Fred Rogers is My Role Model

This morning, a friend posted to Facebook the following question: “What inspires you?” I initially replied with a photo of Donald Trump holding a bible. Of course, I was being bitterly facetious. To my mind, Trump’s Christian pretensions are a grotesque mockery of Christianity and, even more so, of the Christians who support him. But I wasn’t content to leave that as my final answer to my friend’s sincere and serious question. So I followed up by saying:

A more serious reply to your question...is that too many things inspire me to list. But if I seek a common thread in most or all of them, what I find is people being the best they can be physically, intellectually, artistically, athletically, characterologically, "spiritually," and in every other good way possible and being a figurative light in the pandemic darkness of this world. And I've somehow come to view this guy as kind of the patron saint of "light."

I didn’t grow up watching Mr. Rogers. I came along several years before his PBS show did. But if I’d been a young kid when his show graced the airwaves, I’d like to think I would have benefitted from it. I’d also like to think I can still benefit from the shining example Fred Rogers set in videos like the one above and this one and this one.

How so? Well, I think we can all benefit from having inspiring role models in our life. It’s not that we necessarily try to be exactly like our role models. But we can do our best to internalize and manifest their spirit in everything we say and do. And when we encounter challenging circumstances where we aren’t sure exactly how we should proceed, we can ask ourselves what our role model would say or do in that situation.

Christians often ask and have been mocked for asking, “What would Jesus do?” Well, I never saw Jesus. Not in person or on video. But I’ve seen plenty of Fred Rogers. And his gentle voice and loving demeanor fill my mind with the palpable gratitude those Hollywood celebrities displayed during Fred Rogers’ acceptance speech at the daytime Emmy awards. And I want to live what’s left of my life manifesting his spirit in my own unique way.

I’m not sure how to go about doing that. I’ve bottled up a lot of anger and despair in my disappointing life, and I have a tendency to flee from Rogerian earnestness to pseudo-clever irony and caustic sarcasm, and from unconditional positive regard for my fellow humans to angry denunciation and condemnation of their words and deeds.

But I want to stop doing those things. And I’m hoping I have the wherewithal to follow through with my intention while there’s still time even if it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done or ever could do. May the saintly Fred Rogers help light the way out of my darkness.

Why I Don't Mourn My Friend's Death

Over a year ago, I wrote the following in the wake of something I wrote even earlier:

Sitting at the bedside of a good friend who seems, for reasons I don't fully understand, to be virtually comatose and close to death from cerebral hypoxia associated with an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. What an awful, cruel disease Alzheimer's is!

Three nights ago, my friend’s decline ended unceremoniously in a senior care home bed. It was the first time either I or my wife had ever watched anyone die “up close and personal.” My friend lie in bed, unresponsive to his environment, unblinking eyes wide open, gasping in a strange, rhythmically spasmodic manner for breath. And then after what seemed like ten or more seconds’  interruption in breathing, he breathed in and out a couple more times, closed his eyes briefly and opened them again, and then stopped breathing altogether. A hospice nurse arrived a half hour later to officially pronounce him deceased on July 10, 2017 at 11 pm.

I wish I could say I was struck by the momentousness of a life passing before my eyes, but I’d be lying. I felt almost nothing except sadness for my friend’s wife who, after taking tender care of her virtually comatose husband for over a year with almost superhuman diligence, lost the considerable monetary benefits she would have qualified for had he been able to hold on for just twenty-two more days.

Maybe one reason why I felt so little is because it seemed to me that my friend actually died over a year ago. Certainly, the shell of a person who lie helpless in that bed virtually unconscious for all those months requiring total care from his wife and other caregivers was not the man who watched TV with me at my house several times a week two or three short years ago and intelligently discussed politics, international events, religion, philosophy, and the copious personal adventures of his rich and varied life.

If I were to have felt anything besides sadness for his wife, maybe it should have been elation over the fact that my friend was now “free at last...free at last, thank God almighty [he is] free at last!”

Yet perhaps that possibility was tempered by various considerations such as my uncertainty over whether a fully dead or non-conscious entity can be better off than a conscious one any more than a rock is “better off” than a starving child, and of whether, if my friend’s consciousness continued in some posthumous condition or place, he actually suffered less when lying virtually comatose on this mortal plane. Suppose he died and passed on to some excruciatingly hellish afterlife or wandered alone and fearful in some strange new dimension.

Or maybe my friend’s death and death in general mean little to me anymore because life has come to mean little to me. The older I get, the more I see life as a pointless, futile exercise. My friend seemed to think of it that way too. In fact, we seemed to think a lot alike about a lot of things. Maybe that’s why we were friends.

Why Today?

As a boy and young man, I sprained my ankles so many times playing basketball and doing other things and stretched my ligaments so far that my doctor told me, umpteen sprains ago, that if I sprained one of my ankles again, it would probably require surgery. However, although I stopped playing basketball decades ago, I've managed to walk and bowl and get around just fine for years without a single ankle twist of even the mildest degree. Until today, that is.

I was walking home from the store and twisted my left ankle for no apparent reason. There might have been a slight indentation or other deformity in the sidewalk, but it wasn't a big deal. I've walked that same route and far worse countless times and never had a problem.

Fortunately, the sprain doesn't seem to have been a big deal either. When I used to sprain my ankles playing basketball, they'd go numb and then hurt like hell and throb and swell up to twice or more their normal size. This one felt only slightly numb for a minute or so and barely hurt afterward, and I see no visible signs of swelling more than an hour later.

Still, it makes one wonder what confluence of factors came together to produce such an anomalous event and whether I can do anything to forestall them from reassembling to cause a possibly worse sprain that might even force me to have the threatened surgery I've been fortunate enough to avoid for decades.

Time will tell with this as it does with everything.

No Brain for Poker

A friend of mine is playing poker in Las Vegas. He just sent me a short video of him or someone apparently winning a poker hand. I say "apparently," because I don't understand the first thing about poker, and I think it would be difficult if not impossible for me to learn. I've never been good at learning these kinds of things. He, on the other hand, learns these and many other kinds of things easily. And he's a pretty good poker player from what he's led me to believe.

I don't know if I'm better or worse off not understanding anything about poker and probably being unable to learn. However, I think I'm much worse off being apparently incapable of learning so many things that many if not most people seem capable of learning quite readily. It makes for a very narrow range of activity I can hope to perform and enjoy with any potential competence.

I wish I wasn't so limited in what I can do. But I'm still grateful that I can do some things reasonably well. For one thing, I think I can speak and write better than most people.

I've read articles that say the printed word will increasingly give way to multimedia communications that rely more on imagery and audio than text until text becomes virtually obsolete.

I hope that never happens. But if and when it does, I guess I'll be obsolete too, if I'm not already. But maybe it won't happen until after I'm dead and won't care.