Color Blind

My Dad does not have good eyesight. A few years back we were in Costa Rica on vacation when he backed up into a coke truck.

“Where’d that come from?” he said.

“They’re easy to miss,” my stepbrother quipped.

At the time my Dad was weeks shy from getting laser surgery on his left eye. It is an eye that has been plagued by both glaucoma and cataracts.

Even prior to these ailments my Dad’s eyesight was far from perfect. He’s color blind. A childhood memory is my Dad coming downstairs first thing in the morning holding up ties and shirts and asking us if they matched.

“No,” we would all say.

The clash of colors would be immediately clear to my visual mother. She would send him back upstairs while yelling out what he should wear instead. Or she would just put down whatever she was doing at the moment to go upstairs and lay his clothes out herself.

The clash of colors would be evident to me, now a bit of a fashion buff but in those days most definitely not. It would even strike my brother, then not a design-conscious person, now not a design-conscious person, and, my guess is, when hell freezes over, still not one.

But my Dad never saw it.

Thus it was with a touch of joy that I watched my Dad emerge from his room this morning in our beach house in North Carolina wearing a pink and purple tie-dye shirt with ‘Wesleyan’ printed on front (my brother’s alma mater) along with orange and brown flowered surf shorts.

My stepmother laughed out loud. My brother and I looked at each other, smiled, and said nothing.

The more things change the more they stay the same.