Susan Stamberg. Walter Cronkite. Roger Mudd. Charles Kuralt. Peter Jennings.

These were the voices I trusted, not to inflame me, but to inform me, to tell me what was happening in the world.

And they're all gone now. Cronkite and Mudd got my mother and me through Watergate, though I hardly knew what was going on. And Cronkite's work on Vietnam was definitive, although before my time (I was born in '67.)

Kuralt was a friend, almost, after he retired. He and my mother rattled around coastal California in our old VW microbus, looking at properties and swapping stories. She used to come back from those drives with the sort of serenity that comes of long conversations about things that really matter. I wish she had gotten to have more of those. But I was enormously grateful to him for his friendship with her.

Stamberg was a voice on the radio from my earliest memories, always trying to make sense of things, always looking for the way through. I didn't always agree with her, even as a kid, but I never thought she deliberately lied or obfuscated. I miss the warmth of her voice terribly, just as I miss my mother's.

This is too long for Natter, so I'm putting it here. If it needs to get longer, I'll put it on my site and link it.