Saying goodbye to a pair of literary friends

I’ve just lost two friends. They may have been friends of yours as well. I didn’t know them the way many of us know our friends, talking out our thoughts and schemes over coffee or whiskey. And you probably didn’t know them that way either.

They were one-way streets, but that was OK with me. They were writers.

They are so different. They don’t belong together, but for me, at different stages of my life, they were necessary. Readers seek out the writers they need, and once readers trust a writer, they rely on them.

Beverly Cleary, a writer of funny children’s books, and Larry McMurtry, author of epic sagas of the Old West such as “Lonesome Dove,” died on the same day, March 25. She was 104 and died in Carmel-by-the-Sea. He was 85 and died in Archer City, Texas, where he was born.

They have little in common except this: Readers trusted them. They weren’t liars. You might think it odd to group them in the same paragraph, but they belong here because I needed both of them. I was lucky to find them.

What is it about finding an author who speaks to you? It’s not like these writers held a mirror up to my world. I’m not some cowboy, fretting over man-burning killers loose on the plains.

And I wasn’t a kid with a dog in a manicured neighborhood where most people treated each other decently and spoke using proper grammar. We spoke South Side.

I can’t say what leads us to seek out certain writers and spend time with them. But sometimes we have no choice.

We’re at the beginning of spring now and soon there will be kids finding a quiet place in their backyards, or a noisy place like I did, near the refrigerator compressors in the backroom of our family store to be left alone to read. Some will read into the late afternoon, the shadows lengthening into evening, straining to see the words on the page as the fireflies dance about.

Those are readers.

Cleary, a children’s librarian, wrote the “Henry Huggins” series for boys. Girls loved her “Ramona” series. We squabbled over them in the Kolmar School library. When Henry first met his dog Ribsy — the mutt was so skinny his ribs were showing — and tried to take him home, I think in a box on the bus, I was hooked.

Cleary didn’t talk down to children. She respected us, and we sought her books out, perhaps as refuge from the angry tension building throughout the 1960s. In Cleary’s books, people were decent to each other, decent to their families, their friends and their neighbors.

“Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school,” Cleary said.

She wrote children’s books because, as a girl, she didn’t like the children’s literature offered to her. In a speech, she said they were unrelatable stories of “wealthy English children who had nannies and pony carts or books about poor children whose problems were solved by a longlost rich relative turning up in the last chapter.”

McMurtry, the Texas writer of “Lonesome Dove” and many other novels of the American West, including “The Last Picture Show,” gave voice to Americans who drove cattle in great, epic drives, battling renegades, thieves and nature. And he wrote of those old Texas Rangers who, sadly, are now being pushed into the mists of a culture that doesn’t want them anymore.

In his memoir, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” McMurtry remarked on the world that was fading: “Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.”

Back then, some of my colleagues at the Tribune were excitedly reading Marcel Proust and telling one another that they were reading Proust. It became a thing.

But my friend and great Tribune sports and political columnist the late Steve Daley smirked at the Proust fetish. He didn’t mind Proust. He hated the fetishizing at the book clubs. And he shoved a copy of “Lonesome Dove” at me instead.

“Read this,” he said. It wasn’t a request. So I did.

It led me to read McMurtry’s other novels, such as “Streets of Laredo” about the killer Joey Garza, and of his mother Maria in Crow Town, a village of killers — a village of the devil pig that cleaned up the bodies.

How are readers shaped while young?

TV doesn’t help. The phone doesn’t help. Reading aloud helps. A parent who reads, rather than staring open-mouthed at YouTube videos, might help. A school that doesn’t turn reading into political indoctrination might help too.

I’m getting old. I don’t know what younger generations think of those Texas Rangers and McMurtry, or if they’re allowed to consider them at all. And Cleary writing about ordinary families and Ellen Tebbits’ embarrassing woolen underwear might seem too old-fashioned for today’s readers.

But I was lucky to know them, even though I didn’t know them. All I had were their books.

And that was enough.