“Oh captain, my captain”

I clicked “like” on the post. Those were the only words there. I hadn’t seen or heard anything else related – I just knew the quote and had always enjoyed it. Always, as if there was never a time when I didn’t know a show or movie that involved Robin Williams. To a certain degree this is true. Mork and Mindy came on the air when I was 8. It hit just the right nerve or wavelength or something. It worked. Crazy, funny, alien.

Since then, you know the list: Dead Poets, Good Will Hunting, Aladdin, Good Morning Vietnam. Even the others that weren’t as popular: Club Paradise, Flubber, Hook. I’ll admit I probably reached a point where I took his stage presence for granted. Perhaps even thought, “can’t he do something that isn’t his manic ranting…” from time to time. Funny thing about that – he did. He was in just tons of things. He crossed generations as an entertainer. My daughter knows him as the voice of the genie. Most profoundly, my dad knows him as Mork. I don’t recall any conversations my dad and I may have had about TV over the years – out taste in entertainment / media are about as far apart as they can be – but Robin Williams as a performer crossed that huge gap. The title is true. My dad wore rainbow suspenders.

I am more saddened than I expected. The passing of somebody I’ve never met who lived a life so far from my own and so foreign to my way of thinking, yet he was always there. He’s been a force on television and in the movies for as long as I can recall. Robin Williams touched so many lives. He will be missed.