I cried yesterday when I heard about the death of Fred Rogers. And I cried again, reading the lovely tribute to him by Charles Taylor in salon.com.
The oft-quoted line that opens L.P. Hartley's novel "The Go-Between" -- "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there" -- applies to nothing so much as to our own childhood selves. It's very easy to forget how difficult naming or even admitting your fears can be for young children. To do that is, for a child, almost to will those fears into being. Fred Rogers found a way to name those fears and to tell kids that admitting them was a way of being strong enough to deal with them. The softness of his approach, the determined zipper-cardiganed and tennis-shoed niceness of it, shouldn't obscure the greatness of his achievement.
