Colorblind when it matters

Right before COVID, around December 2019, my sons Zane and Aidan stopped cohabitating. That is, they stopped sharing the same room.

Teenage boys need their own space, and since Brian’s mother passed away, there just haven’t been that many people willing to spend the night in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior. Thus, we did not need the purple room to be the guest room, so instead it became Zane’s.

To mark the occasion, we repainted Aidan’s room. When he was young, his favorite color had been yellow, but by his teen years, he had migrated down the spectrum to green. While he stayed with the Sasbs, we painted his room a soft mint with kelly green trim. Aidan walked in, and, for one of the few times in his life, cried.

“What’s wrong?” we asked.

“I asked for green. This is white.”

Aidan, it turns out, is colorblind. I didn’t know there were different types of colorblindness. He doesn’t have a complete inability to differentiate colors, which is called monochromacy. His would best be called protanomaly, in that reds and greens look less distinct to him, but it doesn’t interfere with most normal activity.

I might have a touch of this myself. My husband Brian asks, “Are you really going to wear that tie with that shirt?” and I understand from the question that my one orange Hermès tie doesn’t really go with everything.

A father wants to protect his son, so since I discovered this, I came to resent things that were one color but were called by another color. Like Aquaman. I mean, Green Arrow wears green. Black Canary wears black. Why does Aquaman wear orange?

Or that bridge on the other side of town. Why do we call it the Golden Gate Bridge when it’s painted orange vermilion? Yes, yes, I know the official color is “international orange.” Irving Morrow, a consulting architect for the project, picked the hue so that it would be distinct from the cool colors of the sky and sea. But wouldn’t gold have worked just as well? Or why not just call it the Orange Gate Bridge? Did you know that it’s painted continuously, that there is a crew of some 30-odd painters whose job it is to keep repainting the bridge every week of the year because the fog is so salty?

Here’s a fun fact I would normally save for my annual trivia quiz: The reason that it’s called the Golden Gate Bridge is not because it’s orange, but rather because the 4-mile-long waterway it spans is called the Golden Gate Strait. It was named that by Capt. John C. Fremont, way back in 1846, because it reminded him of Chrysoceras, or the Golden Horn of Istanbul.

Twenty-two years ago, when we picked the color for what was then the stale-mustard-yellow bungalow, I was looking for the shade of the cape Adam West wore as TV’s Batman in the 1960s. A neighbor complained, “I’m going to buy you some fast-growing ivy.” But since we live in a neighborhood that has a cow on a roof and a stuffed aardvark on a lawn, a Batman-blue bungalow is not outre.

Didn’t know the actual name of the color until this week, thanks to Caltrans and its work painting the underpasses of the Central Freeway. First constructed in 1955, it had been the same ugly hospital green for at least 30 years. But someone in upper -painting management decided to coat it the same color as our bungalow, and that is Coronado blue. I like the new look of the underpass, although I’m not sure it was worth the $31 million to paint it that way.

Sometimes we don’t know the color of things. Sometimes on purpose. When Zane (who is African American) and Aidan (who is biracial) were very little, we went into a corner store near the purple park to get Yoohoos. Zane, always one for a good bargain, asked, “Daddy, can I have chips too?”

The guy behind the counter asked, “‘Daddy?’ Don’t you think he’d be happier being raised by someone the same color?”

Zane grabbed my hand. “Me. Daddy. We are the same color.” Aidan grabbed my other hand and nodded.

I grabbed their hands right back, “Come on, boys. We’ll get our Yoohoos somewhere else. Somewhere they have good chips.”

I like to think, almost two decades later, that even if Aidan can’t tell that his room is green, he’s right about color.