Water, water everywhere; be seen without it, if you dare
All Bottled Up
I was sitting in a pew at a wedding on a recent sweltering Saturday when something new caught my eye. A young woman in fancy dress, was seated by an usher, and all was as usual except for what she carried in one hand. The wedding guest had a bottle of water, from which she promptly began sipping. A quick survey around the rest of the church revealed that she was not the only one hydrating herself during the marriage ceremony.
To be fair, which l usually see no reason to be, the families who organized the wedding were thoughtful enough to have stacked several cases of water bottles in the back entrance of the air-conditioning-free church for anyone to pick up. However, l don’t know whether they intended people to help themselves to a bottle on their way into the church or on the way out.
In any case, the mass hydrating continued on, which led me to do some thinking on this phenomenon later on. And I have to admit, some of the thoughts were troubling, beyond the idea that church might now be fair game for wining and dining. How long before burgers and fries make it from drive-through to sanctuary and moments of silence, called for by the priests, are interrupted by cola slurping from various parts of the building?
What bothers me most about the hydration craze is this: When on earth did human beings become so desperately in need of water every 15 minutes, especially in a country which is normally teeming with the stuff? Go anywhere, anytime now, and you’ll see folks standing around clutching those distinctive little clear plastic bottles with the white tops, and sucking back the fluids as though they were on life support.
On a recent telecast of a hockey game, I watched the coaches make their way across the ice to the bench, carrying – you guessed it – bottles of water. Performers at rock concerts have them as do politicians at debates. The big oblong tables in committee rooms are covered with them. Kids on in-line skates, people in parks and I am guessing, though I haven’t seen it yet, farmers in their tractor cabs.
When I was a kid on the farm the best water in the world came out of the end of a garden hose, and I think it still does. Whatever effect the rubber had (and the odd spider that had crawled up the pipe) on the stuff, I don’t know, but it beat purified, sanitized, de-thisilized and de-thatilized water ten to one. It had good old iron in it. Oh, how I miss the iron. And who knows what else?
Name any mineral – zinc, copper, lead (that’s all the minerals I can remember) – and I’m sure it came shootin’ out the end of that flexible, green lifeline. And it tasted sooo good!
But, now, like Pavlov’s dog at the sound of a bell, we’re hauling home water bottles by the caseful and jammin’ up our fridges with ’em. Using all sorts of electricity to cool the stuff when it’s already coming out that hose nice and cold. Some genius has even come up with flavoured water. Lime. Lemon. Etc. Giant pop companies want permission to put caffeine in it. Soon enough, if they keep adding things to it – cocoa, some brown colouring, fizz – we’ll be right back to good old cola, where all this got started.
Because I don’t think all of this is about hydration – how I love the word, though I admit when I first heard it I thought of dogs and big yellow, cast-iron street faucets – but about fashion. How cool can you get? Water bottle in one hand, headphones in ears, cellphone on belt …
Oh, for the chance to call up a long-ago farmer ancestor and tell him people are laying down good hard cash these days for water in bottles. Even people with green garden hoses.
When the disbelief ended, the guffawing would begin.
“Well I’ll be darned,” my ancestor would remark.
My belief is, if my ancestors could spend a day walking around my town today, they’d be darned a lot.
©2005 Jim Hagarty
