The Show's beginning

When it comes to the subtle start of the autumn color display, I have a problem. I'm red-green colorblind. This is something of a misnomer, of course, because I can actually see fairly pure tones of both red and green; I just don't see them the way the vast majority of humans do. The handicap rears its head when those two primary colors are blended in various combinations, such as purple, a color I've probably never seen right in my life. A close friend, an artist, once thought that she could cure me of color-blindness by talking very slowly. Her theory, I would learn, was that I had just never learned my colors. Alas, her approach didn't work. You can't teach a non-functioning cone cell new tricks, so after some frustrating attempts at tutelage, she gave up. Thank God for digital technology, which allows me to use numbers as proxies for colors. By examining a photograph, I can "see" colors that just aren't there to my eyes. The colors you see. The colors that tell me the fall show is about to begin.