That’s what eternity is made of: invisible, imperishable good stuff. - Fred Rogers

The woman who was the director of the nursery school told me that she had never seen the children use puppets, and there were puppets all around. She said they used them imaginatively when I would come with my puppets. She made an analogy to a father of one of the children several years before. He was a sculptor. He would come to the school once a week just to fashion clay in the midst of the children, not to teach sculpting, but to show how you enjoy it in front of the children. He would come and love that clay in front of the children one day a week. She said that never before or since had the children used clay so imaginatively as when that man used to come and love it in front of them. Nothing didactic about it.

how can I say how grateful I am for what I've been able to do and be. How can I ever express my gratitude enough?

Later on, he brought that same sense of hard work and inner discipline to his work. Whether he was working on a script for the Neighborhood programs or on a speech, he fretted over the words, attempting to make the content meaningful. I can remember his saying over and over again, as he worked at the fourth or fifth draft of whatever he happened to be writing, “Simple is better.