My third grade teacher read aloud to us daily, and more often than any other author we seemed to read Beverly Cleary. A writer from the state just next door, she was a neighbor whose books depicted similar West Coast lives. I wasn’t as big a fan of the older books featuring Otis and Ellen, or the animal books featuring Ralph and his motorcycle. I didn’t think much of Beezus, and Ramona, I felt, authored most of her own troubles, but Henry Huggins was just my speed. He and his dog and his paper route seemed like they led a charmed life, one that I could imagine having. I dearly loved Cleary’s older books that portrayed an idealized 1950’s world where a corsage and a dance or a boy were the most important things. No matter the era she wrote was in, everything seemed so very clean and good on Klickitat Street, a street where all quarrels were solved and even mischievous childrens’ comeuppance wasn’t so very hard to bear.
Ironic that Klickitat Street in Oregon is named after the Chinookan people whose name means “beyond“.
beyond Beverly’s street
other tree-lined lanes
perhaps hear brown-skinned Beezus
sigh at her sister:
Black Exclusion Laws, repealed
left silent echoes behind
