On June 9, I watched the film Won’t You Be My Neighbor? during its early release in Pittsburgh. At the start of this documentary about Fred Rogers, he turns from the piano:

Come on over a minute, I just had some ideas that I’d been thinking about for quite a while, about modulation.

It seems to me that there are different themes in life. And one of my main jobs, it seems to me, is to help, through the mass media for children, to help children through some of the difficult modulations of life.

Because it’s easy, for instance, to go from C to F. But there are some modulations that aren’t so easy. For instance to go from F to F-sharp, you’ve got to weave through all sorts of things.

And it seems to me if you’ve got somebody to help you, as you weave… Maybe this is just too philosophical. Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined, but it makes sense to me. 

The film indicates he spoke these gentle, insightful words in 1967. Two years earlier, John Lennon had written In My Life. Last July I transposed the song from the key of A to C to better suit my vocal range and to play on the guilele:

There are [C] places [G7] I’ll re- [Am] member [C7], all my [F] life [Fm], though [C] some have changed.

The modulation from F to F-minor occurs twice during each verse, accompanying life, gone, no one, and think of love. Until this past week, when I transcribed the words from the Mister Rogers movie, I had recollected he was referring to this type of transition, from major chord directly to minor chord — that is, from the subdominant major (IV) to the subdominant minor (iv). I’ve also encountered this chord change in the titular line of the Green Day song Wake Me Me Up When September Ends.

But no, he was referring to chords where the root is separated only by a half-step. This is a different case. With my limited repertoire and simple understanding of music theory, I have encountered this only once (and in reverse), when Jeff Lynne moves from A-flat to G in the song When I Was A Boy:

[Ab] In [G] those [C] beau- [Em] tiful [Am] days …

When I was a boy, I found comfort in the neighborly, avuncular reassurances of Fred Rogers. In my life now, he helps me to remember what it was like to be young, the vicissitudes, and therefore how to be old.

Every weekday morning and evening my little commute takes me by the Tree of Life. But not today. The white wooden barricades with blue letters that arrive every spring for the marathon were blocking Wilkins Avenue. When I turned and turned again to detour, a police car silently strobed blue, red, blue, red, blue, red.

Wear blue, my daughter explained, in solidarity. Are you giving blood? she asked. The children talked about the active shooter drills at their schools going awry. My wife and I described tornado drills in Illinois, fallout shelters in Ohio. As though matter of fact.

Today the sky is gray and it is cold and people are quiet.

Before this week I had not seen Parts Unknown. I had a faint awareness the program involved travel and food, two of my favorite pastimes. However, I imagined the show would portray other cultures through a lens of superiority, like issues of National Geographic where the natives are objects to be gazed upon, or like the Fear Factor episode when the contestants gagged down half-formed half-cooked duck embryos.

(Not that I myself have ever eaten balut.)

I figured Anthony Bourdain’s message would be something on the lines of: Come one, come all! Step right up and see the wonders of the freaks who dress, act, and speak in a manner that is nearly-but-not-quite civilized. Marvel at the disgusting dishes they dine upon. As your intrepid explorer, watch from the comfort of your armchair as each week I venture into bizarre places, and hold your gullet as I consume what passes for cuisine.

It turns out that I had prejudged him unfairly. Yes, the first episode I watched, about  Pittsburgh, paints the city in broad strokes, with an overemphasis on sausages and pierogies, and on pro wrestling and demolition derby. Despite this, I appreciated his attempts to describe the mixed blessings of historical and contemporary gentrification in neighborhoods like East Liberty, the Hill District, and Braddock.

The second episode I watched, about Manila, is spot on target. The episode focused on overseas Filipino workers, who labor across the globe for decades in order to send money and balikbayan boxes to families back home. This emphasis on OFWs created a bridge for Western viewers to empathize with Filipinos, to more fully understand the people who serve them as maintenance and musicians on cruise ships, as nurses and doctors in hospitals, as maids and nannies in their own homes. He illustrated how the generosity and joy of Filipinos intermingles with a broad faith in Catholicism, extended family, extreme poverty, and a history of colonialism and violence — although he glossed over the atrocities the United States committed in the Philippines barely a century ago.

 (CNN)

He showed the importance of food in everyday life and during celebrations, instead of attempting to gross out viewers with balut and dinuguan. While I would have liked to see some personal favorites like pancit, lumpia, and leche flan as well as a greater emphasis on seafood, I understand that he must have wanted to downplay foods that resemble the noodles, egg rolls, and desserts in Chinese and Hispanic restaurants and that his travel to coastal areas was restricted by monsoon season. He did push on the boundaries of typical American viewers, showing the traditional method for making lechon by roasting whole pigs, the colorful mixing of halo-halo from syrupy jars of fruits and beans, the pungency of adobo, the elevation of sisig beyond the necessity of entire-animal cooking, the use of peanut butter with meat in kare-kare.

Rice is so important to Filipinos that the word for rice (kanin) is cognate with the word for eating (kain). I wanted to see him talk about rice, which I myself enjoyed for every meal at home for the first seventeen years of my life but only rarely now. Parts Unknown reminded me I am both American and Filipino, yet I sometimes feel an outsider in America, and always an outsider in the Philippines.

I would like to travel there a third time; it has been 32 years since my last visit. I do not know how comfortable I will feel in my own skin, as someone who understands but can barely speak the language, whose diet keeps me from the most common foods, who is unsure what to do when I travel to the islands where my parents were born, to a land where I look like I should know what I am doing.

Marissa and I met twenty-one years ago tomorrow. Our first date included walking around Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Two months later, we took our first trip together, to Brooklyn and Manhattan. We saw three plays, most memorably Side Show, a musical about Daisy and Violet, the conjoined Hilton sisters.

Last week my father’s twin brother passed away. They looked so much alike, especially when they were younger. I remember how they dressed and tried to see if we could tell the difference between them. My cousins cried because they couldn’t. I identified my father by his wedding ring. Seeing the photographs in my uncle’s online obituary, it’s like reading of my own father’s death.

I dearly wish I could have attended his service on Monday. Instead, on that day I was on a conference panel at Ole Miss. On the flights there, I watched Three Identical Strangers. Because I hadn’t heard anything at the time about these young men who discovered each other as triplets in the early 1980s, I first thought the film was a mockumentary. Instead, it turned out to be a throughly engaging movie that captures the joy of discovering long-lost siblings, explores the nature of personal identity in relation to nature vs. nurture, and interrogates ethical issues in scientific research. Yesterday, driving from Oxford to the airport, I arrived at Elvis’ Graceland too early to visit his gravesite. I took a quick photo before making my way home.