My Patron Saint Wears a Cardigan
How Mister Rogers changed my life 17 years after his death
At some point in the last 12 months, I adopted Mister Rogers.
The first time I actually learned about who Mister Rogers was, I was sitting in the living room of our first-owned home and folding laundry on a Saturday. I surfed my mom’s HBO Go account for something to occupy my mind while I folded towels and underwear. When I have the remote, it’s usually The Office, a biopic, a drama about family dysfunction, or a juicy documentary that ends up on the screen. This time, I went with “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” then sat back and got to folding.
At first, I had all the usual questions, Why does this guy stay quiet for so long on his own show, like his viewers can answer him through telepathy or something? Does he have a gross thing for little kids? What’s with the cardigans? Then, as I listened to the talking heads give testimony after testimony about Mister Rogers’s character, the questions quieted down and my interest piqued.
I spent the first half of my life with a one-track mind about who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be seen. I remember being in the fourth grade and steeling myself internally as I landed on the one word that I hoped would be the supreme quality of my life. I thought to myself, “I want people to look at me and say that I am strong.” To me, it didn’t matter what else they said. It didn’t matter if I was compassionate, service-oriented, intelligent, or even nice. As long as I was strong, I was golden.
Then during the second half of my life — the one where I fell in love, had my first kiss, and grew into myself — I began to learn that hiding out in a fortress of solitude and scaring intimacy away any time it got too close wasn’t actually doing anything for me. I realized that this whole “I must be strong” thing was the mantra of a scared, wounded, misled little girl. I began to value other things about my natural character.
I liked my directness and bold-faced courage, sure. But I also liked my intelligence. I also liked being a helper. I liked hugging and theorizing and being the first one in a group to tell the truth about something hard. I liked carrying people who couldn’t stand on their own. I still wanted to be strong but in a different way. I wanted to be strong in my openness and unshakable in my vulnerability.
The only thing was, I felt like I was forging a new path with a machete in a forest full of brambles and burrs. I couldn’t find any role models who had pre-cut a path for me to follow. Not until that Saturday, when the towel I was folding fell to my lap as I watched the grainy retro footage of Mister Rogers’ feet scootching over to make room for Officer Clemmons in a bright blue kiddie pool.
I learned that he broadcast this simple, powerful interaction right in the middle of the nationwide social upheaval that was the Civil Rights Movement. While hate was pouring acid into a Whites Only swimming pool that two black men were swimming in, Mister Rogers used his privilege to show a new generation just how easy, normal, and kind it could be to cool their tired feet on a hot day alongside a friend.
I had never taken the time to visualize who my patron saint would be, but I knew that this lanky, slow-talking, cardigan-donning man with an impossibly passive nature certainly wasn’t the one I would have chosen. Yet here he was. He was just like I wanted to be. His patience, openness, wisdom, and unconditional acceptance were the most badass act of resistance that I had ever seen.
At first glance, he seemed puny, stunted, and slow. Yet, when the credits began to roll at the end of that documentary, I found myself standing at the trailhead of a perfectly forged path toward vulnerable strength. Mister Rogers’ path.
Soon after I saw this documentary, some family friends offered me a job looking after their beautiful little boy. For six months, I spent 7 hours a day, 5 days a week pushing him on the tire swing, sitting through library story-time with him, catching him at the bottom of countless slides, and fostering his budding communication skills. Having him strapped in a seat in the back of my car meant that I couldn’t listen to my usual true crime podcasts. Instead, I’d play Mister Rogers albums on a loop.
He liked the songs well enough. Looking back, I think I may have needed the words to those songs far more than the toddler in my backseat ever did. I would taxi us all around town just singing away to those simple songs, tears rolling down my face.
They were words like this:
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you.
And this:
It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:
I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And this:
Sometimes people are good
And they do just what they should.
But the very same people who are good sometimes
Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.
It’s funny, but it’s true.
It’s the same, isn’t it for me and you.
All the pain of my disappointments, the venom of my tightly held grudges, and the pride of my unrighteous anger seeped right out of my eyeballs as I sang those words into the steering wheel. It felt good and pure to have those lyrics flowing around the inside of my ruby red hatchback as we drove to the science museum, the playground, and the library. It felt good to sing them to the child I nannied after he bonked his head or got frustrated during the many transitions of our day. I’d hold and rock him, singing off-key.
It’s you I like.
It’s you yourself.
It’s you.
During those months I was very open with my husband about the effect these songs were having on me, how healing they felt to me, and how fulfilling it was to sing them with intention to the little boy in my care. He doesn’t always understand me, but he listens, and his mind is just about as open as a mind can be.
I’ll never forget the evening that he saw me in the kitchen, huffing and puffing and talking to myself in guilt-ridden circles about how I wished he’d get off his phone and how there were too many dishes in the sink. He knows me well enough to know that the real problem usually isn’t the thing I’m grumbling about. He knows me well enough to see when I’m talking hateful to myself on the inside.
“Hey Google. Play It’s You I Like’” he said suddenly.
The sun was setting outside our bay window when he moved slowly toward me, completely disregarding the many complaints I was hurling in his direction. He wrapped his arms around me and I sank into his chest, exhaling desperately. He supported every ounce of my body weight and began to sway from left to right.
I tucked my entire face into his neck, surrendering. Our Google speaker, the dependable housemaid, began to play that song. My husband sang every last word of it into the crown of my head.
By the end of it, his chest was soaked with my tears. He’s the person I want most in the world to please, to serve, and to deserve, and he was holding me, freeing me with the lyrics to a song I’d only ever believed to be true for other people. He was serenading me with the only love song I really wanted to hear. I heard his message loud and clear.
This past winter, Tom Hanks starred in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which is a biopic about Mister Rogers’ life. In it, a cynical workaholic journalist is assigned to cover the phenomenon of the Fred Rogers children’s show. Of course, Mister Rogers breaks down the journalist’s emotional walls gently and discreetly, until they’re practically family.
My husband and I went to see it. I think that was the day he hopped on the Rogers Trolley alongside me. We shared a paper boat full of french fries and sobbed to the point of dehydration through all 109 minutes of that movie. We even sat through the credits.
I was brought up Southern Baptist, but I believe that God prefers to live inside people rather than in a particular denomination or church. As for us and our home, we serve the Lord. The same one Mister Rogers served. We serve the God that celebrates all colors, cultures, and creeds.
We serve the God that loves the whole LGBTQ rainbow with the same relentless fervor that he offers to all his other children. We serve the God that smiled down on a lanky and soft-spoken Presbyterian as he shared a kiddie pool with a gay black opera singer on live TV in the 60s.
And that, dear friends, is how the tiny, half-canine Allen family adopted Mister Rogers 17 years after his death. Inspired by the innocence of a little boy, sealed with a barefoot slow dance in the kitchen, and stamped by a lot of ugly crying in a movie theater.
Now, reader, we’ll close it out Rogers style.
There’s only one person in the whole world like you, and people can like you exactly as you are.
