Point of View: What Heaven Is

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

    There is so much more than is dreamt of in my philosophy that all I can say, sitting in this Jacuzzi in a desert, with mountains behind it, and above them the vastness of the universe, listening to Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and Jim Hall playing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” is, “I may not be very smart, but I know what heaven is.”

    We have some time on this vacation to take delight in each other, and to remember why we were magnetized from the start. The feeling is always there, but the distractions that are in the aggregate largely known as life often get in the way.

    This week in Palm Springs is, in our 28th year of marriage, our honeymoon. She reads to me from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, I read to her from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and though I overdo the steaks and underdo the pork chops on the grill, it’s all right. The margaritas I’ve got down pat, thanks to Alex Silvio.

    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.