"Correct as usual, King Friday!"

My manly 13 year old, Ethan looks me eye to eye these days. Often he is aggressively seeking affirmation for one or more of his ideas and his manly voice is somewhat alarming and newly a source of anxiety. I mustn't reprove the manliness coming from his voice. Once again, Mr. Rogers had just the thing this morning. "Am I correct in saying that, mother!" he haunted {about some other thing or another, I can't recall for the tremulousness of my core at his insistence upon an answer}. "Correct as usual, King Friday!" I quoted my sagely delightful memory from childhood. How many times the tactics of human relations is used from the earliest memory of a Pastor to my soul, I cannot tell. How aware he was of children's ineptitudes and need for tools to learn the way to comport oneself with royalty as well as peasants. How true the world of make-believe has become in the life-skills that it has taught me. King Friday, the thirteenth was our first royal example. He kept me from whacking my loveably insistent Man in training. He was correct as usual and I am grateful that talking to him as if he were royal subdued his aggressive request for personal attention that is always in small supply. Thank God for Fred Rogers and his skill at teaching me to think before I smack.