What You Can Learn from TV

For Thanksgiving weekend, we went away to a hotel in Oxnard with a bunch of other families. We'd done the same last year and had a good time, the hotel grounds open directly onto the sand of the beach, the kids had a ball, we got sleep - it was enough of a success to want to repeat.

This year was fine, I suppose, but it was COLD. And before you Mid-West and East Coasters tell me to cry you a river, please bear in mind that forty-five degrees coming off the shore is still cold, even if it could be colder in late November, when you haven't packed properly.

And I hadn't packed properly. I brought one light sweater and one 3/4-sleeved sweatshirt for outerwear. Not enough. I froze.

To compensate, I wore every single article of clothing that I had brought - from pajamas to skirts to boots to hats to hoods - at every single moment, and generally walked around looking homeless. With whom I suddenly felt MAJOR empathy.

Our hotel room wasn't much better, because nothing in it seemed to work the way it should. When we first arrived it was a little stuffy, and because Y feels about a room with broken air conditioning the way I feel about enclosed spaces, he immediately called to have it fixed. Apparently, rehabilitating the A/C - which we would use for approximately one hour of a long weekend - meant disabling the heat, which we would long for druing the remaining hours of our stay.

In other words, I wore all of those clothes to sleep, too. There was no respite from the cold.

Being freezing meant less time spent on the actual beach, watching the waves and playing Frisbee, less time sitting by the pool reading, and more time feeling annoyed that I wasn't in my warm, free bed.

Feeling annoyed in general meant wanting to target that annoyance, and Y and I targeted each other. After a couple of days of basic sniping and fighting, we were both raw and on-edge by the time Sunday came along. The day of going home. To warmth.

Of course, as one of the meaner jokes the universe tends to play on vacationers, Sunday was blissfully warm and beautiful. The perfect day to bike along the boardwalk. Or go strawberry-picking, as Y had hoped to do for the entire past year.

Oxnard is the epicenter of the California strawberry industry, and Y thought the kids would really enjoy going out into one of the fields and picking some themselves. He promised them that they could also keep any bugs they uncovered in the process.

Naturally, I pushed for biking. But I didn't really care what we did, so long as we were outdoors. On Saturday night, when I benignly asked Y if he had found an actual place to strawberry-pick the following morning, he took it as criticism that he hadn't done any research and that I didn't trust his judgment and snapped back at me that NO HE DIDN'T KNOW AN EXACT PLACE BUT FOR G-D'S SAKE WE WERE IN OXNARD AND HE COULD GUARANTEE THAT THERE WERE 500 MILLION PLACES TO GO STRAWBERRY PICKING WITHIN A MILE OF OUR HOTEL AND ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS ASK THE CONCIERGE IN THE MORNING AND WHY DID I HAVE TO GET ON HIS CASE ABOUT EVERY LITTLE THING?!

Like I said, it hadn't been a great weekend for us. But I assured him that I meant nothing of the sort, was merely making conversation, and then shut up. Later, we talked and made up and everyone was in a good place by Sunday morning.

Back to the morning. We pack up the room, the car, pull out of the hotel parking lot and spin around to the front entrance to attack the concierge.

"Excuse me," I ask out the window. "Do you know off-hand a good place near here for us to go strawberry picking?"

Silence. The man stared at me as if he was sure he couldn't have heard me correctly. Finally, he repeated: "Strawberry picking?"

"Yes," answered Y, craning his neck from the driver's seat. "Is there somewhere close by that you guys recommend?"

The doorman gave us a worried glance and then turned to his partner with eyebrows raised, as if to say, Stay calm, dude, but I think we're dealing with psy-chos here...

"I've never heard of PICKING strawberries," he told us. "But there are several fruit stands up the block where you can buy them. Perhaps that's what you had in mind?"

"Um, no," replied Y. "Maybe we better go ask the concierge, inside."

"I can do that for you," said the doorman. "Be right back."

A minute or two later, the concierge, a middle-aged man with a concerned but not exactly polite face appeared at Y's window.

"Hello, sir. I've been told you want to go strawberry picking. Is that right?"

"Uh, yeah," Y answered, confused. "That's right. Is there somewhere you can recommend?"

"Well sir," replied the concierge, his brows furrowed so tightly together that they formed deep creases above his nose. "You CAN'T pick strawberries here in Oxnard. They don't recommend it at any of the fields because it is such a HUGE liability for them."

"Liability? I don't understand. What kind of liability?"

