Horse sense

I’ll admit to hypochondriac tendencies; not usually with regard to physical ailments, but sometimes when it comes to mental and/or behavioural quirks. For example, this moving but often funny article from the New York Times about the relationship between two teenagers with Asperger syndrome had me flinching with recognition:

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

But the glorious punchline came after the article was published, with a correction that seems by its very existence to celebrate Asperger’s not as a disorder or an encumbrance but as a lifestyle that contentedly beats its own, slightly divergent path: