Playing Hooky

by Nicholas Allen — September 8, 2007

I'm discovering, to my great delight, that Patricia is a girl who's usually up for a spontaneous adventure. I called her Wednesday afternoon with the suggestion that the two of us head into Philly on Thursday to see the King Tut exhibit, which I've been meaning to see since it opened in May, but--like so many things--never quite got around to. "The trip to Philadelphia is about three hours each way," I told her. "We could go in, see the exhibit, have dinner somewhere in Philly, and be back by midnight so we don't miss work on Friday."

Patricia hesitated only for a moment before responding, "I could probably leave work for the day at 1:00 and work from my Blackberry on the train. Could we get tickets to go into the exhibit at around 4:00?"

Sounded good to me.

The six hours we spent on the train going there and back is probably the longest amount of completely alone, uninterrupted time we've spent together (other than the eight hours or so we spend at night unconscious together at one or the other of our apartments). I stocked up on munchies and magazines for the train--to remove some of the burden of conversation, if it became necessary--and also brought along my iPod. I was pleased to see that Patricia had also brought hers.

I've heard that one of the true tests of a relationship is how comfortably the two of you can sit together without feeling the need to talk. Patricia and I chatted intermittently, and read magazines, and listened to our iPods, and generally seemed to feel completely comfortable together. If it was a test, I think we passed with flying colors.

The exhibit was blissfully uncrowded at 4:00 on a weekday. It almost felt as if Patricia and I had the entire display to ourselves. We oohed and ahhhed over cases of jewels and golden statuettes, and when we were done I took her though other parts of the museum (the Franklin Institute of Science, FYI) that I remembered traversing on school field trips when I was a child. We walked through a giant replica of the human heart (although it felt much smaller than it had the last time I saw it, when I was six) and amused ourselves at some of the museum's "hands-on" experiments--setting up dominoes just to watch them fall and looking at our reflections in mirrors designed to bend light and reflection in outrageous ways. It all felt appropriately silly and fun.

Dinner was a simple affair at a local pub, and then we were on the train back into the City. The magazines had long since been discarded, so we shared favorite songs from our iPods with each other, and were for the most part content to quietly watch the dark landscape rolling past the train windows. At one point, Patricia fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I looked over at her and thought, I'm a lucky guy.

Nicholas Allen is a writer and columnist based in Manhattan. To read all of his blogs, click here.