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What colour is this?
“Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Survive without ever reaching out.” —Ideal of the Medieval order of Carthusian monks (at least according to the Chartreuse website)
Lying in bed this morning, I saw through half-opened eyes a band of light slip in through the curtain’s edge, and for a moment light up one of the leaves of the leafy plant in the window and make it burn greengold. I love a colour between colours. And there is something about the radiant energy of greenish yellow or yellowish green that particularly calls to me. And of course once you start thinking about it, it seems to be everywhere.
Victoria Mboko just became Canada’s biggest tennis star going from a ranking of 333 to 24th in the world in under a year, but the other day it was I Leylah Fernandez was watching. She is the 5’5” lefty Canadian who surprised the odds-makers this summer by winning the 2025 Washington DC tennis tournament. American commentators talk about how she is small and scrappy and from Montreal, and that she really goes for everything. She was briefly famous in Canada, at least in 2021, when a day after her 19th birthday she was runner up in the US Open winning against 3 of the top 5 players in the world and finally losing to Emma Raducanu, another new teenaged star from the UK. I have noticed that the American commentators are way more likely to comment on the mistakes that top five players are making when they play against her rather than considering Fernandez as the cause of an upset. And I notice that the big servers and tall, heavy-hitting, top players that she plays seem, with the commentators, to be surprised to be having a bad day against her. She is small, does not hit particularly hard or with a crazy amount of spin or at extreme angles. She doesn’t seem to have a signature move. If I had to sum up her game, I might say that she is smart and fearless. She hits the ball early and with a kind of lightning wit that allows her to change direction and pace instantly, even returning the fastest serves. She is sometimes called fierce, but I have seen her pull out a moon ball slow and wobbly that almost seems like a mistake but then that lands in some unexpected area of the court and wins her the point on the strength of its unexpectedness alone. She is quick and versatile, but that can’t quite explain how she beats the best in the world. If she has a secret, I think it’s that she has no style of play. She is just playing. And I love a success that ducks out of definitions.
Of course I love a colour that has this quality too. A colour that wants to be explained but keeps slipping out of the confines of its definition. And for this kind of colour we don’t even need to leave the world of tennis.
Roger Federer says that tennis balls are yellow. The International Tennis Federation say that they must be yellow. The particular colour of yellow used, though, is called optic yellow, known to Pantone as electric lime. Which sounds green. A 2018 Twitter poll quoted in the Atlantic noted that, “of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with ‘other.’ ” I have been asking people what colour a tennis ball is. I have been asking myself. I think I think it’s green but just because even a little bit of a darker colour in a lighter colour always strikes me a variety of the darker colour. Like white with any black in it at all is grey, any red in it is pink. The colour nerd or bartender’s answer might be that a tennis ball is chartreuse. Chartreuse, the colour, is named after the drink with 130 secret alpine ingredients that was made by the monks that still live in the pre-Alps. Scientifically, chartreuse is a wavelength of light that sits at 547.5 nanometers squarely between yellow and green. Weirdly, the medicinal liqueur has a green version and a yellow version kind of complicating matters further.
Did you, when you were little, call out, cry out, when you had a nightmare? I used to often wake up at night from a nightmare and almost automatically let out a long —Paaaapaaa— long enough that it would reach upstairs and when he answered, and he always answered, I would say as he was trundling downstairs: Papaaaaa?, a pause, and then, I had a bad dream, and he would meet me in the hall buck-naked and I would be wearing my old purple and navy blue striped flannel pyjama bottoms, and he’d always say, Let’s go for a pee. The two of us would go for a pee and he would ask if I felt better. He didn’t ask me about the dream, just peeing together not talking, and then he’d ask if I felt better and of course I always did. The scary feeling I had woken up to, and that felt so big and so everything, was now completely, miraculously gone.
It’s hard to separate this memory from the later ones. There would be years after that that my Papa would scare me.
