When I Played Hooky

In my last post, it seems I gave only seven random facts about myself instead of the requisite eight. So I owe you one. Except instead of giving a fact, I'll give you a story.

When I was about 15 I did perhaps the wildest and craziest thing in my life thus far. I skipped school. It was just so tempting. A beautiful spring day, a bus to New York City pulling up right by my high school. So my friend Mia and I simply hopped on that bus. We were two small-town girls itching for a life beyond suburbia. Thirty minutes later we were in the big city. No strangers to the place, we made our way to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, that delicious expanse of green ending in a row of far-off skyscrapers. In later years I would make out with a boy on that emerald carpet and even let a tablet of ecstasy melt on my tongue. But this time we didn't do much of anything except sprawl our teen bodies out on the grass, our heads resting on textbook-filled backpacks. I don't know how many hours we passed that way, talking, basking in sunlight and our sumptuous freedom. I'm sure we wandered around the Upper West Side, too, choosing just which prewar brownstones would house our future husbands and kids. But I don't remember that. I only remember being instead of doing. It was a new sensation.

It would have been a perfect day had the juvenile police not spotted us heading home through Port Authority. But the bastards did spot us. At first we thought they were flirting with us (my friend Mia was a blond beauty, a veritable man magnet), but it turns out they were sizing us up and found us looking pretty suspicious with our schoolgirl backpacks and two tickets back to the suburbs. They took us down to the station, called our parents, and thoroughly mortified us both. Didn't those big lugs have anything better to do than piss on one of the most fabulous days of our little lives?

To this day I still nurse a strong dislike for New York City cops. And I have a sweet, Proust-like nostalgia for playing hooky.

playing hooky
Sheep's Meadow