Details remain as fuzzy as a beaver brown bear, but if asked what I remember most about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, I list five things: how he swapped out his manatee grey suit coat for a mountain meadow green sweater and his sienna brown outside dress shoes for denim blue indoor boat shoes when he came into the house; how that scared three-year old me into an unmellow yellow; how I wrote a note to him saying that it scared me; how he wrote back saying he was sorry it scared me but he liked to keep a clean house; how one of my biggest regrets is losing that letter and the signed, in midnight blue ink, photograph of him.
When pressed for a sixth thing I remember from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it’s a single scene of a particular episode that remains deep in the back of my cotton candy brain: the bit about about how crayons made.
For those unfamiliar or unable to recollect, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood played mini-documentaries during most episodes. An old circular sepia brown film reel would be placed in the wild blue wonder wall to the left of framed picture - a stained-glass-like image filled with tiles of macaroni and cheese orange, indigo blue, laser lemon yellow,1 radical red - and with the magic of television, the video would play. Kids would be educated to the voice of Fred Rogers.
Watching A Visit to the Crayon Factory, I found something both unctuous and delicious about the crayon-making process. The process started with hot wax, mixed in a kettle with a hardening agent. Pigment would be added before the solution was poured into molds. Some of them looked like electric lime jello, others like a copper brown Thanksgiving gravy. Delicious.
It’s possible I ate a crayon or two that was nearby when I watched the episode. I was three or four, and I was curious. But other than some cerulean blue teeth and a bit of forest green stool, I was not worse for wear. Since 1903, Crayola crayons have been non-toxic.
Among the many words that end up as shocking pink fads, toxic gets the gold medal. It’s a word that makes me wince like I bit a rotten mango tango-colored mango2, roll my tawny brown eyes and turn pea green in the face. It is (over)used to describe relationships, company cultures, behaviors and masculinity until we’re cornflower blue in the face. It has therefore lost its meaning; if everything is toxic, nothing is toxic. Sadly, even the Oxford English Dictionary succumbed; it uses the example of a “toxic relationship”.
But like many of us, it turns out that once again, I’m prone to recency bias. The use of the word toxic is down from its earlier peak. No, its peak wasn’t reached with the release of Britney Spears’ hit of the same name. Toxic peaked around the time I was watching the crayon episode for the first time: the mid-1980s. Perhaps this was the result of the actual toxic waste in the news as opposed to the wasteful use of the word toxic today. Alas, I meander along a path of toxic tickle me pink oleander.
Despite my aversion to the word, I can stomach its hyphenated opposite. It’s somehow more palatable to call something non-toxic. It seems to take the sting out of the word. It, like its definition, feels innocuous.
Mr. Rogers lived in Pittsburgh. Like its confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers into the Ohio River, our city funnels five elementary schools into a single school for sixth grade. It’s a simple, wonderful thing. With sixth graders more like fourth graders in maturity and seventh and eighth graders acting more like rising juniors in high school, the separation provides the space for our kids to grow with fewer distractions.
In sixth grade, my daughter made new friends. Non-toxic friends. With hindsight, it’s clear that some of her previous friendships, while not necessarily bad, were not completely positive either. Self-esteem, ahead of and during puberty - heck, it’s hard in one’s forties - requires a helluva battle to obtain and retain. And some friends, like some crayons, just don’t mix well with others. With self-esteem in retreat, maturity dampens.
It’s important to note that just as for crayons, non-toxic doesn’t mean safe. For crayons, look no farther than hot magenta; for friendships, look no further than the friend we all need who calls us out on our bullshit. This doesn’t mean we need a friend like Goggins telling us to stay hard all the time either. Friendships, like crayons, can break if you press too hard. Some of those friendships, like two halves of a broken crayon with a piece of tape, can be mended. Others may be discarded like the stub of a crayon with nothing but the memory of days past drawn to a close.
