My friend Andy invited me to a Toastmaster's Christmas party last night in the home of one of the members of a Toastmaster's group he belongs to. Andy is a big teddy bear of a man, 40 years old, never married, who has a form of autism that makes social settings difficult for him. It's not that he is shy or that he doesn't want to be around people. The difficulty is that his autism leaves him without the social skills to read how other people are responding to him in a conversation or with their body language or through other physical expressions that most of us are able to clearly interpret. Andy has a brilliant, encyclopedic mind. He loves to share the endless facts in his head, and believe me, he knows something about every single subject you could ever bring up. But since he has a hard time reading people he often does not know when to pause in a conversation, when to listen and respond to their points, when to let others have their say. He is working on...
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