A Horse of a Different Color

by David Goldman

Here’s a statement that I believe to be true regardless of who is reading this: I am the most color blind person you have ever heard of, read about, or encountered.

A Horse of a Different Color

I see colors – bright, vivid, colors. They just differ radically from the colors you see. An example? To me, some shades of green look like neon orange. For years I’ve been telling people that if they were to put an orange on a lawn, the two colors look identical. You’re asking yourself, “how does he know what color orange is? He doesn’t know green and orange could be blue for all we know.” You are correct, Grasshopper. I don’t know what orange is. All I do know is that an orange (the fruit) is allegedly orange and that’s what I go by.

I used to play golf and because my vision wasn’t great to begin with, my friends suggested I use those orange golf balls rather than white ones. They said they stick out like a sore thumb on the fairway. You can’t miss ‘em! Foolishly, I believed them. I teed off on the first hole, watched my ball sail through the air, hit the ground, and vanish before my eyes. No bounce, no roll, nothing. It was gone. Vanished in plain sight. I asked my friends if they saw it and they all said they hadn’t been watching. Great. When we finally located it I could stand above it and barely see it. From that point on someone was assigned to follow my ball on each shot. It made for a LONG day. I’m sure the foursome following us was quite pleased. My only hope was that someone in their group was also color blind, and from the look of their pants, at least one was.

 

I first found out I was color blind when I was in kindergarten. We were drawing and coloring. I was damned good at drawing (if I do say so myself) but the coloring part? Not so much. Miss. Olenick looked at my picture of stick figure kids playing in a field and with a chastising tone asked me, “why would you color the grass orange, the leaves brown, and the tree trunks gray?” I gave her my honest answer: “Because that’s what they are.”

After a few similar episodes my mother took me to the eye doctor to get checked. Indeed, I was color blind. Technically, I’m red-green color blind which is the most common form. But I’m more than capable of screwing up just about all colors. Blue can look purple, gray, green, pink, or surprisingly, blue. Red can appear as brown, orange, or green. There is no difference between neo green and yellow. The list goes on and on. There’s no cure or glasses that can solve my dilemma although occasionally I read an article saying glasses to correct color blindness are being tested. I’m sure they’ll be perfected just as my cold body is being laid in the gray ground and covered with orange turf.

When I was in college I had a summer job and a complete physical including an eye exam were part of the hiring prerequisites. I breezed through the physical and most of the eye exam until it came to the color blindness test. I could tell the nurse who was administering the test was perplexed. When concluded, she said to me, “You are by far the most color blind person I’ve ever seen!” The only response I could muster was, “Thank you! I really appreciate it! And please tell me, where did you get the green shoes?”

I don’t drive anymore but when I did, people who knew I was color blind would constantly ask me what colors the traffic signals were. I’d explain that it was easy. Orange meant stop, green meant either stop or hurry up depending on where you were, and white meant go. Not a problem! For some reason though, after I told this to someone and they found themselves in the passenger seat of my car, they’d constantly be yelling “The light’s red!” or “STOP!” If they were especially nervous I’d regale them with the orange golf ball story just to increase their panic level a bit.

You may recall that in my introduction I mentioned that I work as a web designer. Now this is an occupation where color plays a critical role. When I begin a new site I always ask my client if they have a preferred color scheme. If so, I have a starting point, if not, there are plenty of online color and color scheme websites where I laboriously evaluate the color schemes, compare them, and then ask my wife to pick one. Where I run into trouble is when the client says, “can you make that red in the sidebar a bit more like fuchsia?” You might as well be speaking Swahili. I can’t tell fuchsia from firebrick, indigo from ivory, or chartreuse from coral. It is at this point that I refer the client to an online color chart and ask them to pick a color they like.

So if you find yourself walking down the street and see a guy wearing brown pants, a black belt, and a green shirt, please stop and say hello to me!