You People Have No Idea What It’s Like for Me
Born color-blind into your world. I have to live in your world but you can’t live in mine.*
(*You can get a clue by taking a nature walk in the moonlight)
I was working in my garden this morning and having a color-blind problem. There’s a plant that grows into a nice size bush — I plant it between trees I’ve planted and shorter flowers. It’s the ugliest plant I’ve ever seen, because I hate the colors. I have to live with that: for all I know they are beautiful colors.
I can see some version of two colors: blue and yellow. Not the blue and yellow you see, because you see different shades (wavelengths) of both. I don’t. But for me the white screen on my laptop is made out of blue and yellow. It’s very dim — I use add-ons in Firefox to darken the lettering. Some people use white text on a black background, and one time my own sister, a web designer, made a website I used red background with green letters, or the reverse, I wouldn’t know. For me it was a solid, one-color screen.
Ironically I was a painting contractor most of my adult life. I didn’t mention my colorblindness to my clients. There was one exception though, and I’ll tell you that story.
Gary Waldrop was a homebuilder based near Portland, Oregon. He built gorgeous, upscale houses in desirable (semi-wealthy) areas and sold them on the open market. They sold quickly because he insisted that all of us subcontractors do perfect work. Literally perfect, even more perfect than the Mormons require (true story).
Being a perfectionist, I was right at home.
One day Gary or his foreman called me up and gave me an address. He wanted me to touch up one of his homes from before my time, to put on the open market again.
I went to the house, and the paint on the gutters, trim, and mailbox structure out front had blisters and dings. But I knew the color was one of the usual, a rich reddish-brown whose name I forget (I knew it was red and brown from asking the mixing guy at the paint store — red oxide and yellow oxide). I diligently touched up *everything,* and especially admired how I’d feathered the paint on the smooth gutters so that the touchup wouldn’t stand out.
That night Gary called me and read me the riot act. But he didn’t scream at me — he was bemused. “Fred, why did you touch up Avocado Green paint with Navajo Sunset?”
He was the first and only client I had to tell that I was color blind. It was a funny experience. He gave me the name of the store that had the Avocado colored paint so I could re-do, and so I did.
I might write again in another article other aspects of trying to live in your world. It’s stuff like ‘racism.’ I’d write that I can’t see what color people are, so racism would be a real puzzle for me. Definitely not worth the effort. Here in Panama most all the people are probably of races you Americans hate.
There are Chinese for sure, and people that must be of African ancestry, others who are of indigenous extraction, who are semi-dark-skinned I’d say. The twenty or thirty fair skinned Anglos, Alemanos (Germans like me), and Italians who I know in the nearby town are browned by the tropical sun like I am, but are still obviously white. We’re called extraños, which sort of means strangers, or just strange. It’s the closest to racism that I’ve seen here, but in my case is balanced out by my age: they greatly respect the elders. In the U.S. I was also an extraño, with no credit for my advancing years.
Well, you know, maybe I won’t write another article. Trying to educate Americans is like talking to a tree stump.
