Commentary—

Let’s Take A Break From Politics

By Donald Kaul

Stories.

I like stories, everyone does. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end; they make you laugh, cry, and sneeze. What’s not to like?

As a columnist, however, I have learned that they are untrustworthy. The better the story, the less likely it is to be accurate in its details. Reality is messy; it is the enemy of coherent narrative.

So when I hear a good story I never ask: “Is that true?” I merely say, “Boy, that’s a good story” and pass it on. (If you’re looking for journalism, you should look elsewhere in this paper.)

Here is a good story I heard recently from a friend who’d heard it from the brother of someone who’d actually been there:

An old-line, high-end private school in Seattle was combining, as schools tend to do, a reunion event with a fundraising drive. Its stated goal was $1 billion (with a B). As the keynote speaker at the big reunion banquet, the school enlisted the services of one of its alumni — Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. Gates began by saying how much the school had meant to his life. He’d always been a kind of outsider-geekish kid and the school had given him a welcoming place to grow.

In gratitude, he said, he was going to kick off the fund raising drive with a personal check — for $150-million. Then he told a story.

One of the ways the school had helped him get over his shyness was by encouraging him to get involved in the drama department. He’d started off as a stagehand with some walk-on parts before graduating to speaking roles. By the time he was a senior he was ready for bigger things and he got the male lead in the senior play. Bursting with confidence by now, he got up his courage and asked his leading lady — one of the prettiest and most popular girls in the class of course — to be his date at the senior prom. She turned him down.

Gates looked straight at the girl, now a well-turned-out middle-aged woman sitting near the front of the auditorium, and said: “Don’t worry, I got over it. I hope you did.”

Boy, that’s a good story. It’s got three surprises.

One: There are private schools that expect to raise $1 billion with a bake sale.

Two: There are people who keep $150 million in their checking accounts.

Three: Bill Gates has a sense of humor. Who knew?

Another story, this one from a friend who was actually there.

It was right after World War II and this man, a veteran, was attending CCNY (the Jewish Harvard, they used to call it) in New York City. He had gone into the Great Hall, a large auditorium, to study. It was nearly empty.

He lost himself in his work, barely noticing that the hall was beginning to fill until it was almost filled. People were beginning to gather on stage for some sort of ceremony. One of them, he saw, was Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the late president.

The ceremony turned out to be a memorial for the victims of the Lidice massacre. (The Czech town was literally obliterated and all of its men murdered by the Nazis, in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust and the wartime ruler of much of Czechoslovakia.)

It was a moving ceremony, my friend said, and at its conclusion, a young man came out and played taps on the bugle. And he was terrible. Hardly hit a note right. It was deeply embarrassing for everyone.

The crowd eventually filed out and once again my friend was left virtually alone in the hall.

But in a few minutes the same bugler came out on stage again and again played taps, this time to the empty house.

And it was hauntingly beautiful, note-perfect. Which was very moving too, in its way, my friend said; a little sad, a little bittersweet.

Stories.

(Don Kaul is columnist based in Washington, D.C.)