Changes

This piece of writing was done at my writing group on 9/12/15.

We had a number of objects to choose from as story starters. I chose an empty Evian water bottle.

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What is it about water nowadays that has made us so conscious of health and in particular about what water we drink. When I was young any water would do. You could drink out of the cement water fountains in the park, your garden hose, even streams that ran through the woods and parks where I grew up. As I got older we moved away from water and went for bottled drinks, like coke and seven-up. We became more discerning about the water we drank and stopped drinking from streams and such, but would still drink from water fountains and hoses.

Then I became an adult. Oh what germs these public places held. Sure you could drink from a fountain, but let the water run for a bit before you put your mouth near it. And hoses…no way! That didn’t stop me by the way in 1989, after Hurricane Hugo, from getting water for my house from my next door neighbor who had city water by running the garden house from his outside spigot to my outside spigot to feed my water line which was well-water (with no electricity the pump didn’t work). City water flowed through my house, which I drank. Since I wasn’t drinking from the end of the hose it must have been safe, right?

Now I get older and there is an abundance of bottled water both flavored and unflavored. Clearly if you are going to drink water, it must be bottled. We’ve added a filter to our water faucet that we use for drinking water. We even use that water for making spaghetti. Clearly all the water that I drank as a child must have been different. Water from a tap now is obviously tainted. Otherwise why at some restaurants do they offer you bottled or tap?

All this is added to the myriad of safety changes that we made. Obviously we were lucky we survived by being ignorant when we were young. Riding without a bicycle helmet, tasting the meatloaf in its raw state to determine if it was seasoned properly, eating raw eggs, eating raw cookie dough, playing outside in the neighborhood unsupervised, having to organize your own sports instead of playing on an organized  baseball, soccer, hockey or basketball team.

As we grow older are we more conscious of what is going on around us or are we becoming more paranoid? It’s probably a bit of both. I become an official senior citizen tomorrow. I hope that in some way I can hold on to and experience the fun and carefree enjoyment of the things I did when I was young, continue to be aware of the changes in our times, and continue to grow in the next phase of my youth.