I Loved Mister Rogers
This picture is how I knew him. 1970s video where the colors bled.
Where the antenna had to be adjusted.
I was a kid in the Mister Rogers era. I didn't know how lucky I was! He was a technology enthusiast. He used television to create relationship with the unseen child. It seems clear that when he looked at the probably bulky, gray video camera, he somehow saw a real child there.
From "Mister Rogers and the Art of Paying Attention," (outline.com link here) I read:
I showed him how to sew a tail on a stuffed rabbit I was making for my son’s fifth birthday, and how to make a toy called a button spinner. “I like the things you make,” he said. I felt a warm glow from his attention.
His comments weren’t just for me. Someone else was with us as we talked: a child on the other side of the screen. On camera, I was careful to speak in a way that I thought a young child would understand. But it was only when I watched the episode (and when I watch it still) that I could appreciate how deftly and naturally Mister Rogers included that child in our conversation. Every so often, he looked into the camera and gave a slight, knowing smile, as if to say, “Did you see that? What do you think of that?” The child watching must have known the smile was for him or her and felt noticed, just as I did.
It occurs to me that he must have invoked a kind of magic ritual. Normally, if I look at a camera...an emissary from the world of high-tech, full of "sparkling possibilities" (the attempt to imagine those possibilities has a strange way of ending with visions of self-adulation, sigh), my attention returns to my Own Self, and what I Must Do to respond to this confrontation with the Modern and the Hip.
Mister Rogers avoided this whole trap. I think what he did is simple, but not easy. Try it right now. Imagine a camera, and a crew, and a million dollars pointed at your face. How do you respond without reference to Self?
Nowadays, if I imagine "technology enthusiast," I get a rather dim picture in my head. It's someone who, yes, wants to connect people. But there is a harshness, an abstraction, in the way this figure speaks about it. I realize they aren't talking about any one person. They have "moved on" from a personal relationship to the imagined connection of many millions. This then invokes money and power. All for the common good, of course!
Imagined connections are dry, useless paper. For a real connection, there must be someone vulnerable and specific in the mind. Someone admirable, someone unintentionally funny. Someone who goes reliably wrong for a few weeks before they find the path that, mysteriously, works for them only because it first lifts up other people. Someone who will reach far further than you ever did.
It seems he saw the highest potential in everyone who came before him, and spoke and engaged with that part. From the article:
Not long after, I saw Fred Rogers again at the baptism of a friend’s child, and told him that I was pregnant with my third. His response was not “Congratulations!” or “When is the due date?”—two perfectly kind things to say to someone who’s expecting—but rather, “That child will be very lucky to have you two as parents.” It wasn’t what one would normally hear, and there was an earnestness in his attention that I found disarming. But as the mother of young children, it felt good to be reassured that what I was doing mattered.
By saying "That child will be very lucky to have you two as parents" Fred Rogers moved beyond simply noting the event of the moment and spoke to a deeper channel. To the fears and hopes of those parents. Their unspoken questions in the night are:
"Will we be good enough?"
Or, "Will we mess him up?"
Fred Rogers' attention offered what they most needed.
I like this very much. The steady, almost sonorous (a word that invokes sound seems right to me) gaze of loving attention that he had is what I'll aspire too. I'll certainly fail on lesser mountains, but gosh, it is beautiful.