A Peace of My Mind in a Chaotic World
I found one glorious day of peace in nearly 6 decades, on television.
One summer Sunday morning in the San Fernando Valley, I awoke to peace.
It was 1975. I got up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, grabbed the milk and cereal, bowl and spoon, and sat on the old rust-colored carpet near enough to the television to turn the dial, my morning ritual. My siblings were older and had moved away. It was just me. As was their custom, my parents slept in. Normally early risers who also stayed up late into the night, they luxuriated in weekend sleep.
On this particular morning, I turned the dial and found a deeply resonating voice.
“Listen …” it said.
There was mostly silence.
The television glowed and showed scenes of calm: a prairie with birds singing in the distance; quiet streets in a normally crowed city; snow-capped mountains in the distance; a desert floor with saguaros standing guard.
The voice said, “On this day, American soldiers are not engaged in conflict anywhere in the world. After a period of long bitter fighting, we now have peace. There is no guarantee this will last. We may be drawn into a conflict tomorrow. But for now, there is peace. Listen…”
And I listened, rapt, intent, worshipping that silence. This was my Sunday church.
The voice belonged to Charles Kuralt, who for years headed “On the Road” featuring a look at America from a motor home, a segment for Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News. Later, Mr. Kuralt headed the CBS News Sunday Morning Edition, starting in 1979.
Mr. Kuralt offered his sermon on the mount: Listen to the peace.
And I did.
Maybe I made it all up. I have not been able to locate a transcript of that episode. Maybe I was older, an impressionable 15 year old, rather than an impressionable 11 year old.
In the summers of 1975 and 1979, the United States was not engaged in any major military conflict.
Summers as a kid in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s were glorious days, bright and glittering with sunshine. Sundays were quiet. Some people went to church. Others slept in. The streets were quiet, unlike a normal work day when adults headed off to work and kids walked or rode their bikes to school, yelling at their friends: “Hey, wait up!”
On Sunday morning in our house, I was often the first one up. I watched television or tore into the large Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, devouring the Sports section and news of my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers, analyzing the box scores and reading my favorite sports columnist Jim Murray. Then I’d tackle the comics and metro section with its local news. I’d read the daily horoscope and try the Jumble puzzle. Then I’d glance through the front page section for any major news, and finally ended with the large Calendar section, my mouth agape at the full-page ads for the latest upcoming movies, glancing at the times and locations for the movies I wanted to see. When I was done, I’d carefully put the newspaper back together for my mom, who liked to read it in bed or, if the weather wasn’t too warm, out on the patio with her morning coffee and cigarettes.
I learned to consume the news from my parents’ example. They were 24-hour news hounds before cable television. In the car, they listened to the news on the radio almost exclusively. My parents read the Los Angeles Times every morning before work, before my dad would rise, take a last sip of coffee, kiss my mother, and head out the door for the drive to work. My mom would finish the paper and drive to work later to avoid rush hour traffic. At night, they would watch the first round of news at 6:00 pm and also at 10:00 pm, right before tuning into The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
As the manager of a law firm, my mother was particularly interested in politics. She’d arrive home after an hour in Los Angeles rush hour traffic, come in the door, kiss my father, drop her purse, and exclaim, “Damn that Barry Goldwater!” This meant nothing to me as a child. I wasn’t the least interested in politics.
When I was young, I was often ushered quickly out of the room when the TV news covered the Vietnam War. I still have brief flashes in my mind of the violence that I saw on television: a cameraman’s tilted camera at ground level; the tops of green netted helmets; the sounds of rapid gun fire; lifeless bodies on the ground while palm trees blew silently in the distance as witnesses.
At 11 years old, I had only known a world at war. My friends and I played with little green army men in a variety of action poses. All of our games were violent — cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war games, always good guys vs. bad guys, us vs. them.
I remember once when Lonnie — the son of my family’s best friends and my second family — dragged a mattress out of the house to play on the front lawn. He was 13 or 14 at the time and we were about eight years younger. We played war games, and he shot us all and threw us onto the mattress. He tore up t-shirts to make slings for our arms and poured ketchup on them, our bleeding wounds.
Not long after that, Lonnie created a homemade firework, stuffing a CO2 cartridge with match heads. He got the materials from his dad’s bullet making supplies, as his dad was a hunter of deer and pheasant, which he mounted on the walls. We didn’t have guns in our house.
When Lonnie lit the firework in the street in front of his house, the cartridge exploded and a piece of the metal pierced his heart.
I was inside at the time, no doubt occupied by one of my many collections: coins, baseball cards, stamps, or rocks.
One of my neighbor friends knocked on the door. Donnie was a special case, not very bright, always in trouble, and rough around the edges, a thief in the making. I opened the door.
“Did you hear the ambulance?” Donnie said.
“No, what ambulance?”
“Lonnie exploded a firecracker and it hit his chest. It was so cool!”
At 7 years old, I was a year older than Donnie and I knew this wasn’t cool. I yelled for my parents.
