The seltzer man came every Thursday with a wooden crate of blue glass bottles and he carried the crate up four flights of stairs and he left two full bottles and took two empty ones and that was the transaction. No bill. No invoice. You paid him at the end of the month and he remembered what you owed because the seltzer man did not need a computer. He needed a back strong enough to carry glass up four flights and a memory good enough to track forty buildings.

The blue seltzer bottles were the most beautiful objects in the kitchen. The glass was thick and the color was the blue of a swimming pool and when the light came through the kitchen window and hit the bottle the whole room turned blue for a second. Nobody bought the bottle for the beauty. They bought it for the seltzer. But the beauty was free. The seltzer man delivered carbonated water and accidentally delivered art.

Seltzer was the drink of the Lower East Side. Egg creams needed seltzer. Whiskey needed seltzer. A headache needed seltzer. A fight with your wife needed seltzer. Whatever was wrong with you the answer was a glass of seltzer and a moment of quiet at the kitchen table and the bubbles would fix it. The bubbles did not fix it. But the pause did. The seltzer was just an excuse to sit down. The sitting down was the medicine.

The seltzer man on our block was named Murray and he had been delivering since 1947 and his truck was older than most of his customers. The truck leaked and the bottles clinked and you could hear Murray coming from two blocks away. That sound was the sound of Thursday. Every neighborhood had a sound for every day and Thursday was the clink of glass bottles on a truck that needed new shocks. Murray did not retire. He delivered until his back gave out and then his son delivered and then the son stopped because nobody ordered seltzer anymore.

You can buy seltzer at the bodega now. A plastic bottle for a dollar fifty. The water is the same. The carbonation is the same. The bubbles are the same. But Murray is not carrying it up four flights. The blue glass bottle is not catching the light in the kitchen window. The clink of the truck is not telling you it is Thursday. The seltzer is the same but everything around the seltzer is gone and the everything was the point. The water was just water. The delivery was the relationship.