Below the Beltway

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.

Mrs. 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 Katharine 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 listed as an usher.

An usher?

There were no bodyguards in evidence. There were no lickspittles 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 Katharine

Graham may have provided the only occasion in the last 10 years or so that Bill Gates was actually unaccompanied, outside the confines of his own privy.

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. (One of the weirder ones, like that prune wrapped in bacon.)

It was too much. Slowly, I rose from my seat. I walked up to Bill Gates and tapped him on the shoulder, and cleared my throat.

"Please show me to my seat," I said.