So after some minor corrective surgery on my 3 and a half year old cane this afternoon, (thank god my grandfather’s a mechanic right? I decide yep, time to get my ass in gear and make a new one appear. I was coming due for a new one any day now and I knew that, but one of the thingies between the joints of the cane decided falling off in the palm of my hand would be awesome. Grandfather replaced it, because he rules at fixing things on the fly.
So I’m digging around and I was gonna have Mom order a cane from Perkins or The Carroll Center just for the purposes of get one and get it here quick.
I use a particular cane tip that I prefer over anything else, and for the love of my sanity I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I mention this, and Mom busts out google. We grab my current cane, and I ask her to compare the visuals because I think most of my “I can’t find it” problem was coming from people who don’t know how to caption pictures. Sure enough, she finds it, and we start dancin’ through the order process.
“Ok, there’s a color chart here.
“A What? But why?”
“You can pick what color cane you want.”
“Do what? But why would you wanna…Ok, wait a minute, this sounds interesting.”
She reads off all the colors, describes them, and I do my typical…”Butbutbut…I don’t know…”
I don’t think my brain had still gotten over the fact that you could actually pick a color for your cane. So I bounce ideas around the house, call my grandmother, bounce ideas off her head, and eventually settled on a pink cane.
My grandmother’s worry was this: “But if you have a different color cane, will people be aware that you’re blind?”
My mother’s response which was precisely what I thought and didn’t say: “They’d have to be stupid not to figure it out.”
So, hey! You can pick colors for canes! Who knew? I’ve been a cane user since age 5 and always stuck with the same standard issue white cane, because it was always just handed to me. When we got free ones through school, it was always what was issued to us, and whenever I’ve bought them, I’ve never found that they could be customized by color. So that was my discovery for the day because I just thought it was like the niftiest thing I’d seen in ages.
I did not know this until recently either, when I ordered a replacement cane from Ambutech. Keep in mind though that the Red tip with the stripe is the legal, nationally recognized color. Some transportation systems require you to either have this type of cane, or a service animal, to take advantage of discounts offered to visually impaired individuals. You can have the upper portion of the cane whatever color you like, but I would stick to the Red-striped version for the bottom of the cane. Ambutech offers this feature as well. This is one of the glaring discrepancies I find with the NFB canes especially–their tips are all White. Sometimes you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. Yes, to us, “they’d have to be stupid not too” sounds logical, but humans are far from purely logical creatures.
Dude, don’t I know it. I don’t use public transpo much and when I do I carry my state-issue “Yes I’m blind” card with me so transpo shouldn’t be an issue. As for a pink cane? We’ll call it… Oh… early midlife crisis. Or we can just call it me going nuts, whatever you prefer. And humans…logical… no, really, they’re not. If humans were logical I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. 😛
I’m going to get a yellow cane to match my wheelchair frame! That’s awesome! Enjoy your new pink cane…