I don't see stuff

A couple days ago, one of my colleagues pointed at the #21 on my classroom door and said, “Are you going to remove that number at some point?”

For the 18 years that I’ve been in my classroom, the room number has never been #21. This is a number from a bygone day.

But here’s the strange thing (but also not-so-strange):

I’d never noticed the number on my door. In the almost two decades that I have spent in my classroom, I had never taken notice of that number.

Sounds crazy, I know. Maybe even impossible. But I’m also the person who once argued with his wife over the color of our house on the way home from the store, insisting that our house - one that we had been living in for years - was yellow. Unquestionably yellow.

She claimed that it was tan. Light brown, maybe. But nothing even approaching yellow.

As we turned onto our street and our house came into view, I realized that our house is not yellow.

Not even close.

So failing to notice a number on a door for almost two decades sounds ridiculous and yet is also not surprising. Elysha is fond of saying that if we lined up ten brunettes of approximately her height in a line, I could not pick her out from the group.

This is not true, of course, but there is truth in what she says.

What does this say about me?

I’m not sure, but it’s not great.