Hello Neighbor

"Won't you please? Won't you please? Please won't you be ... my neighbor?"

sigh Mr. Rogers. So goddam insistent. You had better be his neighbor, or the next 30 minutes is going to be ... well, pretty awkward.

Here Comes the Trolley

C'mon. What'sit gonna take for you to become Mr. Rogers' neighbor?

It helps if your a goldfish or a puppet or a kiddie. And it really helps if you're in Pittsburgh, the home of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

Amy and I were bumming around Pittsburgh recently, and stumbled across many reminders of the stalwart 4th-wall-be-dammed TV host. Pittsburgh loves Mr. Rogers. They will probably name a bridge after him, they just need to pick one of those with a crappy generic or colonial name. Might I suggest renaming the Hot Metal Bridge - gaaah, now there's an awkward name - to the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Bridge? You can send the trolley across it, even! Tell me that isn't pure Instagram fodder.

It's pure nostalgia, but I get it. Being a 1970's kid, you had to swear allegiance to Sesame Street or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It was a Beatles-or-Rolling-Stones thing. You could watch both, but your posters, books, magazines and stuffed animals (I'm kidding - there was no fiberfill back then) had to fit squarely in one camp or the other.

I have to confess, I was not a Neighborhood-er. I liked Sesame Street because the music was better, and the vibe more metropolitan and psychedelic. It was cool long before I understood what cool was (and arguably still don't). Sesame Street was total brain candy. Your mind never drifted off, even when the format of the show expanded to one hour, then got rerun three times a day (offset by one day).

Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was for ... you know, kindergarten babies sittin' in the gravy. The music was some one very lightly tapping a triangle. (Evidently Sesame Street had poached all the children's show electric guitarists.). And where Mr. Rogers was concerned, not only did he break the fourth wall, but his audience was too stupid to know there was a fourth wall.

In other words, Sesame Street was for kids who watched their TV set. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was for kids who talked to their TV set.

Now in my auld age, I talk to my TV set a lot more - mostly four-letter words, but whatever. So I have developed a deeper respect for Mr Rogers Neighborhood. I realize now there were jokes designed to go over my head ("King Friday the Thirteenth").

Most of all, it seems that Mr Rogers never ducked the question of how complicated life is, and how your feelings are not supposed to make any kind of rational sense. Before Van Halen definitively declared, "You gotta ro-oh-ohll with the punches", Mr Rogers taught us how to do just that.

Mr. Rogers respected kids. This might be a radical idea, but respecting kids is different than pandering to them for money extraction. He actually believed kids had thoughts worth listening to.

For example: "Some days 'doing the best we can' still falls short," he says. I'm no child psychologist, but this strikes me as the observation that you only get by watching and listening to kids. As an adult, you have disappointed yourself so often that you have internalized this maxim and forgotten it.

"Some days 'doing the best we can' still falls short." It helps a kid to hear it out loud. They need to know they're not total freaks ... at least, not for this. And Mr. Rogers doesn't even prescribe a remedy for falling short. There is no closure, no definitive answer.

A Smidge of Tidiness

Part of the whole Mr. Rogers vibe is you are part of a neighborhood. Maybe the Sesame Street neighborhood was cooler - and here I mean specifically Oscar the Grouch.

But Mr. Roger's neighborhood wasn't too shabby. You got your mail from Mr. McFeely, your woodworking from Handyman Negri, and your safety from Officer Clemons. It was adjacent to, but separate from the Land of Make Believe neighborhood across the tracks (literally!). Having a definite line between them made the neighborhood more navigable.

Walking around Pittsburgh, I get that neighborhood vibe. There are parts of Pittsburgh that leaked into the show, like the trolley (which still runs around downtown). The opening and closing credits walk you through an actual neighborhood, all the way back to the building with NET on it - which stands for National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS.

Amy and I got to talking with a woman in the Bridges and Bourbon bar. She now lives in West Virginia, which she likes, but grew up in Pittsburgh.

"I miss the neighborhoods," she says. "Everything in West Virginia is so same-y. Here in Pittsburgh, you cross from one neighborhood to the another and the houses are different, the restaurants are different, the grocery stores are different. If you want some particular spice or coffee, there's a neighborhood where you can get it."

Pittsburgh has 90 recognized neighborhoods - quite a few for a city of 302,000 people. There is the German section of the North Shore, the Italian section of Bloomfield, or the Jewish section of Squirrel Hill. Pittsburgh's terrain, which is utter insanity, essentially draws the neighborhood boundaries. The hill or the river that separates one neighborhood from the next is so arduous to cross that it's easier just to stay on your side. The landscape functions like freeways do in other cities.

And it got me thinking. These days neighborhoods have a bad rep for red-lining and segregation. They were ways of keeping people out rather than inviting them in. We could say neighborhoods are temporary waystops toward the American ideal, a huge melted homogenous mass with strips malls. Maybe West Virginia's "same-y-ness" should be the end goal.

I disagree. A neighborhood may start as a cultural or ethnic enclave. That is probably easy and natural when you are first-generation immigrants, and you are trying to eke out a living in a new world. If your neighbors and you speak the same language, it makes things easier. And the Pittsburgh of the early 1900's was not an easy town, although it had plenty of tough jobs to tackle.

But things change. Over the years, through intermarriage and changes of industry, the composition of the neighborhood changes. What keeps a neighborhood stable after that?

I'm no sociologist, but I think what keeps the neighborhood going is kindness. People in the neighborhood are kind to one another, and help each other, and know what they are doing. They care about each other.

That sounds syrupy, but when you think about the homiest home you've lived in, I'll bet the kindness of the neighbors around you played a part in it.

It's a very Mr. Rogers-ish perspective.

C'mon. Be His Neighbor.

The Good Samaritan story starts with some dude asking, "Who is my neighbor?" It's a good question, and I find the answer "Everyone is your neighbor" pretty unsatisfying.

Life is not maxims and philosophy. I'm OK with lending my neighbor my dessert cups, but if 7 billion people start knocking on my door, nobody is gonna get anything.

The book Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale explains it better than I could. A neighborhood is the size that humans can mentally, physically, and emotionally deal with. You don't necessarily get the best of everything in a neighborhood - Handyman Negri is not gonna fix my iPhone. But you get what you need, and at a price you can afford.

It sounds like a good idea. Lemme put on some sneakers and a sweater and mull it over a bit.