My Own Malady

We recently had several folks over to the house for a get together…no. Let me start again.

Our house was a zoo last week when we hosted our youngest grandson’s 4th birthday party. There were about a million kids I’d never seen. I knew our own grandcritters and a handful of others and that was all. The same held true for the adults. The rest were strange little apes who set up a howl that lasted for two hours.

The kids were loud, too.

Family and friends made up part of the attendees, but there were a lot of people I’d never met.

To preserve my sanity, I found a nice corner of our outside kitchen counter and settled in with a couple of dads clutching adult beverages to watch the action. My daughters and the Bride opted for an old fashioned home birthday party. No bounce house. No petting zoo. And thank God for no Chuck E. Cheese insanity. Instead, they had old-fashioned games for the kids, including bobbing for apples, which resulted in only one near drowning.

Who would have thought they’d take their shirts off and go in headfirst?

The only thing the girls didn’t resurrect was Pin the Tail on the Donkey. With our critters, there would have been a stabbing with the tail and the addition of paramedics would have just added to the cacophony.

Conversation wandered as the party wound down. What was a group of adults watching kids have fun evolved into a mixed confederation of grownups and tweens, young people between the age of 9 and 12.

I heard the twelve-year-old ask her mother, who was our youngest daughter’s best friend growing up, why I was wearing a tee shirt that didn’t match my unbuttoned aloha shirt. “Why is Da wearing that? The colors don’t go together. He should know that.”

“That’s because Da can’t help it.” Hanna has known me since she was seven, and I’m convinced she lived with us for a couple of years when she was a teenager. She was at our house all the time. In fact, I recently asked the Bride if we’d sent her to college along with our own girls.

Hanna gave me a sympathetic smile. “He’s colorblind.”

Hanna’s daughter looked at me with a frown. “You only see in black and white?”

I sighed. I’ve spent my whole life answering that question from adults. “No, I see color all right, but it isn’t they same as what registers in your brian.”

She plucked out the tail of her blouse. “What color is this?”

“I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

“Is it gray?”

“I’d be willing to bet it’s purple or something, but it’s green to me.”

“It’s turquoise.”

“It’s green.”

“What color is mom’s shirt?”

Remembering I was talking to a kid, I bared my teeth and smiled. “I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

I’ve been caught in that endless loop before with those who can’t seem to grasp that I don’t perceive what everyone else sees.

The Bride picked out my clothes each morning when I worked full time and had to wear suits and slacks. As the years passed and I moved up in our organization, seniority provided some leniency and adjusted my wardrobe to jeans, white shirts, and a blue or black sports coat. There was a time before we were married when I dressed myself.

More than once I walked into my office to find my secretary with her hand out. “Give me that tie. It doesn’t match.”

“Last week you said it matched this shirt.”

“Nope. Your other shirt is a different shade. Use the black tie on the back of your door today, or don’t wear one at all.”

Color is an issue in writing, also. I’ve described sunrises and sunsets, the light on trees and vegetation, or the changing color of rocks, hill, or mountains without ever seeing what registers in most people’s brains. It comes from asking the Bride wha see sees as we pass, or sit on the edge of a drop-off to watch the sunset.

If I describe the subtle colors of a Craftsman house restored to it’s original paint scheme, it’s a cheat, because I looked it up, or asked her.

She gets those questions all the time. “What color are those clouds?”

“Salmon. Pinkish. Tope. Chartreuse. Vermilion. Persimmon.” She really doesn’t include all those at one time, but they’re examples of what I hear.

“You’re making those up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Persimmon. If I don’t know the colors, how is persimmon going to help? What are those other colors I always have to ask you about?”

“Mauve. Coral. Lavender.”

“Just words. What color is mauve?”

“Dusty rose.”

“Sigh. Roses are red, or yellow So you mean red.”

“No.”

“Give me another color.”

She pointed at her shirt. “This is coral.”

It looked vaguely orange to me, so I gave up.

We recently hiked through Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle, and I spent half of my time asking her and the couple we were with about their descriptions of the canyon walls, or the vastly different layers we passed. As they walked ahead, I stopped and wrote it down in a small notebook.

