Blackberry Island is nothing like Fantasy Island. Blackberry Island is the place you go in your mind when you are at your favorite Mexican food restaurant with your family, celebrating the last day of school, and your Blackberry starts buzzing in your purse, and you can’t help but pick it up and read all of the work e-mails on it, even though it’s your day off, and you pay no attention whatsoever to your surroundings during the next five minutes, as you answer every single one of them.

Bob coined the term last week when Girl was yammering in my ear at said restaurant while I was thumbing buttons on said Blackberry.

“Don’t talk to Mom right now,” he told her. “She’s not here. She’s gone to Blackberry Island.”

“Mom,” Girl said, sticking her face in mine, “are you on Blackberry Island?”

That broke the spell and cracked me up. Bob too.

In fact, Girl got such a laugh from her parents that she decided to repeat the joke to all the other grownups she knows.

“Mom was on Blackberry Island. HA!” she told my sister, friends and parents. They’d smile and give me the “huh?” look. Then I’d have to explain while they nodded, looking bored but polite.

Sometimes Girl would forget what berry was so funny and say, “Mom was on Strawberry Island,” and then I would have to explain further, “No, it’s Blackberry Island,” and by then it really wasn’t funny.

I just wanted to take her aside and say, “Honey, it’s what you call a ‘location joke.’ You had to BE there.”