Red Shag Carpet

Maren: 
When it was torn out, Cary insisted on keeping a few pieces of it so he could make some chaps. I don't think they ever came to be, but the scraps were stored in the garage for a while after that.  What would be an appropriate occasion to wear red shag carpet chaps anyway?  I can't think of any. 

As Corey mentioned, I remembered the musty smell it had and it's dry texture.

Mom:
I chose red since all the other colors offered were gross.  In the 70s shag was all the rage and the builders must have gotten a really good deal on it.  The Berber style carpet was much better and the off white was a better color. I really never completely liked the red shag!

We bought the house in 1972 and moved in on August 31st.  I was pregnant with Corey.  I chose the carpet color because is was the best of the worst.  Marné chose yellow for her bedroom because she knew I didn't like yellow.  I chose green for ours and blue for Curtis and Corey.

Dad:
Red is my least favorite color, but I was OK with the red shag carpet for all those years. I remember the beating that old carpet took over the years, with kids running up and down the stairs, Oscar peeing on  it, muddy feet tracking across it, and years of walking on it. It stood up well, and I was kind of sad to see it go.

Cary:
The red shag scraps smelled like cat pee.   I think that carpet was probably in that house about 20 years longer than the manufacturer intended it to be.  The chaps would have been stage garb for the rock band I was inventing in my head that sadly never came to be.

Curtis: 
Red shag carpet is awesome on stairways because you can throw your Fisher Price toys down them when you're still learning to walk down stairs.  And the toys fare just fine.  Trust me, I've done it lots of times.

Corey: 

When I think about the red shag carpet that was throughout our house growing up I immediately start trying to work out the floor covering pedigree of my childhood. I remember the red shag being throughout the living room, family room, stairs and upstairs hallway.  Then when we had the room added on--the "sewing" room--we had stylish brown carpet in the family room and sewing room and new vinyl flooring in the kitchen. Later, when I left for college, we had white carpet put in throughout the house.

I also remember the tile in the "entryway".  Each tile with three bars of tan/taupe rectangles with small, speckled dents scattered throughout, laid in alternating perpendiculars like a patchwork.  I remember coming home and, with a touch of obsessive compulsive thought from the walk home from school still in me (trying not to step on cracks or lines to save my mother's back or spine), I would try to fit my foot in the rectangles set parallel to the direction I was walking. 

I remember playing on the tile when I was even younger.  Sunday afternoon, stacking the raw and colored blocks that were stored in the linen cloth toy bags mom made for us in an attempt to organize.  It was loud when you dumped out the blocks and it was loud when, invariably, the stack of blocks would come crashing down after listing to and fro in a Jenga like challenge to build the highest tower failed yet again.  And I remember the yell from Mom who was laying nearby on the black couch trying to take a poorly conceived Sunday nap while watching football and making frequent channel changing and Kleenex (is there any other brand of tissue?) fetching requests, to be quiet.   I like to think the tile is still in place, sealed under whatever wall-to-wall carpeting is there now, waiting to re-emerge some day.

For all its promise of being soft and comfortable, the red shag carpet had an unpleasant dry texture and musty, dusty smell. Perhaps that was partly due to the fact that Mom "didn't believe in professional carpet cleaning." I recall building Legos and losing small round studded pieces in the shag forest on Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning (I preferred to do my Lego building on the lumpy bumpy blue carpet in the "boys" bedroom upstairs in my early years, and in the smooth, "short-haired" blue carpet of the "remodeled" duck wallpaper bedroom in my later years) . The red shag carpet wasn't great for playing, except for building up sock-footed static for spark touch battles in the evening dark of the living room.  Of course these were less frequent as the living room filled with flowered couches, coffee tables, and a menagerie of porcelain dolls.

When I was old enough to wield the Electrolux vacuum with its rotating brush power nozzle and 40-pound power unit complete with spring loaded, auto retracting cord, I would vacuum the same red shag carpet.  I remember going to the Kelsch's house and seeing perfectly placed backgammon rows in their brown living room carpet, wondering why their carpet shone so nicely.  When I tried to reproduce the same in our red shag, the best I ever got was a vague shadow of triangles at the edges of the room where the carpet was less worn and could still be "brushed".  I can distinctly remember the sound of a small, round Lego stud piece being ground up in the power brush then ricocheting down the hose piece to the sealed bag in the power unit, never to be clicked in to place again.