Solla Sollew

My favorite song to sing in Seussical is a lovely ballad entitled Solla Sollew. Horton the Elephant, the main character of the musical, calls it a lullabye. In Act 2, a series of unfortunate events puts Horton in the difficult position of having to care for a bird egg. To the egg, and on behalf of the other characters–Jojo, Mr. and Mrs. Mayor, and the Whos of Whoville–Horton begins the song, imagining a place free of all problems and worries, a place called Solla Sollew:

There’s a faraway land
So the stories all tell
Somewhere beyond the horizon.
If we can find it
Then all will be well.
Troubles there are few.
Someday, we’ll go to…

Solla Sollew,
Solla Sollew …

At this point of the show, Mr. and Mrs. Mayor are separated from their son, Jojo, whom they have sent off to military school to provide him discipline that will help him not get into trouble by thinking too much. Afraid for their son, and perhaps feeling regret for how they themselves were responsible for sending him away, they join Horton and Jojo, singing together of this fantastical imaginary utopia where they can put the mistakes and troubles of the past behind them.

The song is really lovely and draws from a Dr. Seuss story that was unfamiliar to me until just recently, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. In the book the unnamed main character of the story hears of Solla Sollew, a town free of all troubles. He decides to travel to the city, and on the journey experiences a series of misfortunes. At the end of the story he finally arrives in Solla Sollew only to discover that a “Key-Slapping Slippard” is living in the keyhole that unlocks the door to the city. Thus the irony–the problem with Solla Sollew is that nobody can get in. The story ends with the main character hearing of another carefree city, Boola Boo Ball. Invited by a passerby to travel with him to this city, he declines, choosing instead to return home and to face his troubles rather than run from them.

After the last four days in Brookville I find myself awash in a sea of feelings. I’ve been to my mother’s grave twice so far, and there have been other moments when I’ve felt tempted to make the drive out to Beechwoods Cemetery to visit her grave yet again. My primary purpose for being in western PA is to do research on Fred Rogers, but I can’t get my mom out of my head. Being at her grave makes me feel closer to her. It’s the physical proximity to her casket that gives me this feeling, to be sure, but it’s also being so close to the home where she and dad raised me for 18 years. It’s simply walking the streets of the town where I grew up. It’s attending the small church that she and dad took me to. It’s driving by our old home. All of these things brings back memories of my mother. On my two hour drive to Latrobe each day, I listen to music. Today I put on a musical playlist of songs that make me think of mom–Karen Carpenter and Olivia Newton-John songs she would sing while cleaning the house, or songs that were part of her wedding song repertoire.

Being here makes me realize I have a lot of grief I need to work through, grief about how my mom died, but also grief about those things I could have done to make her death better than it was. This is what I’m feeling. I suspect that the intensity of this feeling stems at least in part from the time I’ve been spending at the Fred Rogers Institute at St. Vincent College. Most of my time has been spent digging into the Fred Rogers’ series Old Friends, New Friends–a short-lived PBS series he produced in the late 1970s that was targeted toward adult audiences. The series was ultimately unsuccessful, lasting just 20 episodes. Despite this failure, the philosophical underpinnings of the series intrigue me, and some of Rogers’ work on this series, which focuses on the relational needs of older adults, makes me think about my mother’s own needs late in her life and whether I did enough to meet them. Thus, every day I leave the archive thinking about her.

I fear that all of this sounds depressing, and the tone doesn’t well convey how grateful I am to be here this week for my work. My goodness, the Fred Rogers Institute… Sitting down handling papers and letters written by Fred Rogers; I feel like I’m being permitted to hold religious artifacts. They are just so tangible. Earlier today I handled a personal notebook of Fred Rogers from the early 1960s. On one half of the notebook includes pages of handwritten notes where Rogers is spelling out his own theological vision of the church and human identity. On the flipside of the notebook are handwritten notes that Rogers wrote where you can see him mapping out his vision for his children’s television program, Misterogers, the precursor to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. There is this fabulous page in the notebook where the intensity of the letters on the page make it seem as if Rogers has had a moment of revelation about the significance of an idea that would become an iconic part of his series: “(WHISPERING) TROLLEY is real link between MR [Mr. Rogers] (conscious) and Neighborhood (subconscious) spheres!” It’s like watching Rogers plant the seeds that would become his iconic show.

One of the great thrills of this sort of research is that it always opens up the possibility that you will discover something unexpected–a document that sheds new light on the person you are studying. I haven’t had any lightening bolt revelations just yet, but the sheer amount of materials here is breathtaking. Just a few days ago there were two dozen more boxes of Fred Rogers materials sent to the Institute for the archives. The archivist tells me that they are getting new materials on an almost daily basis. The bottom floor of the Institute houses a room filled with archival materials devoted to Fred Rogers, and there are dozens of boxes of things that are not yet catalogued. I could literally spend an entire sabbatical year here doing research, there is just so much material to explore. Hmmmm….

At the conclusion of the song Solla Sollew, Horton, Jojo, Mr. and Mrs. Mayor sing together of what life will be like when they reach Solla Sollew:

High on a mountain
Or lost on the sea,
Sooner or later, I’ll find it.
I have a picture
of how it will be
on the day I do
Troubles will be through
and I’ll be home with you.
Solla Sollew…

A large part of me prefers the stolid realism of the Seuss book that inspired this song. You can’t get in to Solla Sollew. But right now I find myself clinging to the sentiment of these hopeful final words of the Seussical song, imagining the possibility of a place where Mr. and Mrs. Mayor and their child–and all of us who feel regret for the things we did and didn’t do–are together again, where all is forgiven and where we get to experience again the best moments of our life together. To be in a world where we can feel absolution for all that we’ve done wrong and confidence that we are loved–all of us–exactly as we are. It’s a world that Fred Rogers pointed us toward for over 30 years. It’s a world that we can, each one of us, do our part to create.