Thoughts From a Recent Google

"From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot in front of the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings."

--Helen Hayes

One of the things I love to do on Google, is Google!  Googling is the perfect weapon for me—I think it is because it is a lot like my mind:  unfocused, full of trivia, short on attention span, and I love the access it gives to all kinds of unforeseen  information. 

At any rate, I was trying to remember the play my husband and I saw in a trip to New York City shortly after our marriage. I still remember the excitement of sitting in the audience to see Helen Hayes, called The First Lady of American Theater, in the play, “ Time Remembered”.  Hayes won the Tony for her performance and the play itself won a Tony as best play of 1958.  The underlying theme of “Time Remembered” was of a young man who could not release the past in order to live a fulfilling life.  

Knowing my mental proclivities, this immediately set up several mental constructs:

 What does it do to a life if the problems of the past interfere with the richness of our time on earth?  What does it do to a life if a person does not go beyond the past to find his or her wings?  How can one find the will, yes the will to live a productive life regardless of tragedy or pain?   

 Hayes is only an example of those who have found their wings. Her career spanned 70 years, and she was one of very few people to win an Emmy, a Grammy, 2 Oscars and a Tony Award.  She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, was the namesake for the Annual Helen Hayes Awards, and had not one, but two theaters named for her.

  Outside the theater she also contributed and worked toward the Helen Hayes Hospital which originally specialized in children with Tuberculosis but has been expanded to cover rehabilitation for most chronic diseases, and she gave freely of her time and wealth to many causes that we don’t have time to mention here.

 Hayes lived to be 93 years old and at the same time all of the above was happening, she grew up as a devout Catholic child of an Irish Potato Famine background, who was denounced and denied sacraments of the church because of her marriage to Charles MacArthur, a divorced Protestant.  She was hospitalized many times due to serious asthma aggrivated by stage dust, lost a daughter at age 19 with polio, lost her husband many years too early, and was only five feet tall. 

She could have easily retired into herself and no one would have blamed her, considering that her life, indeed, was not perfect.  She could have been like the young man in “Time Remembered”,  but somehow she went beyond the pain that life offers each of us.     “Men are born to succeed, not fail,” and “If you rest, you rust,”  she is quoted as saying.

Hayes is not alone in her success.  There are many, not as famous, or even as successful as she, who, regardless of infirmity, illness or tragedy, have willed to open the book of life:  Stephen Hawking,  Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and so many others who have found their voice beyond the physical or emotional pain that life can present.  To read the biographies of almost any one alive is an exercise showing that almost any life has serious pain.  It is just part of life. 

Most of us will never reach the pinnacle of success that Hayes and many others have reached; our successes are often much smaller,  but to be able, at one’s advanced years, to look back and feel the satisfaction of a life lived with some feeling of success  and happiness “in spite of” obstacles, is reward enough.