Mister Rogers Goes to the Movies | Far Flungers

'To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now - and to go on caring through all the times. May you have a lifetime of caring and a lifetime of growing.'

And, most remarkably of all, there was the irreligious man, an aggressive atheist of the type who thinks Richard Dawkins takes it too easy on organized religion, who quietly confessed, "I don't believe there's a Heaven... but I hope I'm wrong, so that Mr Rogers can be there."

I have a good story about Mr Rogers, too, but it is so corny I have never written about it before, afraid readers would either think it was an invention or think I am both soft in the heart and soft in the head. It took me five months after deciding I would write an article about Mr Rogers to actually write it. I dithered because I didn't feel I was worthy of the subject and because I knew so many people knew so much more about him than I did.

Then, one night, I was watching clips of Mr Rogers on YouTube and I saw six words to which I had a profound physical reaction. Under one of the videos, a commenter had written "lol mr rogers is a pedophile." I was so angry. I had never felt such sudden, vicious rage because of something someone wrote or said. I had read about "tears of fury" but I had never previously produced them. My anger made my eyeballs pulse.

I instantly decided I would channel all the unpleasantness I was feeling and marshal all my skills as a professional writer, and use them to compose a merciless reply to that comment that would rip its author apart. But, as I was logging in to YouTube to do this, I realized that it was, almost literally, the last thing Mr Rogers would want me to do. And so, of course, I didn't do it.

But I was still so upset I had to do something; I just wasn't sure what. And then I remembered one of my favorite Mr Rogers songs, about that moment when children can either seize their anger and direct it into something constructive or let it seize them and do something awful. The song is called "What Do You Do with the Mad That You Feel?" and - here's the corniest part - I thought, in exactly these words, "What shall I do with the mad that I feel?"

And so I began to write my article, in which I would tell anyone I could persuade to read it how much Mr Rogers meant to me and through which I would, I hoped, introduce someone in my mainly British readership to my new hero, the unassuming American TV presenter who injected such joy into my life, even though he died before I ever really knew he was alive and even though I was 25 years older than his target audience.