The Colors of Life :: Example Personal Narratives

The Colors of Life   I was sixteen when I found out.  The year was 1968.  My father and I were in the kitchen, he, in his accustomed talk-spot by the pantry door, my sixteen year-old self in a precede by the window.  The two of us were reminiscing about the time I was a little girl, learning to sp atomic number 18 the letters of the alphabet.  We remembered that, under his guidance, Id learned to write all of the letters very quickly except for the letter R.                                  Until angiotensin converting enzyme day, I said to my father, I realized that to make an R all  I had to do was first write a P and then draw a line down from  its loop.  And I was so surprised that I could lift a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.   Yellow letter? Orange Letter? my father said. What do you mean?   Well, you feel, I said. P is a yellow letter, but R is an orange letter. You know - the food colors of the letters.   The colors of the letters? my father said.   It had never come up in any conversation before.  I had never thought to bear on it to anyone.  For as long as I could remember, from each one letter of the alphabet had a different color.  Each word had a different color too (generally,  the same color as the first letter) and so did each number.  The colors of letters, words and numbers were as intrinsic a surgical incision of them as their shapes, and like the shapes, the colors never changed. They appeared automatically whenever I aphorism or thought about letters or words, and I couldnt switch them.   I had taken it for granted that the whole world shared these perceptions with me, so my fathers perplexed reaction was totally unexpected. From my point of view, I felt as if Id made a statement as ordinary as apple s  are red and leaves are green and had elicited a thoroughly mazed response.  I didnt know then that seeing such things as yellow Ps and orange Rs, or green Bs, purple 5s, brown Mondays and turquoise  Thursdays was strange to the one in two thousand persons like myself who were hosts to a nappy neurological phenomenon called synesthesia.  Later in my life, I would read about neuroscientists at NIH and Yale University  working to understand the phenomenon.