Are humans still discovering new diseases, inflictions and ailments? Because I’m sure I have one that I’ve never heard described anywhere else, and I’m wondering if I’m the only person in the world to have it.
It’s a bit of a mixture of lazy eye and colour blindness. I’m going to call it “lazy blindness.”
I’ve had an inkling of this for a while, but it was diagnosed for me over the weekend by my wife, who is the most accomplished person in the world at helping me discover areas for self-improvement.
I coached a soccer game in Richmond on Saturday – a tidy little 5-2 victory for North Van, not that that is important right now – and after the game my wife noticed a water bottle left on our team bench and wondered if it belonged to anyone on our squad.
“Which water bottle?” I asked. “The white one?”
To which she responded that there were not, in fact, any white water bottles on the bench, even though we were both now staring at the one and only water bottle left on the bench, which clearly looked white to me.
“What colour is that water bottle?” I asked.
I wasn’t prepared for the answer that came next.
“Pebble grey,” she said.
Now reader, this was the culmination of a long history of me describing the world in a very limited number of colours. In describing objects, my vocabulary doesn’t expand much past something like nine hues.
There is no burgundy, violet, maroon or plum in my world. There is just purple. There is no turquoise or teal or aqua. There is just blue, or maybe green, depending on the light.
There is no cream, or eggshell, or alabaster or pearl. There is only white, and there sure as heck isn’t any pebble grey.
At the soccer field, my wife and I locked eyes for what felt like 20 seconds. Or maybe it was 40 seconds, or maybe it was a week. Anyway, I blinked first.
“Oh right,” I said. “That water bottle right there, the one that is … pebble grey.”
We laughed and laughed, and on the drive home my wife casually dug deep into my very essence.
“Do you not see subtle differences in colour, like the car in front of us that is silver and the one behind us that is grey?” she asked. “Or can you see those differences but you simply cannot be bothered to make the distinction?”
Oh dang. There’s the diagnosis. I’m lazy blind.
I have an awful feeling that this isn’t limited to colours either. It seems I have literal blind spots for certain types of stains and dirt as well, most notably the ones I leave behind that my wife has to clean up.
The biggest battleground is the bathroom sink after I shave. I know my sins, and so I’ll double, triple, quadruple clean up after myself trying to get all those beard bits wiped up. When I’m done the sink will be spotless – at least to my eyes – so clean that I would eat an ice cream sundae off of there.
And then my wife will arrive.
“Hey babe, can you remember to clean the sink after you shave?” she’ll call out, breezily ripping my heart out.
Lazy blindness? Actual blindness? Am I the only one who lives this life?
After the “pebble grey” incident, I recalled that “lazy blindness,” or whatever you want to call it, is part of the origin story of our marriage. Before our wedding, my wife’s family kindly gifted us a dining set with four chairs. When it arrived, however, it had mismatched seat cushions – two were blue and two were black. At least, to my eye they looked black, but the store kept insisting on calling them something else.
When we finally got the full matching set, we had my brother over for dinner. “Nice chairs,” he said. “Love the black.”
“Thanks, although they’re not black,” I said. “They’re onyx.”
He told that story at our wedding. “The chairs are onyx,” he recited with glee. “My brother actually said that. That’s when I knew it was true love.”
Maybe it was a good omen – we’re still married, after all.
“Love is blind,” they say. Maybe that’s true, or maybe love sees what it wants to see.
We still have those onyx chairs, although, like us, they’re a little more rumpled than they were on our wedding day.
Maybe someday we’ll go for an upgrade. I wonder if they make them in pebble grey.
Andy Prest is the editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly.
