Thursday, February 27, 2003

A sad day in the neighborhood

Fred Rogers died today, leaving the world a less pleasant place.

I’m too old to have watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a kid, and I don’t have any kids to have shared the program with while they were growing up.  But I lived in Pittsburgh for nearly 15 years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so I got to observe something more of Fred than what could be seen on his children’s show.

What’s amazing, really, is that the Fred Rogers you saw on his program was very much the same as the “real” Fred Rogers seen around town.  His gentle sensibility, his quiet dignity, his appreciation and acceptance of who you were and what you felt rang true.  Just as he never talked down to five-year-olds, he never talked down to adults either.

I can’t speak of Mr. Rogers from a parent’s point of view.  For that, read Body and Soul.  I’m sure there are, or will be, other blogs expressing similar thoughts and feelings.  But from this adult’s viewpoint, I always appreciated his deep and genuine authenticity.  His television show wasn’t divorced from the real world; when one of his supporting players died, Mr. Rogers calmly explained it to his young viewers, expressed his sorrow and sense of loss.  He didn’t try to “protect” children from the realities of life and death, from humanity’s rhythms.  Everyone knew that those comfortable sweaters he pulled on at the start of each program were knitted for him by his mother.  When she passed on, he told his viewers about it.

Once, I sat next to him at a Shakespeare play in the University of Pittsburgh theater.  Though he surely could have gotten himself a front-row-center seat just by asking, he instead folded himself into the kind of seat in the upper balcony that a graduate student (like myself at the time) could afford.  To be honest, I didn’t realize just who I was sitting next to until intermission, because he was completely unprepossessing and completely without the off-putting trappings of celebrity.  During the intermission, we talked about the performances—I don’t remember which play it was, but I recall that the setting had been transformed from 15th century Italy to some nameless mid-20th-century totalitarian state—and compared notes on the entire Shakespeare series that season.  Nothing about his television program, nothing about his fame ... just a pleasant conversation.  No one tried to cut into our discussion, no one even came over to ask him for an autograph on their playbill.  In Pittsburgh, Fred Rogers simply wasn’t treated as a celebrity.

If Mr. Rogers is now somewhere beyond this mortal coil, today is a wonderful day in that neighborhood.