Point of View: No Trees in the Way

We will have returned from Palm Springs by now. When last we were there, at this time two years ago, I described it as heavenly inasmuch as we’d been able “to take delight in each other and to remember why we were magnetized from the start.”

“. . . It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind. Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.”

I suppose you can’t go to heaven again, but I would like to think, this being written 10 days before our departure, that you can. We’ll see. . . .

My late stepmother said she always had to have a reason to go somewhere, she didn’t just go somewhere to go somewhere. We do have a reason — there’s family out there. There’s a daughter and son-in-law, a first cousin and his wife, with a newborn, and, and . . . tennis courts! All kinds of tennis courts, grass, clay, Har-Tru, and hard, at one of the Courtyard Marriots in Palm Desert, about a half-hour distant.

The only thing is everybody out there plays golf, a game I’ve never cottoned to because it requires that you be calm and mature, not so anxious, as I am, about making mistakes, which, when you obsess over them, makes everything even worse. A sports psychologist told me that once. Maybe when I’m 80.

The universe seems closer there. Here the trees get in the way. So, if I can’t find anyone to play with, I’ll wander back to the Jacuzzi and continue to wonder, as “Concierto de Aranjuez” plays, what it’s all about.