My Dad never let not knowing the words to a song stop him from singing it.

But in the case of one song, he wasn’t that far off.

Whenever he would do any hard physical work, or when we wanted a soda or juice, he would sing these lines from a song covered by one of his favorites, Frankie Laine:

“Don’t you listen to him, Dan

He’s a devil, not a man

And he’s burning in the sand

For water

Cool, clear water”

That is not exactly the lyric. But that’s not the point.

The point is that he was ahead of his time in the hydration movement. No adult I’ve known has been as good as he was as having a glass of water whenever he needed it.

But even the 1954 version of Dad would find it odd that, in 2024, just about everyone carries water with them.

Military personnel and campers used to carry canteens, those round cloth-covered containers. Bicycle riders sometimes had bottles attached to their bike’s frame.

The idea of going to the store and buying one 20-ounce bottle or a case of them is relatively modern. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think about when it became widespread.

I suppose one reason is that people were less trusting of their municipal water systems. I live in a place where the tap water is awful. It really can’t be imbibed unless it’s run through some kind of filter – for us, in the refrigerator or through a purification system.

Another reason is that the two biggest soft-drink companies – Coke and Pepsi – both invested heavily in bottled water. Pepsi introduced Aquafina in 1994; five years later, Coke’s Dasani arrived. Both are basically municipal water that has been filtered. There are some regional brands that sell bottled spring water.

And, as I mentioned, people have been made much more conscious about dehydration. It exacerbates diseases and illnesses, and brings on some of its own.

Hydration was also the impetus for one of the other inventions of our lifetime: sports drinks. 

In 1965, scientists at the University of Florida were asked by the school’s football coach to develop something that would restore nutrients and minerals to an athlete’s tired body. The school’s teams are the Gators, hence Gatorade. Four years later, it was marketed to the public; my Mom said it tasted like sweat and there’s probably something to that.

Like just about everything else on this list, bottled water and other drinks are not an unmitigated blessing. 

It usually comes in a plastic bottle, and when those bottles are exposed to sunlight, they can leach the chemicals that make up the plastic into the water. Microplastics have been blamed for diseases of their own.

There’s also the problem of what to do with all these bottles. Much as we discussed with plastic bags, they seem to end up all over – particularly in places that don’t offer some sort of financial or legal incentive for recycling them. Coke has indicated it will try to get Dasani into bioplastic bottles that are more environmentally friendly; it’s also using cans, which frankly is not a great way to drink water.

This world still has public drinking fountains. You can still get a glass of tap water in a restaurant.

But when you walk down the street or go to a sporting event, you can count on almost everybody having a bottle of water.

It might not be cool. It might not be clear. But it sure is water.