As anyone who has ever seen the clothes I wear knows, I am “color-challenged.” I confess to having difficulty distinguishing between blues and blacks, greens and browns, and nearly everything in between.
So when somebody says, “Oh, look at those teal curtains,” or “The fuchsia really stands out in that painting,” I fully admit I don’t know what they are talking about.
And what is this stuff about black being the absence of color?
Or was that white?
Whatever…
Look, there are less than 10 colors that I, along with much of the male population, know of.
Red, yellow, gold, green, brown, blue, orange, black and white. There are only shades of these. At least that’s what testosterone tells me.
Comprehende?
Burgundy is wine…
Indian Paint Brush is a flower…
Mint is either a plant, or an after dinner candy to take the edge off my halitosis…
So when my wife and I purchased some new furniture last week, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Don’t get me wrong… I liked our old furniture. But a year and a half ago, we gave it to our daughter and son in law, and have been sitting on the floor since.
The new couch and coffee tables are nice, to be sure, but they have also caused discord in my home.
It all started after I went on a tapestry buying binge. I like tapestry, and consider it art. But when my wife put the tapestry and furniture together, she had a “marvelous idea.”
Simply marvelous…at least in her mind. She pointed to an area between some flowers on the cloth, and said, that is the color I want to do the rest of the house in.
Mauve.
What is a mauve, and how do you kill it?
Well, according to my wife, mauve is that color between the brown flower and the maroon pedal on the tapestry.
Maroon, brown…what’s the difference?
We purchased our furniture from a local business. The fellow who runs the place is my kind of guy. A man’s man. Big, burly, and just slightly on the brutish side.
Just one problem. He and my wife can carry on an hour long conversation about the color mauve.
What color? Where?
In my frustration, I started to tell a friend about the predicament I was in. What on earth is mauve?
She walked over to a table covering in my home office and pointed to an area between the brown flower and the maroon pedal,
“That’s mauve,” she said, straight-faced.
How humiliating.