The desert scrub plants I saw as silver, gray, or brown came in subtle shades I didn’t understand. I had to write them down, too, and when I set my novel, A Dead Man’s Laugh there, I resorted to my almost indecipherable notes.

For example, a creosote bush has, according to my companions, dark green leaves with brown-burgandy fruit. I saw waxy dark brown leaves with even darker brown buds. That’s because I’m red/green challenged.

It made elementary school art a living hell. My grades weren’t good because the crayons in class didn’t have their labels and I had no idea what colors I was using. trees were brown, grass probably turquoise, and people’s hair most likely began the punk movement.

According to Color Blind Awareness:

Being ‘red/green color blind’ means people with it can easily confuse any colors which have some red or green as part of the whole color. So someone with red/green color blindness is likely to confuse blue and purple because they can’t ‘see’ the red element of the color purple.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for me. I can identify the basic colors, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc, if they’re neon bright, but subtle shades leave me in the gray dust.

The Bride, the editor I sleep with, corrected those descriptions in A Dead Man’s Laugh to match what she saw in the canyon and I sent the manuscript off.

We always talk about using all our senses in writing. The scent and taste of chocolate. That one I can easily identify. The squeak of metal as a swing set moving in the wind. A smooth tabletop, or the hard slap of a gunshot.

For those of us who are colorblind, these descriptions are hard and we have to find a way around them.

I sincerely hope you don’t suffer the same malady.

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About Reavis Wortham

NYT Bestselling Author and two-time Spur Award winner Reavis Z. Wortham pens the Texas Red River historical mystery series, and the high-octane Sonny Hawke contemporary western thrillers. His new Tucker Snow series begins in 2022. The Red River books are set in rural Northeast Texas in the 1960s. Kirkus Reviews listed his first novel in a Starred Review, The Rock Hole, as one of the “Top 12 Mysteries of 2011.” His Sonny Hawke series from Kensington Publishing features Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke and debuted in 2018 with Hawke’s Prey. Hawke’s War, the second in this series won the Spur Award from the Western Writers Association of America as the Best Mass Market Paperback of 2019. He also garnered a second Spur for Hawke’s Target in 2020. A frequent speaker at literary events across the country. Reavis also teaches seminars on mystery and thriller writing techniques at a wide variety of venues, from local libraries to writing conventions, to the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, SC. He frequently speaks to smaller groups, encouraging future authors, and offers dozens of tips for them to avoid the writing pitfalls and hazards he has survived. His most popular talk is entitled, My Road to Publication, and Other Great Disasters. He has been a newspaper columnist and magazine writer since 1988, penning over 2,000 columns and articles, and has been the Humor Editor for Texas Fish and Game Magazine for the past 25 years. He and his wife, Shana, live in Northeast Texas. All his works are available at your favorite online bookstore or outlet, in all formats. Check out his website at www.reaviszwortham.com. “Burrows, Wortham’s outstanding sequel to The Rock Hole combines the gonzo sensibility of Joe R. Lansdale and the elegiac mood of To Kill a Mockingbird to strike just the right balance between childhood innocence and adult horror.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The cinematic characters have substance and a pulse. They walk off the page and talk Texas.” —The Dallas Morning News On his most recent Red River novel, Laying Bones: “Captivating. Wortham adroitly balances richly nuanced human drama with two-fisted action, and displays a knack for the striking phrase (‘R.B. was the best drunk driver in the county, and I don’t believe he run off in here on his own’). This entry is sure to win the author new fans.” —Publishers Weekly “Well-drawn characters and clever blending of light and dark kept this reader thinking of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” —Mystery Scene Magazine

18 thoughts on “My Own Malady

  1. There are some glasses that let some colorblind people see colors (some colors?).

    My FIL was colorblind, but I could never get my husband to get him the glasses – he didn’t understand that they might give his father a new experience – and I didn’t push either of them

    I wish I had.

    Or was it all advertising?

      • I hope you still have a very long life ahead of you.

        Not pushing, but if you had the opportunity to give a writing conference keynote in, say, Sweden, would you not go because you’ve never, say, been to Sweden before?

        Truly NEW experiences are harder and harder to get as we get older. I’m 75 now, and Macchu Picchu is going to be a digital visit if I even ever get well. My mother and father went in person.

