GROWING OLDER

c.2009VirgilT

Last night I learned of the passing of Walter Cronkite. If you don’t know who Walter Cronkite is – was – stop reading this immediately and send me an email. I’m taking you off my list of Dose recipients.

The title to Hemingway’s novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” derives, I think, from a John Donne quote, “…ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” I have tonight truly heard that bell’s sad clangor.

I can’t think of another individual whose presence on this earth helped place me more fully in my time and place than Cronkite. He was an anchor in more ways than one, and held fast the mooring lines for three generations.

It was he who grieved with me over the assassination of President Kennedy and our nation’s transition from adolescence into full and knowing maturity with its concomitant recognition of evils in the world.

It was Uncle Walter who walked me through mankind’s spectacular arrival, first steps on and successful return from the Moon.

It was he to whom I and millions of others turned each evening to learn the true state of our nation and that of the other nations of the world. If Cronkite said it was so, it was so.

Under his firm hand, the CBS Evening News coalesced and matured into top-notch must-see television programming. The same could be said of his series, “You Are There,” which always fascinated me with its reenactments of historic events and Cronkite’s narrative making it clear just how and why things transpired as they did.

His tenure bespoke an era; that of the post-WWII generation with the dawn of the technological age: space programs, computers, cell phones, Concord, better automobiles, high-speed monorails, expansive Interstate highways and much more, an era carefully examined and detailed by Mr. Cronkite's skilled journalism.

There has not been, and is not likely to be, another who had – and deserved – the complete trust of a nation as did this singular individual.

I am unmoved by the death of bizarre pop star Michael Jackson, and I will be glad when the tabloid media move on to other matters, just as I was when that busty blonde chippie who married the elderly millionaire died. I can’t even remember her name. Oh…Anna Nicole Smith.

They are the chaff of life’s threshing, and deserve to be borne away on the passing winds of time.

Saying goodbye to Walter Cronkite is a different matter altogether.

His passing tells me that the bell is slowly, inexorably banging out its single dolorous note for me, and that my time, too, is finite, and his demise does so as no other event could have done.