Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Conversing with the Child Inside

I try to keep the child inside of me alive and kicking.
I do not remember watching “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood” as a child.  I recall seeing episodes of his program, but I cannot say that I considered him my neighbor.  My childhood memories are of Maypoles and Fourth of July fireworks, of summer evenings spent chasing lightning bugs and Hide-and-Seekers to the symphony of cicadas that surrounded us in the trees.  That was my neighborhood. 

We used a neighbor's oak tree as Base for every game of Hide-and-Seek.
A man in tennis shoes and a zippered cardigan did not educate me; however, I feel as though the Mister Rogers whom Tom Junod portrays in “Can You Say… Hero?” would approve of my childhood.  In the profile, Junod uses astounding detail to paint a picture of this famous man who touched so many lives through his program.  Through observation, Junod is able to recount various stories about Mister Rogers as well as those affected by him, and these observations lead us to understand the man behind the cardigan.  What’s more, they lead us to understand more about ourselves.

I think that a great profile accurately depicts an individual and the impact that he or she has—why is this person important?—while making that individual relatable.  To care about the subject, readers must be able to relate to it.  To make us really understand Mister Rogers, then, Junod had to make us see the connection we have with the star.  Mister Rogers speaks to children.  Thus, he must speak to the child in all of us.  In “Can You Say… Hero?”, Junod does just that: he makes Mister Rogers reach out to the child inside.

I love that Junod accomplishes this through telling a bit of his own childhood and how getting to know Mister Rogers changed his life.  What Junod does is a mark of truly good writing: in writing about himself, he challenges the readers to think about our own childhoods.  When he throws Old Rabbit out of the car, I pictured the times I lost my beloved stuffed animals and dolls; when he prays, I think of the times I’ve prayed furiously for something and then have not learned from the experience.  By connecting Mister Rogers to himself, Junod causes us to connect him to ourselves.  In this manner, we enter into a personal relationship, a personal conversation, with Mister Rogers that really has nothing to do with the writer.  This is a mark of brilliant writing.

The detailed picture that Junod paints helps place us in the scene and create a cohesive vision of the life and surroundings of Mister Rogers.  From images like “The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds…” to scenes such as, “…he leaned back from his waist and opened his mouth wide with astonishment, like someone trying to catch a peanut he had tossed into the air…”, we grasp exactly what his life looks like and how he acts in private and in public.  It is a remarkably detailed story that allows us to walk for a while in those famous tennis shoes.

My favorite detail, however, that Junod utilizes is the style in which he writes the story.  He uses a combination of short sentences with long run-on ones, including extensive phrases and descriptions that only a child could follow.  That is the point: he writes the story just like Mister Rogers speaks to the children who watch his show.  Though some sentences are long, they flow like a stream of consciousness, and the simplicity of the story is of the kind children require.  Watching a short clip of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” gives us a glimpse at the similarities between Mister Rogers’ speech and Junod’s writing style.  By writing this way, Junod makes is sound as though Mister Rogers is talking directly to us.

Junod’s descriptive profile “Can You Say… Hero?” allows us to speak to Mister Rogers, even if he was not a large figure in our own childhoods. Mister Rogers stresses the fact that we each have “special ones who have loved us into being.”  While reading this piece, I could not help but take his advice and think of—and thank—those people who have helped me become who I am.  My childhood was full of these figures, and I think he would appreciate that I was so blessed.  I, too, was a child once, and my neighborhood of family and friends filled that little girl with hope and love.  And I like to think that in those times I did watch “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” I felt his love emanating from the screen, just as it does from his words.