Fred Rogers and Joy Harjo On My Sofa

So already, the meeting between Joy Harjo and Mister Rogers happened last week on my living room sofa. All afternoon I'd been sitting there reading Joy Harjo's Poet Warrior. But after dinner, wanting something lighter, I'd turned on the television.

After no small amount of scanning, skimming, and clicking, I discerned that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the film starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, might be my only viable “entertainment” option. Though I'd never watched Mister Rogers as a kid, I'd heard from so many people say that A Beautiful Day was a really good movie that I decided to give it a try.

Within the first five minutes of my watching it, the movie glued me to my sofa and continued to command my full attention for the next two-plus hours, except when I had to get up to get more Kleenex because I was weeping again. I was used to exhausting tissue supplies during Call the Midwife, but I hadn't cried over a televised movie in a while.

When it was just about over, I blew my nose for the final time and texted my husband, who was still in his studio. “I’m just finishing watching the Mister Rogers movie—it’s so good,” I texted.

“It’s good? Mr. Rogers? When I was a kid, I wanted to punch him.”

I wasn’t surprised by his response; he always questions the authenticity of overt kindness.

The next morning when I asked my younger sister why we’d never watched Mister Rogers as kids, she said, “Well, I always thought he was kind of creepy.” He definitely was different: he spoke very slowly, he was never sarcastic, he spoke to puppets like they were people, and he seemed to have only children and animals as friends.

But while my sister and I avoided Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, clearly so many other kids did not. And that’s what sent me to YouTube, where I watched a video called “The Best of Mr. Rogers,” a Charlie Rose interview of Fred Rogers that included various clips, including Rogers’ 1969 testimony to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee* that helped secure funding for national public television. I didn’t make it through that interview without running to get more Kleenex.

Later that same day when I sat down on the sofa and continued reading Poet Warrior**, I realized that Joy Harjo was partly responsible for the many tears I’d shed in the last day. She and Fred Rogers had so much in common.

Testifying to Commerce Committee, Rogers had explained,

We made a hundred programs for EEN, the Eastern Educational Network, and then when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we've got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what -- This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are."*

Rogers’ brief statement referred to both the collective and the individual: the neighborhood was needed to express care of children, and the individual child was to be cherished as “unique,” and therefore uniquely contributing to “this . . . special day, by just being you.”

Similarly, in Poet Warrior, Harjo emphasizes both the uniqueness of each child and the critical role of the surrounding, supporting community. The book opens with a poem that asserts "all children are deemed as ours” (5). But while each child belongs to all of the adults, each also needs and deserves a smaller, more personalized “circle of belonging,” like the one Harjo experienced when she spent time with a beloved aunt who discerned and nurtured her uniqueness (11). That circle could also be at a kitchen table, such as the one described in Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” where “we sing with joy, with sorrow” (25).

In the book's final poem, as an adult, and particularly as a grandmother, Harjo explicitly pays forward her aunt’s gifts of instinct, inclusion, and expressed ascertainment of a particular child’s unique nature:

Poet Warrior [Harjo’s poetic avatar] stood at the doorway of time. 

She held the child of the seventh generation in her arms 

Adjusted the soft blanket to see her face 

To glimpse what this one was bringing with her to share, 

In the way she took every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild 

Into her arms to welcome them, to bless them 

During her time walking on the earth. (218)

Like Rogers, Harjo understands each of us as a distinctive “this one” whose uniqueness is to be discovered, acknowledged, and treasured—and who will, consequently, have something distinctive “to share.” But more than Rogers does, she emphasizes that the neighborhood needs the child as much as the child needs the neighborhood: in the final lines of both the book and the poem, Poet Warrior walks “into time/ To deliver the baby to the earth story that needed her” (218).

Yet another important thing Harjo and Rogers have in common is trust in ritual’s capacity to foster children’s happiness and healthy development. Mr. Rogers’ daily rituals of putting on and taking off of the cardigan and sneakers bookend the time during which he’s happily, completely available to each unique child. Harjo muses on how different the lives of her mother and other female forbears might have been had they participated in rituals marking their transitions into womanhood:

I wonder what would have happened had my mother been given a coming-of-age ceremony, or her mother or hers—a ritual in which they were welcomed and given spiritual and physical gifts to help them navigate their lives as young women who would grown to become matriarchs, to become loved leaders in their families and communities. (87)

Finally, in addition to trusting ritual, both Harjo and Rogers trust song. The ancestors present Girl Warrior with “a song that will keep her in the right direction” (77) And Rogers*** told the Senate subcommittee the story of a particular song that “has to do with that good feeling of control . . . that children need to know is there”—and that begins with a line that “came straight from a child” who’d been part of a small-group puppet-centered therapeutic session:

What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite. When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you go? 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. Can stop, stop, stop anytime. . . . And what a good feeling to feel like this! And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.

 

I know; an updated version of this song might make its last line a little less binary. But the idea of being able to “stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong” and the sense of reassurance that results from knowing a feeling “is really mine” make me want to send this song to every American politician today.

I wonder if Joy Harjo watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and, if she did, whether she thought Fred Rogers was talking to her, and what she thought about what he was saying. Even if her childhood self reacted more the way my husband and sister did, I’m still of the mind her adult self would have appreciated him for creating place, story, song, and ritual. 

 

A final comment about all those tears shed and all that Kleenex used. Having come from both a nuclear and an extended family that emphasized how much and how equally all of us “kids” were loved, but that didn’t much articulate or acknowledge how we differed from one another, I found myself envious of the inquiring, discerning attention Harjo and Rogers focused on individual children.

In my life, it was teachers who saw me as an individual, who put into words what they saw or thought they were seeing in terms of my personal strengths and interests, and who encouraged to explore and develop them. Given this, it doesn’t surprise me that I knew early in my life that I wanted to be a teacher. I came to poetry early, too, because, as Harjo put it, “with poetry, doors would open inside even as I heard them slamming outside” (38).  

 

But when it comes to Mr. Rogers, I am definitely a latecomer. I’m glad I finally made it to the neighborhood, though; it's a beautiful day here.

 

*Rogers, F. (1969, May 1). Senate statement on PBS funding. American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fredrogerssenatetestimonypbs.htm   

**Harjo, J. (2021). Poet warrior. W.W. Norton & Company.

*** Fred Rogers Statue Photograph Credit: