friend although, technically speaking, Ramona was not an actual human being.
Ramona Quimby was the hero (of sorts) in the eponymous children’s books by Beverly Cleary. We’d read the Ramona books to our kids, and later they’d read them to us: “Ramona the Pest,” “Ramona Forever,” “Ramona the Brave” over and over and over again. Cleary wrote eight books in her Ramona series.
For sure, other books would compete for our hearts — “Fudge” and “Superfudge” by Judy Blume, for example, and almost any story about horses. But Ramona Quimby remained dear to us.
Reading “Ramona” had two purposes — to get the kid to fall asleep; and to share these stories about, I thought, adults doing a reasonably good, if fallible, job of taking care of kids and making them feel safe. But, it turns out, what I thought I was reading was not what our daughters were hearing.
Recently I asked our elder daughter Jo, whose name was inspired by Jo March in “Little Women,” why she loved Ramona Quimby. Jo explained that Ramona made kids feel understood because the stories often reflected the point of view of that little girl who was often misunderstood. For adults Ramona’s antics could feel annoying, but from Ramona’s perspective — and the stories are often told from her point of view — her thoughts and behavior made perfect sense.
Jo talked to me about how Ramona’s heart and imagination were always in the right place. Unfortunately, her execution rarely lined up neatly with her intentions and often landed her in trouble. What the stories illustrate is that adults, however well-intended, don’t really get it when it comes to understanding kids. (Jo related all this while wrestling a sharp object away from her toddler.)
For example, in “Ramona the Pest,” Ramona and her family are sitting together in their living room one evening when the power goes out. Ramona brilliantly suggests that her parents turn on The Dawnzer, which confuses everyone present. Ramona is exasperated. Why does she have to explain everything to the older generation? The dawnzer gives “lee light.” She knew this from the first line of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that her class sang in school every morning. Turn on the dawnzer already!
Ramona’s dawnzer lee light story has stayed with me — probably because I still can recall that as an 8- or 9-year-old at summer sleep-away camp, I was baffled by the last words of “Taps,” which we had to sing many nights, “God is nice.”
Ramona shows us what the world looks and feels like when you know in your bones that you don’t see things the way everyone tells you that you should. That’s a big reason Ramona wriggles into our consciousness — that and the fact that Ramona could accept herself and her foibles and that in the end she finds herself “winning at growing up.”
The reason for asking my daughter Jo for her thoughts about this book character? Five weeks ago Jo and her husband Dean had their second child, their second daughter, our second granddaughter. They named their baby girl Ramona.
Ramona — our granddaughter Ramona, that is — has a sister, who turned 2 in May, the aforementioned toddler with the sharp object. Ramona’s big sister’s name is Kobin, my late mother’s family name.
Ramona’s birth and her name reminded me of the scene in “Ramona Forever” when Ramona is sitting in the lobby of the hospital looking unhappy while waiting for her father and older sister Beezus (short for Beatrice) to finish their visit with her mom and their new baby sister, Roberta.
A doctor comes by, takes out his stethoscope and diagnoses her with “an acute case of siblingitis,” which, he notes, is “not at all unusual around here, but it shouldn’t last long.” The doctor then writes something on his prescription pad and hands the prescription to Ramona.
When her father returns, Ramona informs him that she has “something awful, [a] doctor said so” — an “itis” of some sort. She hands the prescription to her father who immediately fills that prescription for “attention” by picking her up and giving “her a big hug and a kiss right in the lobby.”
One afternoon this past week Kobin wanted her mother. “Now, Mama!” But she couldn’t have her mother’s attention because Jo was busy with baby Ramona. Being 2, Kobin was fully capable of dissolving into a complete meltdown. But she didn’t. Instead Kobin, who has quite the vocabulary for a 2-year-old and apparently a preternatural sense of the world today, simply said, “Times are hard. Oh well.”
Bill Newman is a Northampton-based lawyer and radio show host.