Sheesh!

I should really be in the classroom beginning to work on the goldenrod page of the report cards for my students.  Unless my principal is reading this, then I should be putting the finishing touches on my report cards.  There are two problems...it is far too early in the morning, and what the heck is goldenrod?

I'm only partially kidding.  I do know that goldenrod is a yellowish page and it is different from the the other two colors of paper that are sitting there waiting for me to print out copies for the parents.  But color is what I wanted to talk about today.

Before I begin let me just say, Mom, I warned you.

Colors and I have not been the best of friends over the years.  At first I didn't know what to think.  

As a kid I got a Lite Brite for Christmas.  Not a spectacular thing.  Pretty generic.  Lots of kids had them.

 

It came with seven bags of pegs like these.

See all those happy kids playing with their new toy?  That was me.  (the one on the left)  The way it worked was there were these black construction paper pages that had letters printed on them in a pattern.  That page lay between two sheets of plastic that had holes in them that allowed you to see the letters.  The letters stood for colors the primary colors.  R = red, O = orange, T = taupe, A = auquamarine, P = periwinkle...you get the idea.  Behind this plastic honeycomb and black paper was an incandescent light bulb...back before they were declared illegal and people who owned them were carted off to re-education camps.  Spoiler alert:  The Easy Bake Oven used a huge light bulb also, to cook its little cakes and such.  When using this year's model, and its stupid curly cue light, you have to plan on about a three week bake time..but I digress.

  The object of the Lite Brite was to take these little pointy plastic pegs and poke them through the paper to be held by the plastic holes.  When you were done you could plug it in and voila!  The light would show through the plastic and your picture glowed. It was kind of cool.

I remember distinctly the first picture I made. 

 

Look at it!  A thing of beauty!  Totally symmetrical.  It used all of the colors.  It was great.  I know my parents were impressed.  Then it came time to try the next picture.  They got me one of our fanciest containers to hold all the little pegs...a cool whip container...and away went the picture.  I set up the next picture, the slightly less aesthetically pleasing sailboat, and began to work.  When immediately I looked into this white plastic tub and thought, "What manner of hell is this!?" 

You see, when I made the first picture I took the pegs right from the little plastic bags...the LABELED plastic bags.  When I needed an orange I grabbed for the bag that said orange.  When I needed red, I grabbed for the bag that said red.  When I needed taupe, I grabbed...you get the idea.  When it came time to take it apart I just grabbed all of the pegs and tossed them into the container.  When I looked at the new picture and went to grab a peg, there were no more labels.  The tub of pegs looked like a stew of similarly colored plastic.  When I asked my parents what the heck was going on, they couldn't understand why I didn't get it.  It took the help of my brother and sister to get through subsequent pictures and Lite Brite was relegated to the shelf of, yeah, if you want to play with it, go ahead.  But I never chose that toy for myself again.

That was the first time I, looking back, became aware that I was colorblind.  I didn't know there was such a thing when I was a kid.  I just thought I was stupid or something because everyone else could just grab the right pegs on the first try, and I had to hold it up to the light, compare it to another, and then ask for help.  

It wasn't until I got glasses, in junior high school, that I discovered that I was colorblind in addition to being blind as a bat!  The doc, Ronald H. Sand in the mall near our house, showed me a page of dots in a book and said, "Trace the triangle."  He said it in a , "Oh yeah, I almost forgot to ask you this..." sort of way.  I looked at the page, back at the doc, then back at the page.  I tentatively reached out and picked three of the dots to make a triangle.  Any three points, not in a line, make a triangle ya know.  

(This is a picture I Googled and it's as distinctive as a patio paver to me.  I hope it doesn't say a bad word.)

It was only then that he got interested.  He flipped the book back to the beginning and showed me the page where the dots were gray and black...I saw a figure 8.  "I said, there wasn't anything like that on the first page though."  We went through the whole book and he determined that I was red green colorblind.  Nothing I could do about it.  My eyes were just missing something.  It wasn't til high school biology that I discovered that I was one of the ten percent of people who were colorblind...and that it was my mom's fault!

OK, not really.  It's not anything that you do to become colorblind but, genetically speaking, the gene that flips the switch for your eyes to not work right is carried by the mother.  I had a lot of fun with that bit of info growing up.  It's not everybody that gets to tease their mother on a genetic level!  I used to point at her and very dramatically yell, "YOU DID THIS TO ME!!"  Don't worry about my mom though...She gave as good as she got in the teasing arena.  There was the time that I was frantically opening and shutting cabinet doors looking for the "green pitcher!"  "Mom!  Where is the green pitcher?"  "We don't have a green pitcher." open shut "Yes we do!" open shut "No.  We don't."  open shut  "Oh my goodness!  The green pitcher we use for orange juice!"  OPEN SHUT!  Mom walked calmly over to the one cabinet I hadn't yet assaulted, reached in, and gently pulled out what I was looking for.  "Do you mean the brown pitcher?"  Yeah, it took me a while to get over that one.

Well that brings me to a month ago.  We were in the audience at a play that Jacob was in.  I was sitting next to my mom and Kristiana and Sylvia hadn't come to their seats yet.  They were busy putting make-up on all of the actors.  We had arrived ridiculously early and to pass the time I was pointing out people walking in and who they were to us.  It is a smallish school so I knew a fair number of people. "That is the lead actor's mom."  "That is Kristiana's friend from choir."  "They lived down the street from us."  That kind of thing.  Then a couple walked in that I felt additionally compelled to mention...this was the mom and dad of the other Kristiana at school.  (They spell it with a 'Ch' but we don't that against them)  As you can imagine, we don't encounter too many Kristiana's in our day to day lives.  I said, "Mom, that is the dad of the other Kristiana!" and scanning a little further along the audience..."And that is her mom!" 

As I look back at this interaction I replayed the scene in my head.  Christiana's mom was alone.  She was walking.  She was standing.  She was smiling.  She was blond.  She was on the steps.  She was holding a purse.  She was not sitting down.  She was turning around and looking for her seat.  Any of these would have been wonderful descriptors!  She could have even said, "The one in front of that man?"  Nope, my mom, comes up with, "The one wearing green?"  Picture me...eyebrow raised, mouth flat, shoulders up, hands out palms up like I was checking to see if it was raining in the little theater..."Really mom?  The one in green?  Are you sure you don't mean the one in gray?"  She started laughing and all I could say was, "You're going in the blog."