        If I get well (I’ve had ME/CFS since 1989, and MAYBE the long covid researchers will come up with something useful for other post-viral infection victims), I’m buying that Tiny House, leaving the retirement community periodically, and seeing this wonderful country, if I have to hire a driver because husband doesn’t want to go.

  2. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. You remind us of yet another way we take our blessings for granted and something we should give thanks for–being able to see without having the colors screened for us against our will.

    I’m not colorblind but have had to wear corrective lenses nearly all my life–and I’m thankful for even imperfect vision because one of the greatest blessings of my lifetime was moving west and getting the absolute honor and privilege of seeing the mountains every single day. I thank God for it.

    It’s also a blessing for you that your spouse can step in and help you get a better picture of colors and details. I’ve noticed that not everyone has the skill of good observation and describing what they see–I myself would probably make a terrible witness if I had to give details pertaining to some criminal act I witnessed. Although I pay more attention to the landscape than to people.

    Happy birthday to your grandson!

    • I wear trifocals and they’ve allowed me to see clearly. I’m with you about the mountains. Can’t take my eyes off them. We’re in Alpine, Texas as I write this and can see the low hills from our hotel window. Even these worn down mountains barely six hundred feet high and fascinating.

  3. How interesting. I’m glad you have a reliable person to tell you the colors, but it must be so frustrating not to know what those color words mean, visually. Persimmon versus dusty rose.

    I am not color blind, but I have some degree of aphantasia, or not being able to create a mental picture of things. That makes scene-setting challenging, because I’m only imagining two talking heads and nothing else, and those talking heads are blurry. (“What does your character look like?” I have no idea.) I can read description and get a general idea of an image, but it vanishes once the description’s done.

  4. Rev, considering the hideous clashing colors I see in current clothing, either much of the population is color blind or that’s The Style.

    I never thought of the problem with crayons. Sheesh, that must be awful for a kid.

    My ability to distinguish hues isn’t good. The one (and only) time I painted our house, I chose reddish brown for the trim and what I thought was a complementary cream tone for the walls. It came out purple and pink. Still living that down,

    • I don’t understand how colors clash and change those hues, but I learned in architecture class how designers use them. Original Craftsman houses, for example. Even with colorblindness, I can see how they work, but don’t ask me to understand and describe them.

  5. This is the best description of color blindness I’ve ever read, Rev. I’m fortunate not to have it, but I don’t have a facility with describing shades to the degree that I’d like. Which means asking my wife or others, or doing some research, but I’m blessed that I can see those shades.

    However, my sense of smell isn’t what it was in my youth–I suffered a serious sinus infection when I was thirty that required surgery, so describing scents can be challenging for me.

  6. Describing colors must be awful. I think I would have to try the glasses for the very reason you don’t. 😉
    Inquiring minds want to know how you distinguish between a red light and a green light?

    • Ha!

      I’ve been pulled over because if that. Red is the one on top. Yellow is bright. Green is white to me. However, horizontal lights were a problem when they came out. White on the right.

      Then there are times when the sun is right in the lens and the colors are dim. Slow down and watch!

      Blinking lights at night are extremely difficult. I either use an abundance of caution and have stopped on blinking caution, or watch other drivers. Mary a light-related accident in Nearly 65 years behind the wheel.

      But there was that one night at 2:30 AM when an officer pulled me over to administer a sobriety test. We were both surprised when I passed it.

  7. I have a tiny inkling of what you face in writing descriptions involving color, but mine is my loss of smell. Because of nerve damage I lost my sense of smell about ten years ago. I still miss it. Plus it can be dangerous not to be able to smell gas etc. Or when food has spoiled. My husband insists two weeks past the best buy date is no big deal, but when I can’t smell the lunchmeat, I’m leery! I often ask him to remind me what foods, cut grass, rain, popcorn, bacon, coffee, etc., smell like when I’m writing scenes. It’s funny what we don’t miss until it’s gone . . . .

  8. Fascinated by your description, Reavis. As I understand it, colorblindness is rare in women. I worked with a colorblind reporter at the newspaper, and we always knew when John’s wife was out of town. His clothes were outrageous.
    He also picked the department’s bowling shirts. Lord knows what color he thought he was getting, but the team shirts were magenta with yellow-orange lettering.

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