When I was 14 I had a vivid demonstration of the paint chip illusion.

The paint wasn’t actually chipping. The term referred to small squares of color on strips of light cardboard, with dramatic names printed below them. Stores that sold paint provided them then and now, to allow customers to choose their new hues without starting the job.

My parents had decided to change the color of our kitchen. I’m sure it was my mother’s idea and Dad went along, but what I remember of the incident is from my diary, and I didn’t record the backstory. I do know that they took on the painting themselves; they paid Mr. Shannon to manage the garden and Mom occasionally hired an (always unsatisfactory) cleaning woman, but they did all the other house jobs on their own. When they painted a room they always seemed to get to work after dark, and they blamed the poor lighting for the “holidays” (weird term, I thought, learned from them at that time) they saw when the sun lit the room the next day.

They spent awhile choosing the color. Mom wanted pink and there were scads of options. They brought home several chips and took turns holding them against parts of the wall before they selected.

The kitchen was large and the chips were small. When they finished the paint job they were uncertain at night and then astounded in the morning. The color was glaring. In daylight it almost hurt our eyes. It was too much.

But so was the job of repainting the room. Mom said we’d get used to it. She switched the window curtains to a darker fabric and lowered them a bit.

In time we adjusted. But we never loved that color. And we didn’t repaint the room. We moved a year later and said goodbye to pink as an interior design element.

Do I remember 1964
because I was so vividly impressed
with punch experience? Or is it more
because I took those notes? I never guessed
a kitchen pink or kitten gift would ring
this loud this distant from that infant year.
The blood and diets fountained from that spring,
distorting everything that had been clear.

I gained a little wisdom by the end.
I grew an inch and took off 7 pounds,
and most of what I wrote I recollect,
perhaps for writing. Did the words I penned
engrave my brain, coordinate my bounds?
I marvel as I read and I suspect.