Don't You Miss Your Water, Momma?

With her hands folded, palms down on the bar, Momma said that she can't suffer pets in the home but loves it when people "make babies." i think she said she had six kids, and she mentioned that one of her children had died very young. in the old world, children increase the relative wealth of a household, but in the new world it gets complicated. Momma knew what she was talking about. she had years to draw upon, and her origins, El Salvador, when she was young and in love. she talked of her husband and of marriage. her husband is gone, too. recall the feeling of passionate love and the world does stand still for a moment, this woman, a certain light in her eye, suggested, her mouth softening somewhat. she treated these matters with much gravity, though. and she cautioned us, or she seemed to be cautioning us, me and Abby, advising us that marriage was nothing to enter into lightly, sacred, to be honored. of course, no divorce, no surprise here, no one likes divorce, but especially Catholics. i listened intently. was she speaking to us directly or just making casual conversation?

Momma called the card room the boom-boom room because she walked in on a couple have sex in there one time. bada-bing. i watched two black guys play ping pong in the back. they were both wearing shorts, which struck me as odd considering the single digit temperature outside. they were both damned good ping pong players. Abby told me that they come every wednesday and have with them matching blue gatorades. i unerstand that that's an extreme flavor, relatively speaking.

i'll have the crab juice, personally. Diet Sip, which is a fictional brand of soda for which i used to do mock-believe television commercials when i was a kid, comes to mind. Diet Sip. Sippidy-doo-da, Sippidy-ay, Have You Had Your Diet Sip Today? that's . . . i just made that up on the spot, nothing like that but a lot of long, glass-draining gulps of water with lime in it. We used to make ominous concoctions: into regular tonic water (which my brother loved to drink) we would squeeze lime or lemon juice, using whatever was on hand (what else were we going to do?) if only we had stopped there; what would start as an inviting potable would always end up like a science experiment -- pickle juice, milk, you name it. always my brother would have to drink. the beauty of Diet Sip, what really sold it to consumers the world over, was the fact that, when you stripped away the name, the brand, the image, and got right down to the essence of Diet Sip, Diet Sip was nothing but regular ice water. that's it.

looking back, i just may have been on to something. water. selling water. how could i have known at age ten, about the rise of the bottled water industry? Diet Sip. Water. Poland Spring. Deer Park (the water that deers park their behind in and go you know what, hee-hee. little propaganda there, Diet Sip style.) vitamin water, meet my friend, smart water. hey, who invited Snapple? water in every color of the rainbow. water from every corner of the globe: the French Alps, Fiji, Maine. they should sell an Antarctica water. or water bottled fresh from the melting polar ice caps.

i notice they sell no water bottled from the icy-clear streams of Iraq. it would probably be something like the water that remained inside the canteen that Michael Kelly gave me, one that had belonged to an Iraqi soldier, one who was quite possibly killed in action, as Michael was more than ten years later when he went back. back then, the Iraqi soldiers were the enemy, but now we are trying to train them all over again from scratch. the desert is still the desert though, and water is still water.

"Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and hearts . . . that cry . . . for water . . .

Cool, Clear water."