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Where do those razors go?
By Carl Heintze
The other day while looking in the medicine chest for something I noticed a small slot at its back.
For a minute I couldn't think what it was. Then it dawned on me it was where I used to slip double-edged safety razor blades for safety's sake.
Back in those days medicine chests were made that way, because back in those days men shaved with safety razors.
I used to shave with a safety razor myself and I suppose I must have deposited blades in that very slot. Not anymore, though, I use an electric razor.
My discovery set me off on a strange tack.
First, I got to wondering where the razor blades I deposited in the slot went. Did they fall to the ground under the house, there to lie endangering anyone who crawled through the crawl space?
Or had the house builders thought of that, and did the blades, instead, drop between the 2-by-4 studs that make up the wall? And, if this had happened, would someone sometime in the distant future, when the house was torn down, find them and wonder what they were?
Perhaps they would become an archeological treasure centuries from now, like the debris in ancient Egyptian tombs or the junk found in ruined cities in Mexico.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Recently I read of an archeologist who basically spent her time sifting through the remains of an ancient outhouse. She was interested in what the people who once had used the privy ate.
That's the way it is with archeologists. They deal in the trash that's left behind, by those who lived years ago.
Trash tells them a lot. To the rest of us it's just trash, but to them it is gold, not very often pure gold, but, at least, the gold of knowledge about the past.
So looking at the slot in the medicine chest wall and thinking about those rusty razor blades somewhere in the wall of the house, I could see the scientists of the early 22nd or 23rd century puzzling over these thin little pieces of sharp metal, trying to understand what they were for.
Somehow, I had the feeling they would not immediately be associated with how men removed hair from their faces.
But I hoped they would finally figure out what the blades were for. I guessed that if they did, the latter day archeologists would have a hard time understanding why men had used such harsh methods. In their time a couple of hundred or more years from now, because we believe in progress, we would have to assume that facial hair somehow would be zapped off electronically.
This led me to ponder what the archeologists of the future are going to think about our age, in general.
What might they think of the Shark Tank, for instance, better known as the San Jose Arena? Someone has proposed erecting a giant fin atop it, which would move about when the Sharks are playing hockey inside. That would certainly throw the archeologists of the future. They might well take it as some kind of cathedral where worship services were held and sacrifices were made.
Clearly, there is a thin line between what we use in every day life and what the archeologists are going to think we use it for a few centuries hence. It's not only history that gets bent as time passes, it's reality.
So, I am thinking about the razor blade slot. At first I thought of crawling under the house to see if the blades fell there. But there's an easier solution.
I'm going to write a note for the archeologists of the future and slip it down the slot.
I'm going to write: "These are safety razor blades. They once were fitted in a safety razor with which I daily shaved my face. I disposed of the old dull blades by dropping them down here. I don't use them any more. Neither does anyone else. P.S. Watch out. They are sharp."
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
