When I was 10, I was introduced to the life of Helen Keller. In the branches of our favorite tree, my best friend, Carla, read the story of Helen Keller to me, and together we learned the manual alphabet from the pictures at the back of the book. It would serve as our secret code.

        While I marveled at the accomplishments of Helen Keller, I felt no connection with her. She, after all, was remarkable and “handicapped.” Although I shared one of her significant disabilities, blindness, I didn't want to be linked to her: I just wanted to be a regular person.

        June 27 is Helen Keller's birthday. Immersing myself in literature and artifacts from her life these past weeks, it is clear to me what Helen Keller wanted: simply to be treated like everyone else.

        Mark Twain, one of Helen Keller's many celebrated friends, predicted that her name would still be known a thousand years after her death. Certainly, 33 years later, her name remains a well-known icon of triumph over adversity and the capabilities of a person with severe disabilities.

        Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller lost both sight and hearing at 18 months of age. Wild and unruly, without language, she was considered by many to be without intelligence until her famous teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, came to the family a few months before Helen's seventh birthday. For the next 80 years, Helen Keller would continue learning, expanding boundaries and amazing the world.

        She met all 10 presidents from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson and had a warm correspondence with both Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the first American both deaf and blind to complete college when she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904. Her first book was published just one year later, The Story of My Life, which has been translated into 50 languages.

        But Helen Keller was much more complex than an angelic deaf-blind wonder who earned a college degree and met presidents and kings. In her frequent contributions to newspapers and magazines, she wrote not only about blindness but also about social issues, world peace, women's rights and social conditions.

        “We vote? What does that mean?” she wrote in a 1911 letter. “It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee!”

        In 1909, she joined the Socialist party. Her name was on lists monitored by the FBI. She wrote and spoke out against the atrocities being committed against German Jews in the early 1930s, against racism in America all her adult life, and in support of women, children and people with disabilities.

        She was beautiful. She drank martinis. In 1916, she came close to being married. And yet, as Dorothy Herman points out in Helen Keller, A Life, her physical beauty was rarely noted.

        “The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them,” she said in a 1925 speech.

        Similarly, as fund-raiser and ambassador for the American Foundation for the Blind, she wrote in a letter to Will Rogers in 1930, “the blind suffer from the wrong attitude of the world towardthem more than from blindness.”

        Any person with a disability of any kind might well say exactly the same thing today.

        Helen Keller was funny and brilliant and generous. Although she had never been out of the United States until age 50, she ultimately visited 35 countries on five continents to speak on behalf of the blind and disabled and to try to improve conditions for others less fortunate than she was. In 1943, she began touring the military hospitals across the country, visiting soldiers who had become blind, deaf or disabled to offer courage and inspiration. She called those visits “the crowning experience of my life.”

        While raising money to purchase radios and early phonograph machines called Talking Book players to bring news, entertainment, and literature to the blind of all classes, Helen Keller wrote tirelessly to politicians, movie stars and other celebrities for help. She sometimes commented on how much she enjoyed the radio. “But she was deaf!” we say. That is perhaps the greatest reason why we should always celebrate her life — whether we have disabilities or not.

        She had three senses in lieu of the customary five, and it might be argued that her deep appreciation of the world was the result of more sensory input rather than less. She who was perceived as having great limitations accepted no boundaries for her love of life and exploration of the world.

        Mark Twain was probably right: We will know her name for at least a thousand years. Now that I know her better, I hope the name will conjure images of a woman of passion and laughter and drive, not just a saintly icon of otherness. In fact, she was all of it.

        E-mail dkkendrick@earthlink.net. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kendrick

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