Thursday, February 3, 2011

H2O

Water. A substance essential to humans and other life forms. Without water, plants die. There would be no coffee or jello or Kool-aid. We could not live without water.

Yet, you are constantly hearing people say things like "I know I should drink more water, but I just never remember to do it." or "I try to drink water, but I just can't..."

I have a friend like that. For many, many years her "breakfast" was a super large cup (a quart size) of Pepsi that she picked up at 7-11, and a few cigarettes.

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She still drinks lots of Pepsi, but she is happy to have found the 4 oz size bottle of water because if she works at it for several hours, she can finally finish it all. The 8 oz size bottle of water intimidated her and she would never start drinking it because she knew she couldn't finish it.

Drinking water has never, ever been a problem for me.

From a very early age, I loved going to visit my grandmother for one particular reason. She had an ice box built into the wall of her kitchen and in the ice box you could always find a half gallon bottle of water and a glass frosty with precipitation from the moisture in the ice box.

I loved getting water out of that bottle and would make many trips to the kitchen over the course of a visit to get ice water. The icy cold glass made it even more delicious.

I don't remember if we had water in our refrigerator at home and, to tell you the truth, I have no memories of drinking at lot of water in our house, but I loved that water from Nannie's kitchen.

I also remember stopping along the road on the way to visit my other grandmother in Inverness. This was long before highways and this stretch of narrow 2-lane road through Samuel P. Taylor park had a place where you could pull over under the canopy of trees and get a scoop of water running down the side of the mountain into a little basin that had been cut out of the rock. Fresh, clean water straight from the source. It was one of the parts of that long trip that we all looked forward to.

Over the years, I have continued to enjoy water. There was a period of a few years when we first moved to Davis when I almost stopped drinking water because Davis water has a unique taste that I just couldn't learn to like. (David, all the years he was alive, complained about water anywhere else, because he had grown up on "Davis water." Everything else for him tasted like "San Francisco water" and he hated San Francisco water. Which proves, I guess, that our best tastes are the ones we learn to enjoy in our early years.)

The reason Davis water tastes so bad is two-fold. For one thing, the water coming into Davis comes from the Vaca Mountains and has a high boron content. The mineral content is so high that you need to have a water softener to prevent corrosion of the pipes, so everything that comes out of the tap has been filtered through water softener salt and it just leaves a bad taste.

But when we moved here, I decided that if I was going to learn to live in this town, I would have to learn to like its water.

I never did. And I finally decided that the only solution for me was to buy one of those water coolers and drink bottled water.

There has been much discussion about bottled water and how it is ridiculously expensive--significantly more, per gallon, than the gasoline we all complain about. Yet supermarkets devote an entire aisle to types of bottled water. Which mountains they come from, which filters they have gone through, which has the prettiest picture on the bottle, etc.

In truth, I drink bottled water for one reason only: I like the taste. I don't care if it comes from France or the creek up the road apiece. If it tastes as good as the water that came out of the bottle in my grandmother's ice box, I'll drink it. Don't give it a fancy flavor or carbonation or some sort of weird ingredient that will give it extra zest. Just plain old ordinary water is what I want. I keep a big flat of our local supermarket's finest (and cheapest) water in the car, and replace it when it is gone. It's particular good on winter mornings when it is as cold as a bottle fresh out of the fridge.

My recent trip to France and Italy proved that money is no object if I'm thirsty. I don't know how much, total, I paid for bottled water on our trip, but I'm sure it was more than all souvenirs and gelato combined. Yet when you are dying of thirst, you don't stop to bargain with the guy who has water to sell.

At home I drink a lot of water. I drink water with my breakast, and then switch to coffee. I drink water throughout the day. I drink water with lunch and dinner. I take a bottle of water to put beside me to drink if I wake up in the middle of the night. Drinking the recommended 8 glasses of water is never a problem for me.

The glass of water I drink when I go to get a drink of water, is about 8 oz in size. Sometimes I drink two of them because they just taste so good and feel so good going down.

The nice thing about my addiction to water is that it's about the only thing edible to which I'm addicted which is not bad for my health. My doctor may warn me about carbohydrates or sweets, but she never has to remind me to drink more water.

3 comments:

Harriet said...

A water softener was never in my plans, because of the high salt levels. (Did you know they had to remove a water softener when Bess Truman moved into the White House? You have to wonder how much it contributed to Roosevelt's condition.)

I use a countertop filter, and I keep the pitcher full. I like the taste of our tap water, but I do think we're better off without the stuff that makes tea cloudy. I often microwave a cup of hot water when I'm chilly. (Bet you never do that.)

I used to be pretty good at lifting a 40-pound bottle of water into a cooler, but I'm glad I don't have to do that any more.

Mary Z said...

I'm a constant water drinker, too. I rarely buy bottled water - usually just fill a bottle from the tap or our Brita pitcher and carry it with me. There's always water by my bed and by my chair.

As y'all know, it's really hard to convince people that water really IS your first choice of beverage.

When we're in SE Asia in a couple of months, I know I won't be able to drink "tap" water. I just hope I can find non-flavored, non-carbonated bottled water to drink.

Kwizgiver said...

I'm a major water fan, too. I blame all my ailments on lack of water. Or lack of sleep. But headaches and things like that are blamed on lack of water.