Clever Magazine, Kitchen Floor (www.clevermag.com)

Wanna read the latest from Clever Magazine?
Click here and return to the coverpage!

Kitchen Floor as History
by Hal Reichardt

Archaeologists have had a lot of luck lately digging up fossils and frozen animals deep in the tundra of Siberia. The technique here is simple. You just peel back layer after layer of snow and sedimentary rock until you find something interesting. The latest discovery was a 20,000-year-old woolly mammoth that somehow got stuffed into a giant ice cube. (How'd you like to find that floating around in your cocktail?)

While contemplating that possibility, I got to looking at my kitchen floor and thought I saw a gleam of something poking through a hole in one of our vinyl tiles. I was on my hands and knees in no time clawing at the edges of the tile until I could peel it back all the way and see what was underneath there. And what I found goes right to the heart of what's wrong with America today. Yes. It was another stick-on vinyl tile. The tile was woefully out of date, almost campy in appearance, but I had to admit that it was mine because I recognized the pattern.

Exhausted after pulling up that tile, I sat back for a minute to admire my handiwork. I now had a kitchen floor that was all white with a black criss-cross pattern, except for the one blue tile I had unearthed next to the refrigerator.

Before you know it I was lost in sentimental memories about the blue tile. Ah, it the was early '90s when we got that floor. Things were better then, I seem to recall. I didn't worry as much about the stock market because I didn't own any stock, and I was optimistic about the future.

My curiosity piqued, I was soon back on the floor digging at that blue tile with a butter knife. I knew there was something underneath there, something from my past that would shed more light on my personal history, an artifact of semi-antiquity, possibly from an era known only as the '80s.

And there is was. Just as I suspected. Another stick-on tile. This one was green, the color of money, because the '80s were all about money, the decade of greed. Unfortunately I had even less money in the '80s than I did in the '90s. I was beginning to see why archaeologists can't afford to wear anything but khaki shorts and sandals. They keep going back in time until they're broke.

There must have been something good about the '80s. Maybe that was the decade when they relaxed the rules on how many layers of stick-on vinyl tiles you can put down before you have to buy a real floor. I was getting in pretty deep now, so I put up some scaffolding and grabbed a football helmet with a flashlight strapped to the top so that I could peer further into the depths of my kitchen's past.

I fought my was past cigarette burns in the orange tiles we had back in the '70s and soon found bits of pressed vegetables that never made it all the way back to the fridge. It was becoming obvious that whoever lived in my kitchen 30 years ago was a slob. Oh, yeah. That was me. Well, things weren't always better in the good-old days.

I like vegetables a lot better now and I even clean the floor once in a while. But this depressing tile on the kitchen floor has got to go. My expedition back through my kitchen's history reminded me of how far we've come as a society as well as the futility of simply covering up our past transgressions. So I'm coming clean for the new millennium. Instead of a new batch of stick-on tiles on top of the heap, I'm ripping it all out. The Smithsonian may be interested in a cross-section of the old floor for posterity, but I'm throwing the rest in the dumpster and looking forward to walking on a clean slate.