I was sitting in the grade 5 class at Greenslopes State School listening to the teacher, when a nurse came into the room and interrupted the lesson. After speaking to the teacher briefly, I was the only one singled out to go with her to a lower class room. Now this was a bit scary nurse, sick, problem me? I followed her down the stairs and she said something about Tom. Now I was getting worried. What had happened to my little brother that required such special attention? As I came through the downstairs door I saw Tom. He was just sitting there, looking around with legs crossed at the ankles which were swinging back and forth between the chair legs. He seemed to me to be happier about missing out on school than being concerned about having any major sickness. I was ushered into the temporary medical clinic and was told the tragic news that Tom was colour blind. BLIND OH NO!!!! What can’t he see? No just colours. What he sees in black and white? No just some colours. They then began to show me a series of sixties type psychedelic pages and asked me to tell them the number that I could see. To be honest, at first I could not see any numbers. You see, everything that had been shown to me at school up until that point had been very clear. No one had ever tried to hide the number or letter they were trying to teach me behind a page full of multi colored dots. What was this some form of adult trickery? The number was there but you had to squint pretty hard to make it out. Still, I must have given all the correct answers because they just sent me back to the class after explaining to me that Tom had problems distinguishing between green and brown. He saw a lot of brown shades as green which is why we always got a good laugh out of him pointing at brown topped EJ Holdens and saying there goes our car (which actually had a green roof). But you know, as I get older I somehow think it would be advantage in seeing browns as green. What a growing, lush, fresh, clean, bright world Tom must see everyday compared to the brown, burnt, rusty, dirty reality that I see. When Louie Armstrong sings it’s a wonderful world I recon he is seeing lots of greens, not browns just like our Tom.
