Musings of a White Haired Teenager

There is a commonly used expression that drifts through conversations with remarkable persistence: “I know where the bodies are buried.” I found myself using that phrase three separate times recently. The first occasion was with a close friend in the legal profession who was struggling through a couple of difficult cases, and I reminded him that every sufficiently complicated legal matter eventually arrives at the same point: find the person who knows where the bodies are buried. Somewhere in every conflict there exists a keeper of inconvenient stories, someone who remembers what actually happened before the official version was circulated. The second occasion emerged during discussions about a project I have undertaken - to write a living history of the Department of Communication, my home for nearly four decades. A senior colleague wisely reminded me that if I wanted the real history, I needed to locate the people who know where the bodies are buried. Then, it came up a third time,...

There are moments in life when you get to do something that looks ceremonial from the outside but feels surgical from the inside - cutting through layers of time, memory, obligation, and yes, loyalty - to arrive at something that resembles truth. I recently had one of those moments. I had the opportunity to honor a person who, quite literally, made my life - as I know it - possible. Not in the performative, LinkedIn-endorsed, hashtag-gratitude sense, but in the inconvenient, historically verifiable, narrative-defining sense. The kind where if you remove that person from the timeline, the rest of the story collapses like a poorly written third act. In doing this, I was constantly reminded of the comment to an earlier blog from the pedestrian philosopher hiding behind anonymity, who offered this gem: “More like ‘Mentor’ is the bandage, notthe wound.” One has to admire the ignorance. Not the clarity, mind you - but the confidence embedded in a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Beca...