This is my second (experimental) month-end note about personal goings-on.\u00a0 The idea is to communicate without either the filter of Facebook or the author-stance of a blog writer. I’m not going to work hard to make it interesting — the point is to share recent events and maintain connections.\u00a0 (So long, casual readers!\u00a0 I can hear your screen-taps from here.)<\/p>\n
This week we went to see the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor<\/em> about Fred Rogers. I was not a big Mister Rogers fan when I was young.\u00a0 Frankly, I thought he was a bit weird. I watched his show, on a hit-or-miss basis, on the Pittsburgh educational channel WQED before it was broadcast nationally.\u00a0 The clock and the castle and the characters all seemed pretty stark and low-key, through the black-and-white filter I viewed them at the time.<\/p>\n By the time Mister Rogers hit his stride, I had already reached the expressing-feelings-are-bad age.\u00a0 I didn’t respond to Mister Rogers’ message until I became a father and I listened to his program along with my children — and I began to feel he was talking to me as much as he was to them.\u00a0 There would be many days in my adult life that Mister Rogers was therapeutic for me, probably because he was connecting with the needy child in me.<\/p>\n Fred Rogers’ message, if I may distill it: love and acceptance are universal Goods.\u00a0 Conflict is also universal, but it can be overcome or transcended by love and acceptance.\u00a0 Only if we work to make it so.<\/p>\n Moving along.\u00a0 I don’t really want to talk about the weather in this blog, but it has been a strange month.\u00a0 We ended May with five inches of rain in one week.\u00a0 This was followed by two weeks with almost no rain.\u00a0 It led me to obsessively over-water several of my rhodos to the point where they got root-rot.\u00a0 And now the rains have returned — we have had nearly four inches in the past week.\u00a0 Tomorrow, I have to make up some of my super anti-root-rot solution to see if I can save those shrubs.<\/p>\n I think about my shrubs a lot more than they think about me.\u00a0 It’s a one-sided relationship. I am very sad when I see their wilted leaves.\u00a0 But do you think they feel any of my concern and disappointment?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Because they’re plants.<\/p>\n We are enjoying listening to the tree-frogs outside our deck.\u00a0 (I am doing so as they speak.) Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Frog, we now have several plump tadpoles in our little water pond, whom we hope will one day add to the chorus.<\/p>\n