What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [118]
While they are conscious of their advancing age, Barbara and Ira are convinced that the daily surprises of their activity, the demands of its labor, and the appreciative interactions with a loving and diverse chunk of humanity—volunteers and clients alike—reward them with physical, cognitive, and spiritual health. One hundred-seventy years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson identified the phenomenon when he wrote: “It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” In recent years, scientific studies have suggested that the Smiths’ intuition is correct: doing good and helping others strengthens the immune system and lengthens lives. A five-year study of 423 older couples by psychologist Stephanie Brown of the University of Michigan found that those who provided significant support to others were more than twice as likely to have remained alive during the study.
“Creating and realizing HGRM’s success means that I can pass from this life knowing that I have made a difference. But when I reflect on the fruits of my labors, I feel young in body, mind, and spirit,” Ira said. What began with a request to help furnish one apartment has become proof of the saying that a life lived for others is a life well-lived. And that’s the life the Smiths plan on living “as long as we can get out of bed in the morning,” Barbara said.
BETTY REID SOSKIN
Living Color
“Despite my ambiguous skin color . . .
I have lived the black experience.”
After the phone rang at five-thirty, there was no way Betty Reid Soskin could return to sleep: Even though the sky over Washington, D.C., was gray and the mercury stood at seventeen. Even though she had timed it and knew precisely how long it would take to walk to the Capitol. And even though she had only to cut through little Lincoln Park, pass the Emancipation Statue paid for by newly freed slaves at the end of the Civil War, nod good morning to the bust of educator and civil rights advocate Mary McLeod Bethune, and walk twelve blocks with the thousands of others funneling through the street.
She showered and slipped into a pair of new long johns. In the cold, the fine-boned, five-foot-five-inch woman would need them. She pulled on her forest-green trousers and a black cashmere turtleneck sweater, over which she put on her government-issued gray long-sleeve shirt. She affixed the gold name bar on her right breast pocket. Proudly, she pinned a gold badge over her heart. She regretted not having remembered the flag pin for her lapel. “It was optional, except for this day, when I would have given anything to have it,” she said.
She caught a glimpse of her late mother, Lottie, in her own reflection in the mirror, and grinned. Where on earth has Betty gone?
She parted her black hair down the middle, pulled it back, and bound it in a clip. She penciled arching brows above her dark, deep-set eyes. She brushed blush on her lightly complected cheekbones, and touched her lips with gloss. Betty put on her hip-length, regulation raincoat and stuck extra tissues in the pockets. Then she picked up a small black-and-white photograph and tucked it in her breast pocket. It was of “Mammá,” her great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, a slave in Louisiana until she was freed at nineteen. She died, at 101, in 1948, when Betty was twenty-seven. “Slavery, you see, is no abstraction for me. Mammá would share this day with me. It was, after all, as much for her as for myself that I was there at all,” she said.
Finally, Betty put on her Smokey the Bear hat. At eighty-seven, America’s oldest National Park Service ranger was ready to celebrate.
After all, Betty had long fought for civil rights and civility. She had lived the long arc of moral history and, as Martin Luther King Jr. had promised, had finally seen it bend toward justice. Betty was approaching