Midlife Meditation

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...