But, he is slightly colorblind. The first time I noticed was shortly after our wedding. We were on a trip to see another wedding, and one of us mentioned something about a backpack worn by a person ahead of us in line. I called it dark green. He said it was black. I clarified that I meant that dark green one. "It's black," he told me.
"I mean that really, really dark green one." Then, I blurted out, "You really can't see that that's green!?"
The look on his face told me I'd pushed a sensitive subject too far. I soon learned that he wasn't colorblind.
But his mother was. He told me a story about how she had worn a certain outfit for years. She said it was blue, but it was actually periwinkle. So, he really wondered about her ability to see color.
Then came the day when I discovered that Paul couldn't tell the difference between my lavender scrubbie and his light blue scrubbie hanging in the shower. "Yours is on the left," I made sure he knew.
Other blue/lavender situations arose. Sometimes, he would take the objects in question over to look at them closely in better light. Sometimes, he would say, "Okay, I can see now that that's a little bit blue." Often, though, we just had to agree to disagree. He was so confident in his ability to see color well that he sometimes made me wonder about mine.
But, as a firstborn and an only son, he came by some measure of arrogance naturally.
After all, I couldn't see that band of green above the horizon that he often talked about. Nor could I see green in the gray and pink tiles in our bathroom. He once bought a gray shirt on sale, thinking it was green, and was disappointed when I told him it was gray. Later on, he would mystify the children by sending them around and around the house, looking for the "green recycling bin."
"What are you doing?" I would finally ask.
"Dad said to put this in the green bin."
I pointed to the gray one, and they would look at me, puzzled. "Don't worry about it," I'd say.
The clincher was when he took the main bathroom toilet outside in the sunlight to prove to the children that it was pink.
It wasn't, but we're still fighting about that one. We did used to have a pink toilet in that bathroom that matched the pink tub and pink sink. Hey, this house was built in the sixties--what can I say? But we replaced the toilet years ago. He doesn't remember that. Or, sometimes, he remembers that we replaced it with another pink toilet.
There was one time, when colorblindness charts were present at a doctor's office, when his confidence cracked a bit and he admitted he couldn't see all of the numbers in the bubbles.
But, overall, he's continued to insist that he can see colors correctly, and it was years before I could convince him to stop wearing a red and green floral tie with a blue and yellow striped shirt. "The tans match," he'd say.
Sometimes, he will ask me for help in choosing a tie. We usually get through this by my suggesting good, better, best. Or telling him, "There's nothing in that tie that matches the blue of your shirt." Sometimes he takes my advice, and sometimes he doesn't. The subject has been pretty much closed--from both sides--for some time.
So, last weekend, I was slightly amazed when he wanted to take a colorblindness test he'd seen on Facebook. Honestly, I just stayed out of it. The task was to line up four rows of colors as they went through very slight variations from red to green, from green to blue, from blue to lavender, and from lavender to green. I looked at those rows and thought, "Good luck."
He reported his score, in the low 100's, a few minutes later. Zero was perfect, he explained, and the worst score was something in the mid-1500's. "So, a slight problem," I assessed.
"I can't wait for you take this test!" he exclaimed, to my surprise. "And the kids!"
"You think the kids have a problem with colorblindness?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I'm just curious to see how they do."
He asked me again the next morning, so I took the test. I knew in the back of my mind that if I didn't get a zero, my credibility would be on the line in all future tie conversations. Even if I got a two, I thought, when I told him a tie didn't have purple, he would be thinking, "But maybe it's that two percent she can't see!"
So, after I got my rows lined up, I went over the test again. Was this red rosier than the one next to it? Was this greener than that one? All the way through. After I pushed the SUBMIT button, I called out to Paul. "Do you want to come and see my score?" I thought it would be very prudent of me to be sure he saw it himself, with his own perfect eyes.
"What'd you get--a two?" he scoffed.
He stood over me, looking at the screen where my score, zero, stood. I didn't say a word.
But, he did, throughout the day. "It's a mourning process," he said. I looked at him incredulously. I wonder what it would be like to go through life honestly, truly believing you had no natural flaws. Mere mortals like myself will never know.
"Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses," I said. I really couldn't see why that particular test was such a revelation to him. But, apparently, it was. "It's not like it's a character flaw," I pointed out. "It's not something you can help. You just don't have as many cones in your eyes as you should. What's to be ashamed of? It's not a sin."
So, he posted his score with the words, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born colorblind?" That was cute, and I took heart.
At bedtime, he was saying, "I know I can see colors. See? That's a blue, and. . ."
"Paul," I said, gently. "Your diminishment is less than ten percent on that scale."
Then, he took heart. "Thanks for putting it that way," he said, and we smiled at each other.
He knows very well I can't sing.
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