seeing red

Back in the 70’s, when I was in my 30’s, there were big ballrooms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that people flocked to on weekends. A couple of Saturdays a month, my husband and I would dress up and go out in his red Datsun pick-up and drive to some ballroom in the Dallas suburbs. On the way home we’d stop for breakfast at a diner/coffee shop which was variously called Shoneys or Jack Brown or Mickey Mantle, depending on who owned it at the time. One night we parked, had breakfast then came outside to find Joel’s pickup missing.

We looked and looked and couldn’t find it, so we called the cops. The patrolman led us around the outside of the restaurant to make sure it was really gone. He asked where we’d parked it. We were certain about that. “Right there.” Then I looked again. Right where we’d parked sat a gray Datsun pickup. Strangely, on the dashboard of that pickup were the same maps and ledgers and pens that Joel had on our dashboard. Joel’s key opened the door. The policeman explained that the restaurant’s outside lights turned our red pickup gray. We were lucky he didn’t arrest for drunkenness.

You may know that I have macular degeneration. One of the machines they routinely have me look into has a scene with green grass, a road, a white fence running along the road and at the far end, a little red house. That’s what I see with my left eye. I see the same thing with my right eye, except the house is gray.

By the way, I’ve been getting shots in my right eye every four to five weeks for about six months. At my last appointment, the little house looked red with both eyes! It’s really working!

All of which makes me wonder about my purple Mother’s Day purse. Do you suppose that I picked out a purple purse thinking it was gray, because the light was such that my eye couldn’t distinguish the color?