Midlife Meditation

Even at 2, I didn't know how to smile for a camera--unlike my 6-month-old little brother. If the concept of an "autism spectrum" had existed in 1961, I would've been tagged with it then. Wait a minute--weren't you born in 1961? Why yes, I was. And from the beginning, I was different. To be clear, there are plenty of baby pictures of me smiling, even laughing. Although first-born child photography of the 1960s was limited by the cost of buying and processing film, there are still plenty of stills, slides, and even some 8mm movies of my tender years. It's what young parents do. And there are occasional candid smiles coming from my little face. In posed pictures, though, from the moment I became aware that cameras existed, my teeth stopped showing. The corners of my mouth might turn up a bit, but that was it. More significant were the silent tears. When I was hurt, frustrated, angry, sad, I wouldn't wail. Tears would roll down my cheeks...

Take a look at this guy. I see a face that is fully engaged with the person I'm facing: empathy, compassion, active listening, everything I want my face to convey when I'm in a conversation. Chances are you don't see any of that. Of course, it's just a still photo. But suppose you were across the table from this face, with this expression, for 45 minutes, and it never changed. You'd see the lips move, you'd hear the voice speaking earnestly about whatever topic was on the table, and it wouldn't be a robot voice. In fact, if you were just listening, without any visual cues, you'd feel like you were talking with a human being who was sincerely interested in everything you had to say, and who was going to great lengths to answer any questions you asked, as well as to respond appropriately to everything you said. But that face, that calm, still, face. Ten days ago, I had a job interview. I thought it went very well, and left believing I...

I have no idea what this kid is thinking--and neither do you. Cards on the table: I'm frequently uncomfortable around teenagers. As an educator, this has been a hard thing for me to accept about myself. My initial training was to be a band director, more specifically, a high school (and hopefully, eventually, college) band director. I didn't really get to do that until 2011, when, coming out of the recession, I was hired back to Banks as a half-time middle and high school band and choir director. There I found many kids I liked and enjoyed working with, some who were difficult, and a few who scared me. More cards on the table: boy energy agitates me, sometimes to the point of shutting down. As boys get bigger, they also get louder, their impulses more dangerous. I've seen boys in the fifth grade (the oldest kids I work with, now that I'm an elementary music teacher, band together into disruptive proto-gangs. I've seen them play at, and sometimes a...

It's not that I haven't been paying attention. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could just check out, ignore what's going on around me, focus on what gives me joy, celebrate the wonders in my life. Unfortunately, that's not who I am, not how my brain works, not how it's ever worked. And so today, I'm going to begin writing about myself in a way I haven't before ( though I did briefly reflect on this topic in the early days of this blog, more than five years ago ), even as this blog--the way I write it, the amount I share, the carelessness around boundaries, the sheer logorrheic excess of its word count--is, itself, solid evidence that I am, in fact, in possession of an autism spectrum disorder. To be clear, I have not been identified as autistic by any professionally-administered psychiatric assessment, because I have yet to be assessed. I am, however, for the first time in my life, actively pursuing such an assessment. I want an answer. I want t...

"I do one thing. I do it very well. Then I move on." --Charles Emerson Winchester III, M*A*S*H It was Winchester at his most infuriatingly correct and absolutely wrong. There he was, a crack surgeon drafted into a front line mobile surgery, taking the time to be certain the work he was doing to save the life of a wounded soldier was done right and, in the process, ensuring the young man's survival, but in the process endangering the lives of several others stuck in the waiting area. Around him, his colleagues were taking all the shortcuts required of meatball surgeons whose goal was quantity over quality. They had learned through experience that there was no time to spare, that meticulousness cost lives, and that the sooner they could get the next patient on the table, the less likely they were to lose him. They weren't working in Boston's finest hospital, after all: their surgery was a tent.  Winchester came late to MASH, joining the cast at a time whe...

Brace yourselves. This is going to be a rant. I am a skeptic, always have been, always will be. Blind faith is just not in my makeup. I was raised this way by a science-trained father who was a minister in a mainline Protestant denomination--the branch of Christianity that originated with theologians calling bullshit on Catholic dogma--and a New England Yankee mother who believed no gift came without strings attached. I did have a few gullible years in my teens, as most people do, but I quickly outgrew that phase, returning to my default mode of never taking anything at face value or valuing the authority of any source over the content of its argument. At times, this made me a troublesome candidate for ordination, an often disturbing presence in the pulpit, and a frequent burr in the saddle of employers. I say "at times" because, for the most part, I have kept my skeptical opinions to myself. I learned in college that challenging an idea that is believed on faith, rathe...

This tribute to Robin Williams will not be like others. I almost entirely knew Robin Williams from his breakthrough role in Mork and Mindy, a 1970s sitcom that combined the sensibilities of My Favorite Martian and Three's Company. The character of Mork had been created for an episode of Happy Days , and proved so popular that he was spun off to his own show. For me, there was no reason but Mork to watch this show. Every other character was boilerplate sitcom. When Williams was on the screen, it sparkled. The rest of the time, it snoozed. But what a sparkle it was! I'm sure much of Mork's most surreal and hilarious moments were improvised. Robin Williams's standup was a tour de force of tangents, voices, juxtapositions of ideas mashed together in ways one never saw coming. It was manic, furiously busy, the comedic version of an Art Blakey piano solo. I bought a couple of his albums, and just didn't care for them, wondering how I could find Mork so appealing, an...

I finally did it: I took the Autism Spectrum Quotient test. I've heard for most of my life that there's something not quite right about how I relate to other people. I don't pick up on nonverbal cues, I struggle and lose patience with small talk, I'm sensitive to clothing tags and repetitive noises in my environment, and I can have a powerful focus on something that interests me, to the exclusion of everything and everyone around me. And yes, I meant to say "not right," because that is how others around me have presented these personality traits when they've assessed me. I've responded in several different ways to this assessment. At times I've been hurt by it, humiliated to be seen as somehow deficient, lacking in essential survival traits. At other times, I've become angry, insisting that this is who I am, damn it, and I have every right to be myself. Anger like this can lead me to dismiss the person making the assessment: What does he...