Life is a daring adventure

The title of today's post is paraphrased from my favorite quote by Helen Keller:

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

If anyone should know about getting the most out of life, it's Helen Keller. I've known about her as long as I can remember. I recall seeing her interviewed on TV when I was a kid, and seeing the movie "The Miracle Worker" about her extraordinary life. I remember trying to imagine what it would be like to not be able to see or hear. Imagining just blindness or just deafness is daunting enough, but imagining both is beyond scary. Since Helen is the only person I ever heard of who thrived with that particular impairment, it stood to reason in my mind that she must be the only person it ever happened to. Or close to it. Right? I'll get back to that question later, but for now I just want to set the scene of how large the image and story of Helen Keller has loomed in my life.

A few years ago when I first saw this video, it brought me to tears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLqyKeMQfmY Not only is her achievement visible, but her vitality and intelligence and humor shine through.

This next video is harder to understand, but her interpreter translates for us as Helen speaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ch_H8pt9M8 It shows more of her frustration at not being able to communicate more fluidly. 

When I planned this trip, my focus was on the Natchez Trace Parkway and on staying at Best Westerns along the way so that I could cash in a bunch of the points I've been accumulating. I had no idea I was planning to stay in the town of Helen Keller's birthplace until the day before I got there and I started looking at whether there was anything interesting to do in Tuscumbia, Alabama. This was great and unexpected news -- I was so excited! 

After I got to Tuscumbia, I started hearing about the musical history of the area. The locals clearly expect that to be what's interesting to visitors. I looked into tours of the groundbreaking music studios in Muscle Shoals and Sheffield (nearby towns), but opted instead for a low-key morning of learning about Helen Keller and walking around downtown Tuscumbia.

Here are a few of the photos I took at Ivy Green, Helen Keller's birthplace. First, a statue commemorating the moment when she learned her first word:

A plaque about the beginnings of the Lions Club directing their considerable energy toward vision-related charity work:

And the actual pump where Helen learned her first word:

Later in the day, I drove to Tupelo, Mississippi. By doing so, I added another state to the list of those visited by me (I'm up to 42 states plus D.C.). I drove to Elvis' birthplace, but it just didn't hold the same meaning for me that Helen Keller's did. I didn't even want to pay the fee and go inside. It did, however, give me a moment of appreciation for how overwhelming superstardom must have been for Elvis. The town he came from isn't much, and his family didn't have much. I can only imagine how disorienting the adoration he would receive in his later years would be for him. That reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently about how Elvis consistently failed to accurately recite the narrative in the middle of the song "Are You Lonesome Tonight" when he performed the song live. It's an interesting tale and reveals something vulnerable about him: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/30-analysis-parapraxis-elvis

Tupelo is too much of the combination of small town and tourist trap for me, and I'm not a huge Elvis fan. But I may go back, and possibly multiple times, because just about anything would be worth braving to eat fried green tomatoes at Bishop's BBQ in Tupelo: http://bishopsbbqgrill.com  O.M.G. !!!!!

In case it's of interest, here's the house Elvis was born in, and the plaque next to it:

I promised to get back to the question of how common it is for people to be both blind and deaf. I don't have an answer about total blindness and total deafness, but it seems to be not as uncommon as I thought for someone to be significantly impaired in both ways, or total in one and significant in the other. There are enough that there's a national center for the deaf-blind named for Hellen Keller: https://www.helenkeller.org/hknc

Similar to how I got a sense of the humbleness of Elvis' beginnings, I realized the opposite about Helen Keller by visiting her birthplace. Although her ancestral home is modest by modern standards, her family was wealthy in both money and spirit. They could afford to employ an exceptional teacher for her, and they continued to lavish love and care on her at home after she became severely impaired. Had Helen been brought up in the poverty that Elvis knew as a child, I believe we never would have heard of her. It would not have mattered how brilliant she was because she needed help to learn to interact with the rest of the world -- help that it took considerable resources to provide for her. Because her family had wealth, we are all richer for having had the gift of her to the world.