Years where he was not fixing or comforting, but because being the nightmare, he couldn’t have woken me up or calmed me down, hardly could he wake himself up. Drunk. Scrawling, middle-of-the-night gibberish on wall by the phone. Stumbling downstairs. Soul askew. Undiagnosed manic depression. Brain scrambled by carbon monoxide tubed in through the window of the family truck. The police. And then the ambulance. And then the psych ward. Cheap bread and peanut-butter and Clark’s Irish beer stew slopped out of the can from the food bank. We would make this food ourselves. Four kids. When he got out of the hospital, Papa was not Papa. He trailed the sick smell of Cinzano. Trailed by the sounds of clinking bottles and crinkling big bags of potato chips. I guess he thought he was hiding all this, along with his demons, under the dirty orange winter jacket. The garbage and crumbs and fermenting dregs stuffed behind his bed. Barfing. Slurring. Getting fat. Lying. Becoming monster. Worse than my dreams. But also inside himself was inside a storm. He watched his wife die. Then his new wife left him. Then he lost his church and his pension and most of his brain. He did not understand that he was a manic depressive. He did not know a way to fight the chemical imbalance like a wild animal in his head that made him violent and that made his own father disappear for weeks and months around holidays. He did not know how to stay in the world with the heart that he had.
But what I want to tell you was before all that. I want to say I had a father. I have a father. I don’t have mixed feelings about my father. Instead I have unmixable feelings about him. Maybe you have someone like that that you love. That the pieces inside you won’t ever quite fit together in your stories of the way you love them.
Another time. The whole family piled into a tiny cranberry-coloured European station wagon. We are going over the Alps. We found the old route. My sister, the youngest, packed into the space between the back window and backseats. I wake up in the front seat and I have to pee and we have been driving all night Papa didn’t want, of course, to the take the new road tunnelled through the rock, but the old roads, switchback, tiny and taking longer to get to where we were going. Italy? It must have been. We got lost a few times and so we had to drive all night. Not that my Papa minded getting lost or taking the slow route or being late or driving all night. He was a bit wild then. A new wife. Was she his wife? They got married on a hill in upstate where I once dug up a stump with the other kids while the grownups did “The Mat Trip” in a room covered in blue velcro gym mats and a big sign that said Trust The System. In Europe they would pass the bottle of fine cheap red wine between them in the front seat, drivers yelling as they circled L’arc de Triumph trying to get out of town. The gendarmes kicked us out of fancy park. We didn’t understand that the little fences weren’t just for the small dogs and that you couldn’t tuck into a baguette and cheese on just any square of green grass. Or probably we kids did understand noticing the looks we were getting before the grownups did. That kind of wildness. We loved this part of the wildness.
I was in the front seat with Papa because the new girlfriend/wife was on Lake Geneva visiting her rich grandfather. Her grandfather, Kazimir, had made a fortune in WWII as a textile manufacturer and had gold initials on all his fine leather baggage and lived on his own floor of a hotel full of antiques overlooking the lake. You could order anything you liked from the waiters who wore all white and bowties, and we when we asked for ice cream they served it as a single scoop, perfect off-white globe centered in a high-stemmed shining silver dessert cup with silky dark chocolate. They would ask if you wanted nuts, and if you said yes, they would sprinkle fine-ground toasted hazelnuts overtop of the cooling melted chocolate with a silver spoon carried in the pocket of a silky waiter’s vest.
I’m in the passenger seat everyone sleeping folded amongst the luggage. I roll open the fogged window, lean out frosting’d bright green vineyards up the mountains and the cuttingly fresh air there on the high road over the Alps. My Papa. Roll out swim skinned, green edgeless night. Day simmering. Pythagoreanly fresh through the snow peaks, everyone else still asleep in the luggage. He was, by this time, manic, married on a hill in upstate New York on a whim to a woman with another family, a mathematician named Charlie Small was the dad, also depressive. Going around L’Arc de Triumph with a bottle of good wine on Papa’s lap, his white flares, her hair in tiny braids, freckles, also wild with this.
But out there, up there in the dream of the Alps, its crystalline breath seems almost to glitter out of the fog as soft as a dream, old stone all at the windy road’s gravelly shoulder.
Rolling to a stop. I woke fogged up. Even the glass fogged up, but no, he said, we were up so high this was cloud fog. We were inside a cloud. Peeing together. Shale slate grey green sounds underfoot, road grey, we too almost black jewelled, grass beside the gravel by road’s edge. Green grass, a few weeds, and then that old rock wall, an old tough simple farmer blocks chalky grey beyond it, steep rising mountain, the cloud bristling now with not quite dawn, but beginning a lightening, a silver fizz to the air. It’s silent. Me and Papa peeing. Our breath little clouds too. We are finished peeing when Papa, taller than me, sees it first.
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