Brief Encounter, Rich in Possibilities

Ever wish you could go back in time and undo something you did? Me, too. I am thinking specifically about what I did last month at the funeral service for Katharine Graham.

Graham was a woman of enormous importance and accomplishment, and her funeral was the most dignified event I have ever attended. I once was a guest at the Pulitzer Prize awards ceremony, which was plenty dignified, but compared with Graham’s funeral, the Pulitzer Prize awards ceremony was a monster truck rally.

The National Cathedral was awash with luminaries. Bill and Hillary were there, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Dick Cheney and Barry Diller and Diane Sawyer and Bill Bradley, and standing maybe 20 feet from me was a man who looked exactly like Bill Gates, only much closer up than is even theoretically possible. He was in the aisle, arms crossed, alone, looking pleasant enough, if slightly forlorn.

I glanced down at my program, and darned if Bill Gates wasn’t an invited guest. He was an usher.

An usher ?

There were no bodyguards in evidence. No one was talking to him. People were actually averting their eyes, so as not to stare. I suspect that the funeral for Graham may have provided the only occasion in the last 10 years or so that Gates was actually unaccompanied, outside the confines of his own world.

As you can imagine, a dreadful conflict tore at me. On the one hand, I was attending a highly solemn event, an event celebrating the life of someone I deeply admired and to whom I was beholden not just for my job but for the very stature of my profession. This was hardly the sort of event that one should casually arrogate for one’s infantile amusement or personal gain.

On the other hand, here was the richest man on Earth, mere steps away, officially designated an usher, served up to a humor writer like a hundred-billion-dollar hors d’oeuvre. It was too much. Slowly, I rose from my seat. I walked up to Gates and tapped him on the shoulder, and cleared my throat.

“Please show me to my seat,” I said. The Richest Man on Earth peered around. “There don’t seem to be any seats left,” he said.

“I already have one,” I said. “I just want you to show me to it.”

The CyberCroesus contemplated me, and then my empty seat, presumably weighing--and discarding as unseemly in the sepulchral hush of the moment--various logistical options involving security personnel, stun guns, etc. He sighed, smiled gamely, and squired me.

If we were on the clock, I calculate that in the space of those 15 steps I had hired $150,000 worth of Bill Gates’ services.

Anyway, here is my confession. Think of me what you will, it feels good to get it off my chest: I thanked Bill for showing me to the seat, and then sent him on his way.

And this, of course, was wrong, wrong in every possible sense.

I was, after all, at the funeral of Katharine Graham, a woman who disliked ostentation, a woman at ease with herself. And there was Bill Gates, unrepentant monopolist, owner of a home with a dining hall that seats 150 and a library the size of your entire house. I never should have let him just walk away. That’s the thing I would like to undo. I should have held on to his arm, conspicuously inventoried my wallet, and loudly asked people around me if they had “change for a five.”

Gates would have tried to back away, but I would have held fast. “Hang on, hang on, fella, I’m gonna take care of you,” I should have said, fumbling in my shirt and pants pockets, drawing a small and curious crowd, finally fishing out a buck and tucking it ostentatiously into Bill Gates’ pocket protector.

I should have, but I didn’t.