TO QUENCH A THIRST

December 4, 2020

I don't remember learning much from my grandmother, but she taught me to love ice water.  She first had an ice box (with a block of ice) and eventually a refrigerator and she always had a bottle of water and a glass inside so you could always have ice water in a cold glass.  I have always loved ice water.

I come from a family of alcoholics.

My mother was in the younger half of 10 children.  The older half, all of whom grew up during Prohibition, were alcoholics.  When they got older (and sober) two of my aunts started the first AA in the town where they lived and ran it for many years.

My father started giving me drinks when I was in high school.  I never got a lot, but he would fix me a glass of a little bourbon with a lot of ginger ale.  It was to make me feel like an adult. He said it was to teach me how to drink.

My father was an alcoholic.  I don't remember ever seeing him drunk as I grew up, but he had his cocktail every night and gave up alcohol every Lent to prove to himself that he was not alcoholic.  As he got older, and lived alone, he drank more.  He poured himself a juice glass full of bourbon in the morning and then thus kept filling it up through the day.  The Christmas before his last Christmas was the only time I saw him really drunk.  He stumbled around the house and couldn't remember his grandchildren's names.  I found his glass of bourbon hiding in a cupboard and poured it out.

I had my own period of drinking too much, when I was in college.  It became a joke at "Newman Inn," the house where Walt lived with other guys, that I had my own bottle of gin in a closet in the pantry.  I was too young to buy alcohol, so the guys kept me supplied with gin.  I had a few embarrassing experiences when I had too much to drink.

I don't remember when I stopped drinking too much, but I always drank at least a little.  I had my gin and tonic many nights during my pregnancies.  It never occurred to me  that I shouldn't drink alcohol while pregnant.  I never got drunk, but I did drink.

When we moved to Davis and I had a job, I came home every night and the very first thing I did was to pour myself a glass of wine.

Then there was the day when as I was pouring my wine, I looked over and saw David, who was in grammar school, watching me and decided that this was a bad example for me to set for him and I stopped having wine when I got home from work.  (Ironically, David killed himself many years later, driving drunk).

I still occasionally had wine with dinner and stopped doing it when I realized that if I drank wine with dinner, I always fell asleep watching TV and preferred to watch TV than to have the wine (now I fall asleep watching TV without wine!).

At some point many years ago, my beverage of choice became ice water. 

I drink a lot of water.  I have a pint of water with dinner, and a pint of water as I watch TV at night and then most of a pint of water in the middle of the night when I wake up thirsty.

Water is what I order at restaurants and whenever anybody offers me a soft drink, I prefer water.  I'm a cheap date.  Whenever we went to Lawsuit concerts at bars, I ordered either plain water of soda water.

Once in a great while I will have a hamburger at a fast food joint and decide to order a diet Coke, but I always have a bottle of water in the car, so I don't need a soft drink.

I remember in the days when we had "Cousins Day," my two cousins and I spending an overnight with my mother, playing cards, my cousin Kathy was trying to drink more water.  She had a half pint bottle of water she would carry around with her and over the course of the 2  days she would manage to drink most of it.  She did not like water at all.

Since water has no real taste, I can't figure out how you don't like it, but that's me. 

Water is probably the only healthy thing I do.  I never have to think about whether or not I have had enough water during a day!

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For those who are still fighting the rules about safety with the pandemic, I offer this...