An outing with Mother

I am 32 years old and a man, and I think that outings with my mother are just about the best thing ever. This is not just because they usually involve her supplying my needs for food and/or caffeine. She’s just fun to hang out with, and she likes to go cool places.

That’s “cool” as in “less than the pushing-100 degrees F Ojai air.” On Sunday, just after L. dropped me off at my new digs, Mom and I drove back out to the coast to escape the heat. A drive of half an hour yielded a difference in temperature of easily ten, and probably more like twenty, degrees; in Ojai, the sun beat on the mountains from a cloudless sky, while in Ventura, cool winds whipped along the hazy coastline.

There’s a parking lot in the shadow of the system of ramps that lead onto highway 33, the route inland from the 101 in Ventura to Ojai. A few hundred yards of the bicycle path that descends from the mountains before bending east toward Oxnard leads to the ocean: just to the west of the Ventura County Fairgrounds hides the Seaside Wilderness Park, 24 acres of sand dunes, salt marsh, and bird sanctuary tucked between the fairgrounds and Emma Wood State Beach. Mom and I picknicked; watched fishing terns; napped; walked.

Then I suggested ice cream, and I suggested getting it back in Ojai, where the heat would help us enjoy it. We drove the first segment of the trip inland along old Ventura Avenue, the main drag before the 33 was built. I’m disappointed in myself–for all the dozens, maybe hundreds, of times I drove from Ventura to Ojai when I lived there a decade ago, I never thought to get off the beaten path to explore what was hidden almost in plain sight. Ventura Avenue is a treat: a stretch of cute vintage houses and respectable, mostly blue-collar businesses. It’s neither high class nor low; humble but not depressed. I could live there.

Ojai was, as expected, still cooking when we got back into town and stopped at the Rite Aid. Really, of course, we were stopping at the Thrifty; though the drug stores were all renamed when Rite Aid acquired them, the brand lives on in the ice cream that’s still sold in the old locations. And it was the ice cream we stopped for.

Thrifty ice cream is yet another thing that gives me nostalgic feelings, even though it’s still readily available and even though I didn’t exactly grow up with it. I have fine memories of eating the stuff on family vacations to Southern California–specifically to the Canyon Country desert where my grandparents lived. Vacations happened in the summer, and the summer meant furnace heat. Into the Thrifty through the automatic door. Sudden prickles on the skin and the glorious flavor of refrigerated air in the nose and throat. Up to the ice cream counter to make the all-important decision–and then out comes the unique Thrifty ice cream scoop, a gun-shaped contraption pressed into a bucket of ice cream to take a cylindrical puck out and eject it atop a cone. That fascinated me as a child, and still does. It wasn’t shaped like other ice cream; it was the ice cream world’s analog to square burger patties from Wendy’s or White Castle, which I also got rarely as a boy and so was obsessed with.

The ice cream wasn’t, and isn’t, particularly distinguished; just sort of basically tasty ice cream. Besides the unique shape, the main draw was, and is, the price. Back in the ’80s, when I tasted my first Thrifty ice cream, it cost ten cents a scoop. Rite Aid jacked the prices when the chain was purchased, but at 98 cents, the scoop I had yesterday was still cheaper than one from Baskin Robbins would have been, I think.

And the ice cream counter was just perfect: tucked away in a corner of the dim Ojai Rite Aid, looking more or less like I imagine it’s looked for decades, the Thrifty logo still displayed proudly here at least. Mom and I took our cones outside to eat them in the heat, which was exactly the right thing to do. I had black cherry ice cream on a sugar cone. It made me happy.

Then we were off, as I detailed in my last post, on a bit of a meander around town, on which I reacquainted myself with my home of ten-plus years ago. It was surreal, but I think that just pushing through it got the weirdness out of my system for the most part. A few more days or weeks of being here, driving here, shopping here, and it’ll be my home of the present instead of my home of the past.

When’s the last time you had that much fun with your mom, huh?