But sometimes those friendships we thought were broken were merely misplaced. I’ve got two girls, and while they typically use pens, pencils and markers to draw now, they used to use crayons. But from time to time I would find them - the crayons - in the couch cushions. I have some friends who I haven’t seen in a while. And like my daughter’s previous friendship we thought was broken, they may one day emerge like the shadow brown crayon.
A broken friendship doesn’t necessarily mean losing touch with the person completely. Instead they may become, as British Anthropologist (red) Robin Dunbar noted, meaningful contacts. Starting from his work with primates, he determined that we normally have about 150 of them. Known as the Dunbar number, it is also close to the number of crayons in the largest Crayola box of 148.
The smallest box contains eight crayons. This happens to be the number between the loved ones we have (five) and the good friends we maintain (15). What’s interesting is that in Dunbar’s work, it was noted that women have more contacts in the closer circles than men do. Based on the dwindling number of good friends males hold dear, I believe it.
I recently wrote about the importance of thin trust - within your community - and thick trust relationships. Friendships require thick trust. When Dunbar looked at friends, he observed that we normally max out at 50 friends. Crayola comes through again with their box of 48.
It doesn’t take many to get started. Like push-ups, you can start with one. I recently came across a study that said when two people look up a hill, they each don’t think it’s as steep as when looking alone. As my kids will attest, especially when looking for that one missing crayon to complete their picture, it’s no fun to draw a picture with just a couple differently colored crayons.
I mentioned before how Mr. Rogers hailed from Pittsburgh. My wife, a good friend and I believe the city’s motto should be, “Pittsburgh: It’s not terrible.” Pittsburgh sports teams sport simple gold, black and white. Those are the same colors of my hometown high school. Mr. Rogers and I have something else in common: neither of us would have been kneeling at the pews on Sunday. Our reasons couldn’t be more different; he was Presbyterian - they don’t kneel to pray - and I’m agnostic with atheistic tendencies - either way, I don’t pray. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t be friends.
Perhaps, though, he’d be less a friend and more a mentor - a model male3 - as I left out a 7th thing I remember about Mr. Rogers: he was a man employed to make kids feel like they mattered. That’s abnormal these days. The percentage of men in early childhood education is rounding-error low: 3% of kindergarten teachers are male. As Richard Reeves pointed out in his neon carrot covered book, Of Boys and Men, “[as a share of their professions], there are twice as many women flying U.S. military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten.”
It’s not just rare, it’s frowned upon: parents avoid employing men as babysitters. While just an n of 1, in the same paragraph, Reeves noted his son was turned away from a childcare job because the parents weren’t comfortable leaving their kids with a man. Put another way, no parent would hire Mr. Rogers to watch their kids today.
But we watched him. My generation’s parents welcomed him into our homes, albeit through the buzz of the cathode ray-days on PBS. He taught us to be curious. He taught us to be kind. He taught us to look for the helpers. He taught us to be the helpers. He taught us that we mattered.
While I rarely forget a face,4 have plenty acquaintances, nurture meaningful contacts, and hold my family and loved ones close, I question whether I have enough friends.
So ask yourself, like I did, who is your mauvelous friend coming through with a pun in a crunch, your buddy who hosts his Annual Fourth of July BBQ in full purple mountains’ majesty, your high school classmate who went off to join the armed forces in his cadet blue? Your yellow green and green yellow friends who happen to be brothers, your Irish bartender in his shamrock green, the one whose inside jokes make you blush? Your friend who kneels every Sunday at the mahogany pews, the one who sails the sea green despite his motion sickness? Who is your granny smith apple providing the wisdom of age, your friend in the salmon pants, the kid you still chat with from the sepia toned days of childhood?
Friends matter because we matter to friends. Mr. Rogers said:
All of us, at some time or other, need help. Whether we're giving or receiving help, each one of us has something valuable to bring to this world. That's one of the things that connects us as neighbors—in our own way, each one of us is a giver and a receiver.
Be my neighbor.
Sun, arms raised in a V.
Full transparency, I wince when I eat a fresh mango, too.
As opposed to the blue steel male model of Zoolander.
Names are a bit harder, though I usually remember the first initial of their first name.