Lonnie died. He was 15 years old. He was his parents’ only son in a house full of girls. His parents were away on vacation, and it took us a week to find them to tell them the news.
My sister, who was older than Lonnie, sat at the dining room table, her head in her hands and cried. I sat with her and asked her why she was crying. And she explained death to me, that Lonnie wasn’t coming back. I think I understood, and I held my own head in my small hands and looked down at the carpet.
I realized the permanence of death when I saw Lonnie in his coffin at the visitation before the funeral.
For me, it was like the pictures from the television had reached through the screen and entered my life.
Soon after, my hippie brother moved away from Los Angeles to Olympia for school. He was 10 years older than me, we shared a room, and I worshipped him. I remember he had a serious talk with my parents at the kitchen table about what he would do if his draft number was called. There was no question — he would go to Canada. He was a pacifist. He didn’t believe in the war and he wouldn’t fight. We had shared a room until he was 17. Then he moved into the garage: mattress on the floor, his stereo playing Harry Nilsson and America albums, tapestries covering the bare framework, light-up beer signs for decorations, and anti-war posters. I remember a large cardboard yellow poster with a flower and stem on it with words that read: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
The images on the TV could take my brother away.
So when I was alone that Sunday morning and I saw those images of America at peace on television, it’s that image I wished most to have in my life. It was too late for Lonnie, but now with a world at peace, I wouldn’t have to worry about my brother going to war anymore.
On Sunday morning, we didn’t go to church. Cereal, television, the newspaper (coffee and cigarettes for my parents)— that was our Sunday morning ritual.
We had family friends, the Parkinsons, who were deeply religious, Presbyterians, and politically conservative Republicans, the exact opposite of my family. How they remained friends is beyond me.
When my parents would go out with them on a Saturday night, I would spend the night at the Parkinsons. On Sunday morning, they would grease up my hair and take me to church with them. I hated Brylcreem in my hair — it smells of church — wearing a tie with a button up shirt, and going to church. I was 6 or 7 years old at the time, top of my class, and precocious.
All the kids in Sunday school knew each other, regular church goers. I remember the Sunday school teacher pointed me out as a visitor and had all the other kids say hi to me.
During Sunday school, the teacher asked us what we would ask God if we could talk to him. I would ask for something better than any of the other kids. Normally shy, I remember proudly saying, “I would ask God to stop all the wars.”
Without so much as a pause, the teacher chided me, “He can’t do that. It doesn’t work that way.”
I slinked down into the chair, disappointed, and remembered saying to myself, “If he’s God, of course he can. He can do anything.” Obviously, that’s not what the Presbyterians believe.
Even when my brother was born again, gave up his hippie ways, joined a fundamentalist sect and became a preacher, I never developed a taste for church.
Charles Kuralt’s proclamation of peace on earth several years later was the closest I would ever get to a Sunday morning religious experience.
These days, my parents would be proud. My news habit is rabid. I am fascinated, intrigued, horrified, riveted, and enthralled by the news. I no longer subscribe to magazine and newspapers, but I consume more news than I ever have.
I save most everything I read to Pocket, with a view to future writing assignments. I share articles with my friends that I think they may like, overwhelming their inboxes, thinking they must like the news as much as I do, only to find out through conversation, that they most likely deleted it and didn’t consume every word with intent as I do. My interests are vast and varied, from science and technology to social media and gossip, to sports and climate change, from television and movie reviews to entertainment and streaming services, from civil rights and social justice to obituaries of dead celebrities.
But nothing garners my attention more than the break down of American society and partisan politics. I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories and I stay away from far left or right sources. I’m most interested in how we got to this point.
How did we get from the images of peace I saw on television, my awakening into this world, to the fractured, frenetic, fighting existence today? How did everything go so horribly awry?
What is happening to our world? Where is the peace?
Every week, my iPhone says that my average screen time has increased.
I make doomscrolling an art form.
Today, when I’m overwhelmed by the news, by the violence and the incessant lies of a corrupt administration and deeply disturbed autocrat, I conjure those images of peace that I saw on television when I was a child, and of Charles Kuralt’s deep and reassuring voice.
The day after hearing the voice and seeing peace on the television screen, there was a news report that fresh fighting had broken out in the world and troops were being sent into battle. At least that’s what I remember.
We had one day of peace.
Someday, the fighting will stop. Someday, I’ll hear those words again:
“Listen …”
Images of a peaceful world will pass across my eyes: scenes of a pristine wilderness, songs of birds in the air, animals slowly grazing, small towns quiet on a Sunday morning, bright blue skies overhead with light wispy clouds.
Someday, the world will experience that kind of peace again.
For now, those images, that peace exists … inside my head.
Lee G. Hornbrook taught college English for 25 years in every time zone in the continental United States. He writes about current events, literature, movies, mental health, growing up in the San Fernando Valley, and is at work on a memoir. Find him on Twitter @awordpleaseblog and at his personal blog A Word, Please, or his Medium publication Valley Dude.