Playing Hooky (with the Whole Family)

"What time is it?"

"About 10:30, why?"

"Ha ha! I'm missing math class!"

The scene was a broad expanse of sand and surf, where Assateague Island meets the Atlantic. Huge silver waves roared and butted and surged onto the land, leaving behind shining mounds of foam. The dramatis personae: Four bad children and their bad mother, who were supposed to be in school or doing important errands, depending, but who had absconded instead.

Three of the children ran around, dodging the sudden fingers of water that would come shooting onto the sand. They poked for shells and cheerfully threatened each other with the carapaces of horseshoe crabs. The youngest stayed well back from the terrible waves and built a little kitchen of twigs, shells, and mushrooms in the warm lee of a sand dune.

It was truancy.

It was heaven.

Nothing quite exposes the opportunity costs of normal life as getting away from it for a day or two. All those hours that family members spend commuting, cooking, cleaning, doing homework, earning their keep -- hitting the mark, making the grade, meeting the deadline -- months can go by, with everyone trotting along in their invisible harnesses and keeping to the road without ever once stepping off, as it were, on a detour.

There's a beauty to domestic routine and order, and what Thoreau called "quiet desperation" could also be called "delightful placidity," but it's indisputably worth wriggling out of the bridle now and then, if only to remind oneself that one can.

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