ANDY ROONEY

©2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Some Thoughts About Drinking

In the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, it seems to me I do my best thinking. It only seems like it to me at the time, though. The thoughts that seemed so bright and good late at night never seem so good the next morning. Often I can’t even remember some of the most brilliant ones I had.

At 4:30 a.m. yesterday, I got thinking about all the things I’d had to drink in my life. I would have written that "all the things I had drunk," but "drunk" isn’t a friendly word to use, socially or grammatically.

As a boy, I drank milk that was delivered to our house by a farmer who owned a small herd of Jersey cows. They’re the brown-and-white ones. Holstein cows are black and white. Holsteins produce more milk that isn’t as good as that produced by Jersey or Guernsey cows, so naturally, the way the world works, almost no one sells milk from those cows anymore. Farmers complain that people aren’t drinking as much milk as they once did. People aren’t drinking milk because milk isn’t as good as it used to be.

In a supermarket, it’s hard to find a bottle of whole milk. Everything is "reduced fat," "non fat" or "2 percent fat." Milk without butterfat is like non-alcoholic Scotch. The nation’s children have become fat drinking non-fat milk.

The only drink in more trouble than milk is water. When I’m staying in a hotel room and want to take an aspirin, it’s frequently impossible to swallow it with water from the tap in the bathroom. There are not many cities left that have water free of chlorine. If I want decent water in a hotel room, I have to open a pint bottle of water from their little refrigerator that shows up as $2.75 on my bill. If it was gas, I’d be paying $22 a gallon. I try to go to a store near the hotel to buy a few bottles of water because I also use it to make coffee in the morning. You have to have good water to make good coffee.

We have fouled our nest here on Earth and ruined the drinking water in the process. We have a well 430 feet deep that provides the water for a country house we own. That’s how deep you have to drill to get away from the mess civilization has made with the surface of the earth.

My hard drink is bourbon. Margie’s is vodka, which the Russians are still making better than we do. We enjoy the civilized custom of two drinks every evening before dinner while we watch the news. However, I’m angry with people who give drinking a bad name by doing too much of it. On the other hand, I was pleased with the recent story saying that moderate drinking is good for us.

My most frequent soft drink is a carbonated spring water from France. In most stores, it sells in a green bottle for $1.19 a liter, a sip more than a quart. It’s ridiculous to drink water brought to the United States from France. Even so, I always have a bottle in the refrigerator and gulp from it several times a day.

One of the strangest success stories in American business is Coca-Cola. It’s strange because no one who drinks it knows what’s in it. It won the legal right to be called by its nickname "Coke" years ago when it was sued by Pepsi-Cola.

The best idea the Coca-Cola Com-pany ever had was that small, original, green-tinted pinched-waist bottle. In the Army in North Carolina, I was exposed to Dr. Pepper and Moxie but I never took to them. On several trips to Russia, I drank the Russian equivalent of Coke, called Kvas. It tasted like Moxie and the soft drink trucks selling it on the Moscow streets only had one glass and everyone who bought Kvas drank from that glass.

This must have been about when I stopped thinking about drinking and went back to sleep.