The event was billed as a speed mentoring event, a chance for entrepreneurs to meet some so-called experts to pick their brains about marketing, strategy, finance, and legal issues. What could be more fun? Thirty entrepreneurs in a new age concrete and wood conference room, milling around trying to avoid eye contact with each other. Ho hum. So been there done that. But I was ready! Let me at that Bingo card!I was easily the oldest person in the room. I guess I should start getting used to that. The upside to being old, though, is that I don't care what people think about me anymore. I can say anything to anyone. I'll never see them again. And few of these people were likely to be in my target market, so la la la.
The six mentors had to take us two at a time; each entrepreneur was supposed to get fifteen minutes of one-on-one time. Oh boy!
My first two sessions were with marketing experts, a couple of smart, confident women I could have talked with for a long time over coffee. They both valiantly gave me what they could before the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next table.
Actually, my first session lasted only about ten minutes, because my partner hogged the time. I mean, hogged the time. She even came back and gave the mentor a swatch of her unique (and pungent) geranium aroma-therapy oil. I tried not to be resentful.
My third session was with a “strategist,” Josh, a young man with a diffident air. No one else had signed up for that time slot, so I sat alone as I handed him a postcard for my recently published book. He asked me some polite questions, trying to get a feel for my business direction.
I was just drawing a breath to begin waxing poetic about my dream of establishing a small publishing empire when a young woman sat down in the chair next to me and heaved an enormous sigh. My session partner had arrived.
Josh's eyes left me and settled on her. We both stared. She was dressed in a rumpled vintage get up that I might have worn when I was in my twenties, back when I cared how I looked. Her skin was smooth, her lips were red, her eyes were shadowed, her hair was fluffy and pulled up into some kind of shape. She looked messy but real, coy but accessible, and within seconds, I was pretty sure I had her figured out.
“Well, let's let that percolate,” Josh said vaguely, setting my postcard aside. To the newcomer, he said, “Hi, what brings you here?”
“I had a business. Gardening. With my boyfriend. He signed me up, and then he left me. Now I have this business, mostly contract work for walls and walkways, and I don't have insurance, and I don't know what I'm doing,” she said breathlessly, eyelashes fluttering. Her lips were mesmerizing, I had to admit. Josh was certainly mesmerized. The temperature between them ratcheted up a peg. I sat back in my chair and watched.
Her name was something like Nora, and she was on the prowl for attention. Josh was bored and ready to comply. Nora described her business in a self-deprecating way, casting sidelong glances at Josh, and occasionally at me, because I was there, after all. Nobody could deny that I was there, watching. Finally, she ran down, and Josh seemed speechless. Without thinking first, I asked, “What could go wrong?”
“What?”
“What could go wrong? If you don't have insurance...?”
“Yeah, good question,” Josh said.
Nora said a few things, I said some things (devil's advocate is my best role), and Josh pretended to agree. As I listened to Nora talk about her landscaping business, I could tell her heart wasn't fully in it. I know what that feels like, and I've seen it many times in my former students, who were struggling to get associate's degrees in fields they didn't care about.
“It seems like you aren't really into this business,” I said respectfully. “What would you rather be doing?”
Nora took a deep breath. A smile lit up her face. She sat up straight in her chair and waved both arms. I thought, wow, this will be good.
“I want to build a huge garden, twenty acres, with a sauna hut in the middle, in the hills outside of [some town I didn't recognize] in Massachusetts!”
Then she slumped. “But I love my clients!” she moaned. “Their gardens are my babies. The vines and flowers . . . I can't leave my babies.”
“They won't love your gardens the way you do,” I said unsympathetically. “They'll forget to trim those vines and let them grow all over their houses . . . You'll never get away. Your clients will drain you dry if you let them.”
Nora made a pouty face. I thought, whoops, maybe that was a bit harsh, so I smiled disingenuously to ease the sting. I used to be afraid of young women like Nora, I realized. Looking into her vapid, self-centered eyes, I realized, she doesn't want to be in business. She just wants attention. Then I realized that I was actually talking about myself, about my editing clients draining me dry, and suddenly I couldn't breathe.
I said to Nora gently, “Think about where you want to be in five years, ten years... Don't wait until you are old like me to pursue your dream.”
Josh said, “I know what it's like to detour away from doing what you love.” I thought, hey, something is going on with him, too. I turned my earnest gaze his way and asked, “What detour did you take? What would you rather be doing?”
“I play the upright bass in a jazz band,” he said sheepishly. “I like doing this business thing, but . . .”
“It's hard to make money doing music,” I said. He nodded.
“I have a family to take care of. But I'd really just like to be shredding my bass.” We all sat quietly for a moment, pondering detours and shredded basses. Then Josh shook himself and turned to me. “What about you, what's your dream?”
I reflected for a split second and said, “I'm closer now to my perfect life than I've ever been before. Writing, publishing, making art. It's what I've wanted to do since I was nine years old. And now I'm doing it.”
A few minutes later, the bell chimed, and it was time to move on to the next table.
