VISIT MINNESOTA MONTHLY ON THE WEB

Current Issue

Arts and Entertainment

Dining Around Town

Midwest Home and Design

Twin Cities Taste

Online Article Index

IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO GET WISE.

When I graduated from high school one June many years ago (it's a multiple of 7, thanks for asking), I thought I was pretty smart. I had a gold tassel from the National Honor Society on my mortarboard, and I even knew how to spell it. M-o-r-t-a-r-b-o-a-r-d. But then I enrolled in a nice girls' college without bothering to inquire whether or not they offered a major in the field I wanted to study. Not so smart. Rather humiliating to list, a year later, my reason for transfer: "Got on the wrong bus."

While at the wrong school, my plan for my first year away from home was to take twice the usual number of freshman credits, get an A- average (I was, after all, a realist), complete my first novel, and convince the Jesuit teaching staff that the collected works of Ayn Rand ought to be studied along with those of Teilhard De Chardin.

The only one of those four I had any real chance of achieving was finishing my first novel. Which probably would have occurred, had I begun the thing correctly in the first place. Lifelong success hangs on such tiny details. Who knows? Had I typed onto my first blank page, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," or "'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents!' grumbled Jo," or even "Howard Roark laughed," perhaps I might have given J. D. Salinger a run for his money, publishing at 18 a maroon-colored book with no cover illustration, only dull gold lettering spelling out the title, some "Pitcher in the Millet" or "Receiver in the Whiskey," destined to be called the consummate re-telling of American adolescence.

But as I already admitted, I am sometimes smart and sometimes not so. And so I blew it with my first eight syllables: "My name is Beanie Goldenberg."

Of course, my name wasn't Beanie Goldenberg, and it was never going to be. I didn¹t know any Beanies. I didn¹t know any Goldenbergs. Which was the point, really. How exotic to be a Goldenberg! How literary! How utterly New York! How much more interesting a life a Goldenberg would lead, as opposed to that of a Scandinavian-Irish person from the Midwest. Who would want to write about (much less endure) the life of an 18-year-old creature stuck at the wrong college? Instead, I would write about the life of a young intellectual Jewish girl being raised on the East Coast by admirably radical parents, perhaps a reactionary poet mother with blunt-cut bangs and excessively red lipstick and a charmingly rumpled nuclear physicist father who, guilt-ridden, protested regularly for peace in front of the ivy-covered halls of his own scientific research laboratory. Yeah, that was it. I would write about that.

The trouble was, as Beanie Goldenberg, I had nothing to say.

To me, Beanie led a life of unimaginable wonderfulness. She read books, her friends read books, the doorman at her Manhattan apartment building read books. Some of them in Hebrew. Beanie ordered incredible meals at frighteningly swank restaurants, dressed in an easy, tossed-off glamour that often involved a casually-yet-perfectly tied Hermés scarf, and had high tea regularly at The Plaza, right next to Eloise and her nanny. Beanie¹s days were perfection.

And, aside from being perhaps enviable, rah-ther boring, as Eloise's nanny would say, Beanie's life was going nowhere. It had already arrived at someplace divine, a place where the people were overly educated and the references obscure. Once described, Beanie's life lay there on the page like a pale slab of lox. More like lutefisk dressed as lox, actually. I gave it a poke with a red pencil now and then, drove to The Brothers Deli for a half-dozen bagels and a little inspiration every once in a while, but Beanie's tale never moved. She had no challenges to resolve, nothing to accomplish. She was already everything she wanted to be. Beanie was something no one really is: born wise.

But you can't get wise just by being born. Wisdom comes hard-earned, through embarrassing the heck out of yourself with your own bad manners, silly ideas, and dumb choices that still make you wince at the memory years later while driving the kids to the orthodontist.

I never finished that novel. More impressed with myself than I should have been at that young age, I chose the wrong first eight syllables. And set my destiny forever down the more sensible path of writing only about what lay straight in front of me: babies and ballet, kitchen floors and Catholic holidays, hockey and wood ticks.

I had made a bad start as a writer, but a bad start now and then can set you on the right road. I'm not quite wise enough to explain exactly how that works, but I know that it does.

Sometimes getting on the wrong bus takes you exactly where you need to go. MM

Pamela Hill Nettleton is editor of Minnesota Monthly.