What Would You Like Us To Remember About You?

I was interviewed for the second time in twenty years on Friday.

I've had the good luck to be on the interviewer's side of the table many times, hundreds of times, since I graduated from college. Many of those opportunities came from my involvement with Leadership McLean County, which was the only other time I'd been interviewed since State Farm hired me in 1994.

Now I was sitting across from the coordinator of Heartland Community College's math tutoring lab, and another tutor interviewing me for the occasion. On the whole, I was happy with how it went, and impressed by my potential future boss/co-worker.

One obvious question I hadn't considered in my preparation was "What would you like us to most remember about you?"

Maybe it was good that I hadn't prepared, because the answer shot straight and purely from the heart.

"My smile."

Yes, driving home I thought of more unique, catchier things that I could have said. Could have made reference to my acting, coaching, singing, or the fact that I've only vomited once since eighth grade. That I won academic awards in college, was a certified actuary, or taught my brother to read when we were kids.

And yet, I prize my smile as much as anything I've done. Smiles take practice, and sometimes downright hard work. They're easy to break, and so much power of happiness is lost when they do.

"Life's short, have fun" is part of the creed that's helped lift me from many of the black-cloud squalls of days past that used to linger for unthinkably long and thunderous stretches. Just the fact that God's on our side is good fuel for a smile.

No one likes to be rejected for a part in a play, but if it's because my personality is so sunny that someone struggles to picture me playing a dark character... and it's happened twice... I have to consider that a great success. So I smile.

Most of our lives are eternally brief flashes of light or flowers of color on this earth.

What would you like us to remember about you?