Useful Lives

Our satellite system recently dropped Court TV in favor of the Biography Channel. In spite of many ads urging outraged viewers to call or write in to complain, the system has kept the Biography Channel. I have always been interested in this form of reality. Even as a child of nine, my favorite genre when Judy and I went to the library in Greenville, Mississippi, was biography or autobiography. Now we speak more of memoir, indicating in the new term perhaps a realization that all might not exactly be reality but heavily dependent upon the author's memory of the happenings. In any event, I paused last week to see the last twenty minutes or so of Vivian Leigh's life on the Biography Channel. I was especially interested in one of her last roles before her early death at age fifty-three of tuberculosis.

The role I am writing about is in the movie Ship of Fools in which she plays a disillusioned middle-aged woman. She speaks with her fellow character on the ship's deck and basically says words like these: "I wanted to live a useful life, and I wanted to be loved." I've been thinking about those lines since then. The writers of the film seem to have gotten down a couple of the basic life events that make us happy as we reflect upon our legacies in the twilight years.

The answer to the second question is perhaps the easier of the two for me to answer. I met my husband Garlan when I was a mere seventeen year old just out of high school. He had me, not exactly at hello, but when he asked me for two dates--one for Friday and then one for Saturday as well--the first time we met. I quickly discovered him to be quite generous, spending a lot of his extra money on flowers, gifts, movies, and restaurants for me. I also realized he was a rock of a man, which I greatly needed in my life after being deserted by my father at age four or so. He was also older and wiser it seemed to me, being all of five years older than I. After three years of dating, we married almost forty-two years ago. While life has had many surprises for us through the years, I can honestly say that he has loved me.

The answer to the second question is a little dicier for me. When Garlan and I went to the University of Mississippi as young married students in the late 1960's, we both chose a career path that would limit our future earning potential greatly. He chose city management as a major, and I chose English Education. He served twenty-six years in middle management at a non-profit hospital, and I have taught over thirty-five years in non-profit schools and colleges. We both had some other odd jobs in the private sector during our college years. I would say that in our combined sixty or so work years in the non-profit sector we have not been wildly successful in terms of salary. Compared to the rest of the world, however, we were able to live middle-class lives.

Have our lives been useful again is the question? I have to believe that they have. We through the years have devoted ourselves to various volunteer activities that have given us some feeling of usefulness. These include Sunday School teaching, ushering in church, hosting backyard Bible clubs, working for the AIDS victims in the area as well as the homeless and those in poverty, working for the hospital auxiliary, and serving on various community boards such as the Area Heath Education Center.

As Christians we also think frequently of Jesus' commands: to love God and to love others. These four criteria, including being loved and being useful, do seem to represent a way to happiness, not necessarily to worldly success.