Living with the colorblind requires some adjustments

My husband is red/green colorblind. Intellectually I know this, but that genetic tic crops up in the most surprising ways.

Jeff and I were sitting in the living room last week, happily cheering on our favorites at the Olympics, taking in all the glory of sport from the comfort of our respective recliner and couch.

A commercial came on featuring the release of the movie Wicked which is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. In one clip, Glinda, the good witch, said to Elphaba, the bad witch, “You’re green.”

Elphaba answered, “I am.”

Jeff turned to me and asked, “She’s green?”

“Yes, she’s green,” I said.

He looked again at the screen, then at me. “Is the witch green in the Judy Garland movie?”

 “What color did you think she was?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe she was just tan.”

Now, we have seen The Wizard of Oz a bazillion times. I never once thought Jeff did not see the Wicked Witch as green. It was simply not a question in my mind.

It’s not that I am unaware of his inability to define colors correctly. It was one of the first things I knew about him.

We worked together at Michigan State University at Kellogg Center as servers for banquets when we were both college students. Part of our job involved prepping the tables for each event. There were square tablecloths for the round tables and rectangular cloths for the rectangular tables. When folded, you couldn’t tell the square cloths from the rectangular ones. To help sort out the issue, the square ones had a red thread stitched into one edge, and the rectangular ones had a green thread. (Or vice versa. It’s hard to remember after all these years.)

One afternoon, Jeff waved me over to the stack of tablecloths. He held the edge of one to the edge of the other.

“Can you help me?” he asked. “I’m colorblind. Which one is green?”

It may have been just a line, but I went for it. Humble beginnings, but our relationships moved fast from that point.

On our second date, he approached an intersection while driving in the back roads near MSU. The light was blinking yellow, but Jeff came to a full stop.

When I ceased screaming in panic, I said, “What the &*@* you doing? The light was yellow!”

“I can’t be sure it’s not red, so I stop at all of them,” he explained. “I’d rather be rear-ended than T-boned.”

Stop signs are another hazard. The red signs blend into the background. They simply do not stand out like they do for the color-abled.

To be safe, I now point out the color of the country road lights whenever I am riding shotgun and keep an eye peeled for those pesky “hidden” stop signs.

Jeff is not allowed to choose paint colors, btw. (Or buy a car by himself.) One day shortly after we bought our house, he came home from work to find me merrily painting our bedroom and said, “What a pretty shade of blue!”

So help me God, I looked at those lavender walls, and said. “It is a pretty color, isn’t it?”

Not a lie, exactly. I was just agreeing with him.

For years, we were both happy. He had a manly blue bedroom, and I had a charming lavender bedroom.

Several years later, one of the boys (who shall remain nameless) blurted out the truth. Talk about getting a side-eye!

The room has since been repainted with a soft, soothing shade of blue.

When his coworkers learned about his quirk, they challenged him to take an online test. He went through all the photos on screen, unable to decipher more than a couple of the numbers hidden in the colored circles.

At the end of the test, the online survey said, “People with your type of colorblindness often think peanut butter is green.”

Jeff was flummoxed. “You mean it’s NOT green?”

His coworkers were dumbfounded. It may have been their first experience trying to cope with the peculiarities of colorblindness.

I’ve tried to envision how Jeff sees the world. The best I can come up with is that he has a much broader palette of brown and a much more limited one of green and red than I do. Purple does not exist at all. Pink and baby blue are interchangeable.

I have learned to define items by their shape, size, and location. Asking Jeff to bring me a green sweater is an exercise in futility for both of us.

Sometimes it’s funny, like with the Wicked Witch, other times not so much. Jeff wanted to be an astronaut, but no one wants to fly with a man who can’t tell the red button from the green button. He manages his disappointment by watching Apollo 13 at least once a year and having the NASA channel on one of his many monitors in his man cave.

From time to time, we will add another occupation to his “Lists of Jobs Jeff Can’t Have.”

Bomb defuser is probably Numero Uno on the list. Can you imagine?

“Cut the red wire, Jeff!”

BOOM!

Police officer is another.

“One Adam-Twelve. Suspect is driving a green sedan, has red hair and is wearing a purple coat.”

Yep, that guy is going to fly right past Officer Jeff.

This week we added kayak racer, based on our observations during the Olympics. He can tell the red from the green gates but only after a careful study, which you can’t do in the heat of battle.

If I am ever elected to public office, I promise to propose legislation to change traffic lights. Red lights will be in the shape of an X, green lights will be in the form of an arrow, and yellow lights can remain as circles.

Also, stop signs would need to be reflective yellow or have a checkered design or flash wildly. Perhaps all three.

That way I can relax when driving with Jeff.

I don’t know what to do about how to tell green witches from the non-green variety.