Well as you all know this is an odd title and i shall explain it to y'all and describe myself a lil bit.
Well im a mountainboy who grew up in the cascade mountains of Washington state, ive Been a lifeguard,prep cook as a kid/young man, Then a spotter in the 82nd airborne For the us army, and a volunteer firefighter as a young man untill Injuries prevented me from continuing with those occupations,
I met me a wonderfull texas girl when i was thirty and married her and she is my best friend. Who would a thunk it washington state hillbilly & a west texas redneck get together!. We now live in the back woods of western wisconsin in a modern mayberry and love it.
Now as An explination for the title. Well I was born with an extremly rare form of colorblindness, as you may know most colorblindness is typical red/green confusion and some other colors are dificult. But what i have used to be called monochromatic colorblindess but had its name changed so many times in the last 30 years that i cant keep track of the current medical name for it. What i have prevents me from seeing most all the colors in the spectrum but its not truly black & white, because i can see a very basic blue, & yellow, brown & grey as well but only in a well lited area under special circumstances. and to be honest i only know somewhat what these colors are because i perceive differences and other people have put a name to them.
Most people with this condition also are nearly blind as well, but i am not, my regular vision is correctable with strong glasses, and my Opthamologist has described it as an atypical version of a new mumbojumbo of words that i couldnt repeat (partially because i couldnt hear him clearly as im partially deaf now and am waiting on the hearing aid.
so in the future when i can hear again ill update this :)
I call it adventures of monocromatic pat because sometimes life is an adventure with my condition.
For example camoflauge doesnt work for me i can see people/objects that are camoflauged as bright as day (wich came quite handy when i was a spotter) as well as in childhood find the item lost in the picture games. Or that i cant see rainbows (literally) but one evening after a rainstorm i saw a yellow arch in the sky (one of the few colors i can see sometimes) and pointed it out to my wife and she said it was a particularly strong rainbow, even though i couldnt see the rest of it i saw my first rainbow! but then none since.
Speaking with other people t notice a different kind of beauty, My wife loves the look of flowers and the spring/fall colors, Me i love the look of snow,& lightning storms, much of her enjoyment of things are color based, for me i base my guage of beautifull by design or effect of the object/creature itself, i love mountains for thier size & shape not colors, I love waterfalls because of the way they flow not because of the light refracted in its showing many colors, I like the ocean because its vast and has trillions of lifeforms in it interacting with each other at once! others find its beauty in its colors and contrast with the sky.
People all my life ask me what specific colors look like to me because they just cant grasp that i dont know what they are. sometimes im right, more often im wrong, ive learnrd to train my self to guess based on what other people have told me. grass is green, sky is blue, my car is dark red my house is green. but thats because people have told me and ive subconciously filed it away for future references. for example i can get lost looking for my buick thats dark red, because to me all shades of dark green to all browns and all reds look the same to me, so i cant find my car that way.
I know my house is green, only because my wife,neighbors & realtors have said so .. so me its grey, only a lighter grey than my lawn, and the grey of my carpet (my wife says its an off white)
All ranges of purples and blues and some browns and black get mixed up for me and usually just lumped into my generic dark color file and i guess. altho there is one particular blue that i can consistantly see if its not surrounded with similar colors.
Well now you know why it called the Adventures of monocrome Pat.
Its a bit long winded but the best way to describe my unique view of the World. sometime i regret not being able to see the world as my wife does or you do, but other days i can say to myself I get a view of the world that god gave a select few the privledge of seeing!. so every day is a new adventure for me!.
Goodbye and i shall see y'all again
