There’s a beautiful appreciation for Walter Cronkite on the NY Times editorial page today, written by Verlyn Klinkenborg.
How one becomes a proxy for a nation, as Cronkite did, is a matter of luck and timing and experience. But it’s also a matter of character. Cronkite had limitless stores of character. And limitless stores of wonder. He never grew weary of the world or reporting on it. He seemed bemused by the accolades and almost reverential of the trust that so many millions of Americans placed in him.
Some deaths end only a life. Some end a generation. Walter Cronkite’s death ends something larger and more profound. He stood for a world, a century, that no longer exists. His death is like losing the last veteran of a world-changing war, one of those men who saw too much but was never embittered by it.
On this, the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing, I’d like not to focus on the latest exhausting squabble between the U.S. and Israel over whether Israel should or shouldn’t build an apartment complex for Jews among the thousands of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem.
I’d like not to focus on the Republicans who are trying so hard to scuttle a health care bill before it gets off the ground, as if the health care crisis in America can be solved by sticking a finger in the dike.
I’m not going to focus on the seemingly herculean task of passing a bill in the U.S. Senate that would stave off global warming for even an hour.
Or the inability to close Guantanamo Bay, because no one will take the prisoners. I’m definitely not going to focus on that.
No, I’m going to focus on this: When we were kids, in summertime, my dad, and sometimes my dad and mom, would wait until after sunset and take my sisters and me, or sometimes just me, on moonwalks around our home in Highland Park, New Jersey.
This was just as the asphalt began to cool, and the crickets went wild, and the fireflies started appearing out of the darkness, tiny drops of gold, rising.
We would walk along the catwalks — narrow, hedged-in alleys between our neighbor’s houses — that connected one street to another in our part of town, and then emerge, away from the streetlights, look up, and find the moon, floating silently above the treetops.
It never occurred to me that a “moonwalk” was actually something else. That my father had invented the word in this context. That if I opened up the dictionary, the only reference would be to astronauts and their explorations. (Michael Jackson’s dance had not yet been invented.)
His job was to appear unfazed, unchanged by the events he described. But from time to time – reporting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, reporting from Vietnam, reporting that first step on the moon – he made it clear that the news of the day had changed not only us but him.
We pass a wood-shingled house with an air conditioner humming. A moth dives at a yellow porchlight, wings beating. A raccoon crashes between garbage cans, sprints across the street.
The walk is over now. Just a walk. But it feels like the end of something larger and more profound.
Tags: Walter Cronkite
sniff sniff. seriously. i feel like i’ve been thinking about those things a lot lately. the concept of finding magic in adulthood, of losing things you found magical as a kid, but never letting go of them altogether. i remember those moonwalks with fond clarity and reflection. i was just telling brian what our old porch looked like, and how we used to catch fireflies in the summer while dad sat on the porch. when i lived in LA, missed fireflies. i remember my friend amaya, who grew up in europe, had never seen one. when i told her about them she didn’t believe me. i thought then that perhaps it was a piece of magic reserved for central jerseyans. there is some magic reserved for jerseyians … and rolnicks
B,
Love the Amaya firefly anecdote. Do I see that anecdote in a film one day? …
-J