Vinyl Floor Mat

The vinyl floor mat was really getting me down. This probably sounds strange to say, I mean who looks at what's on the floor more than peripherally. Nonetheless, it was the truth. I'd step over that vinyl floor mat every day on the way into my fathers hardware store, take out the rubbish, roll out the other vinyl floor mats in the back over the newly washed floor, and start the day, and everything was drab and gray and vivid and awful. Somehow it would stick in my head all day, that vacuous “Welcome” on the vinyl floor mat, with a big crack in the O, crusted with bits of that thick Missouri mud that truckers and farmers were always tracking in. It was as bad as the checkered linoleum floors. I couldn't abide it. The vinyl floor mat was hurting my brain.

I don't know what it was that it symbolized to me. Maybe it was just the endlessness and emptiness of small town life. That was it, I think. The way the vinyl floor mat said greetings endlessly, with the same vacuous, graying, cracking face. The way it contrasted the black and white checked tiles on the floor without forming any real contrast at all. I don't know what it was about it all, but it was driving me crazy. I needed to replace that vinyl floor mat.

I tried out this rubber floor mat sitting in the back room. It had something pleasant to it. It was the red of a gym ball, and springy and said, incongruously in flowing but hard to see script, “greetings and salutations.” Greetings and salutations; I like that a lot. But – and this is the weirdest thing – once I moved the vinyl floor mat out of the way, strange things started to happen. People would trip as they stepped on the rubber mat. Stock would disappear off the shelves. There were even a couple of car accidents outside. Finally, I decided that enough was enough, and resigned myself to the inevitable. I returned the vinyl floor mat to its proper place.

Now I know that things will never change around here. Maybe some day, we'll get a new Welcome mat, but it will be exactly the same – another vinyl floor mat with the same design sitting in the same spot. Its okay, I guess. I mean maybe things weren't meant to change. I do still like the sound of “greetings and salutations,” though.