‘I like. . .looking forward to doing something.’

Rosie Harris lives contentedly in her small apartment, but she doesn’t sit around there much.

“I like to get up in the morning looking forward to doing something,” she explained.

So Harris, 76, ventures out each day from Good Shepherd Manor, a low-income independent-living senior complex in South-Central Los Angeles, to pursue what she looks forward to doing: getting an education and helping out wherever she’s needed.

Harris worked as a beautician and at a nursing home in Waukegan, Ill., while she was married and raising a family. She and her husband had separated a few years before he died in 1986.

Being alone didn’t faze her. Harris moved to her native Arkansas to take care of her parents in their last years. While she was there, she earned her bachelor’s degree in gerontology at 63 from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff--though she hadn’t gotten her high school diploma until well into adulthood, after dropping out in the 10th grade.

“Growing up, I didn’t have the opportunity to get much schooling,” Harris said. “I graduated from high school along with my children.”

In 1986, after her parents and her estranged husband had died, she pondered where to go and settled on Los Angeles, where one of her daughters lived. “I wanted to be where it was warm, and I had been coming here to visit my daughter long enough to know I liked it.”

Harris spends her days volunteering at the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, doing missionary work for the First AME Church and auditing classes--such as, recently, transitions in adulthood--at USC. She has also volunteered at a day-care center and helped kids learn to read at a neighborhood elementary school.

Her schedule doesn’t leave her time to fret about such things as coping in later years. Good Shepherd Manor doesn’t offer life-care and she hasn’t needed meals delivered or other such assistance.

“I do everything myself,” Harris said cheerfully. “The bus stop is down at the corner, and I’m not far from the Crenshaw shopping mall.

“My apartment works fine for me,” she said. “There are about 100 apartments here, and it’s a nice community. We have all kinds of people here.”

To a question about plans for the future, Harris’ response has nothing to do with the intended implication about how she’ll take care of herself as she ages.

“I intend to go to school as long as I can and keep working in the church,” she said. “When this semester’s over, I think I’m going to try drawing or something like that.”