"If anything were to happen while you were out in the fields, it would be their responsibility," the man said gravely, figuring that was reason enough to stop anyone from trying.

But Y wasn't going to be deterred that easily. He'd been planning this outing for a long time, he'd convinced his kids of its merits, he'd fought with his wife over it.

"I'm sorry, sir," he began, a friendly smile on his face. "I just don't understand. What kind of liability are we talking about? What is so dangerous about picking a strawberry or two? What could happen?"

Well. The concierge was fully agitated by then. When he spoke, it was with terror in his eyes, as though he was trying to describe He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named to an imbecile who wasn't getting it without waking and angering Lord Voldemort.

"Let's. Just. Say," he managed through clenched teeth. "That It. Is. A. Liability. For the fields and so they will not allow you to pick any strawberries here in OXNARD. You MIGHT be able to sign a waiver saying that they are not responsible for you in any way and MAYBE THEN you will be able to pick strawberries. But I highly doubt it.

"Now," the creases in his forehead deepened. Is there anything else I can help you with? I am very busy."

Y and I looked at each other, stifling our smiles. "Uh, no thanks. Bye."

We drove off. Y kept saying, "I don't get it. I remember picking strawberries here when I was a kid. And last year, everyone was talking about going, remember? Why the hell wouldn't that guy explain the potential problems to me?"

"I don't know," I replied honestly. "But I got the feeling we shouldn't press him any further on the chance he'd actually blow a gasket."

We drove around a little, admiring the weather and the scenery and ignoring the persistent questions coming from the back seat about what fun thing we were going to do that day

Finally, we spotted some locals standing outside their beach houses, and we pulled over to confirm the concierge's assessment. "Excuse me," I smiled at the deeply-tanned, too-old-to-have-bleached-long-hair surfer-type holding a rake. He smiled back.

"We're trying to take our kids strawberry-picking. Do you know somewhere we could go?" Smile. If the experience with the concierge was any evidence, this might be a touchy subject.

"Pick strawberries?" Surfer began to laugh, as if he'd never heard of anything as ludicrous in his life. "Pick them? Why would you want to do that? Here, you can actually buy a little basket of already-picked strawberries and just take them home! You don't have to pick them yourself!" He laughed and laughed.

"Um. Yes, I'm aware of that," I said, trying to be patient. "I've bought strawberries before. We wanted to pick them for fun. With the kids? Fruit-picking? It exists..."

Surfer turned to his friend, who looked like a misplaced stock-broker. "These folks want to pick strawberries. Have you ever heard of somewhere to do that?"

"Maybe they mean they want to buy strawberries," Stock Broker answered. He turned to me. "There are lots of stands selling strawberries out of the backs of trucks up this block. You'll see signs. Just drive right up this block."

Ah. Thanks.

Y turned to the third member of their coffee-klatch, an ancient woman with flower bulbs in her gloved hands. "Ma'am. I remember strawberry-picking in Oxnard as a child. Did they stop allowing it since then?"

The woman smiled apologetically. "I've lived here all my life. I've never heard of picking strawberries for fun here in Oxnard. They'd probably be worried that you would damage the crops."

It was enough for Y. We thanked them and drove away in silence.

"Are you getting the feeling that we just tapped into some huge strawberry conspiracy?" Y finally asked.

I could have gloated at his having been so sure the night before. But it's happened to all of us. I went with Supportive.

"I know, it's so bizarre. Everyone seems to think we're out of our minds. We used to strawberry-pick in camp in Wisconsin when I was a kid. I know it's not such an absurd notion!"

Y dropped his voice, mimicking the earlier seriousness of the concierge: "Thou shalt not pick strawberry-pick in Oxnard, California! 'Tis a liability of the worst degree! I need not explain!"

I laughed. "Let's take the kids to the miniature-golfing place and forget this weirdness ever happened."

He agreed, and we set off.

Suddenly, Elan's voice cut in. "Mommy? Daddy? I 'hink I know why they won't let us go strawberry-picking."

Surprised, we turned to him. "How come?"

"They are prob'ly afraid that when we are out on the fields the Black Mamba snake will sneak up on us and attack us and we won't hear it coming and it will bite us and we will die."

"Um, yes. That might be it. What snake was that, again?"

"The Black Mamba. I heard about it on Animal Planet." He sat back, obviously satisfied at having cleared that up for us. "It's very venomous."

We glanced at each other again, fighting the urge to grin. Hey, it was as good an explanation as any.