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.