Length, width, height, and depth. These are four mathematical measurements whose lines grow fogged and gradually imperceptible as your dad's sickness sets in, as deep as he is unwilling. Your mom and dad are back from Boston and New York, two cities, both alike in dignity, that speak in tongues when placed shoulder-to-shoulder in the pew. Your dad breathed the experience in deep in Boston: America's first restaurant, the Union Oyster House, that certainly now serves the country's best bowls of baked beans and clam chowder; rows of brick-baked homes that housed individuals bearing weighty titles like "Founding Father." Your dad breathed the experience in deep in New York, too: the black Hefty sacks stacking like pyramidal cheerleaders above the storm drains, churches that survived the fall of the World Trade Center towers next door, and the urine that trickles from building foundations in Rorshach-shaped continents.
His immune system currently exacts a high transaction fee for the time he spent in Le Grande Pomme, the Big Apple. He's sick. There's naught to do but take NyQuil like a tequilla shooter, sleep in the most comfortable bed he's felt in the past ten days, and hope his head-cold-addled dreams don't wake him up at two in the morning, the side-scrolling filmstrip presented by taxis, trains, and subways rushing by in a close, loud, angry sliding door of Tesla-crackling electricity and railway thudding.
Now back home, your dad doesn't find the crickets' chirping as unmerciful as before.
